twentieth century fiction

“Well, I woke up Sunday morning/With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt./And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad,/So I had one more for dessert.” (Kris Kristofferson)

/ madamebibilophile / 25 Comments

I had such a book hangover after Bleak House. I couldn’t settle to anything. A friend of mine who loves a certain 80s singer has a phrase when she hears other warblers: “He’s alright, but he’s not George Michael.” Well, I kept picking up books that were alright, but they weren’t Bleak House. So few books are, I find…

Then I remembered that when Simon did his books of the year round up last year, I’d recognised two were on my TBR pile. Surely books good enough to make the final cut would see me right? Of course they did 😊 Hooray for bloggers and their brilliant recommendations!

Firstly, the novella which made the top of Simon’s list, A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence (1966). This was the second in Laurence’s Manawaka sequence, but thankfully they can all be read as standalones as I’d not read anything by her before. On the strength of this, I’ll definitely be seeking out her writing again.

A Jest of God is an intimate character study of Rachel Cameron, a thirty-four-year-old teacher who lives with her emotionally manipulative mother above the Manitoba funeral business her father ran until he died.

The novel is narrated in the first-person, and Rachel’s mind is an oppressive and tense place to be. She is highly anxious and self-censoring:

“There. I’m doing it again. This must stop. It isn’t good for me. Whenever I find myself thinking in a brooding way, I must simply turn it off and think of something else. God forbid that I should turn into an eccentric. This isn’t just imagination. I’ve seen it happen. Not only teachers, of course, and not only women who haven’t married. Widows can become extremely odd as well, but at least they have the excuse of grief.”

This anxiety and second-guessing is not helped by her mother’s behaviour, which is self-pitying, judgemental and highly manipulative. Rachel recognises this, but is at a loss as to how to extricate herself:

“Her weapons are invisible, and she would never admit even to carrying them, much less putting them to use.”

“All such words cling to the mind like burrs to hair, and I can never seem to brush them away, as I know I should do.”

Rachel’s mother is not an out-and-out baddie though, and Laurence expertly demonstrates the vulnerability and fear that underlies her machinations. Similarly, Rachel does not always behave well. In one particular scene early in the book, she actually behaves despicably and doesn’t make amends despite her instant remorse. She is a complex, contradictory character, wholly believable. Laurence treats her tenderly but unflinchingly; without judgement but also without sentiment.

Rachel could so easily be a stereotype: a lonely single woman, living with her mother. But Laurence side-steps clumsy characterisation, or easy dismissal of Rachel, by delicately exploring the true meaning of the adjective so often attached to unmarried women approaching middle-age: she is desperate. She is absolutely desperate and despairing. She is lonely, and feels trapped in the life she has always known, with no way out. She wants things to be different, but she doesn’t know how. She is deeply, existentially sad.

1966 is a time of societal change, when women like Rachel could feel stifled by convention and also have some sexual freedom. So when Nick, and old schoolfriend appears, there are brief moments of physical connection. But in only seeing things from Rachel’s point view, the reader is able to realise how little intimacy there is. And that is what Rachel needs, more than the sex which Nick offers. Yet she doesn’t know how to achieve this:

“I talk to him, when he is not here, and tell him everything I can think of, everything that has ever happened, and how I feel and for a while it seems to me that I am completely known to him, and then I remember I’ve only talked to him like that when I’m alone. He hasn’t heard and doesn’t know.”

In some of Nick’s reported speech, the reader picks up on things Rachel ignores. She is so bound in her own intense feelings, she can’t really hear the cues Nick gives, over her relentless inner voice.

“He’s thirty-five, not fifteen. His past such gauche public performances. What he worried about Rachel? I’m not worried. I’m perfectly alright. Well, relax, then. I am relaxed. Oh? Shut up. Just shut up.”

A Jest of God is such an accomplished novel that is also so approachable. I found Rachel’s voice got under my skin very quickly and distinctly, and I had to read on. I think it works very well as short novel, longer would have been too oppressive and difficult to sustain I suspect. But at the length it is it remains powerful and impactful, and not as depressing as I’ve made it sound!

Ultimately there is resilience and change for Rachel, even some defiance. And there are brief moments of humour, such as Rachel trying to duck her colleague Calla’s constant invitation to attend Tabernacle with her:

“At least I have postponed it, and perhaps by that time some reasonable excuse will come along, or I’ll be dead.”

A stunning novel: a precise and compassionate character study, clever and humane. I’m so glad to have discovered Margaret Laurence at long last.

“Something must be the matter with my way of viewing things. I have no middle view. Either I fixed on a detail and see it as though it were magnified – a leaf with all its veins perceived, the fine hairs on the back of a man’s hands – or else the world recedes and becomes blurred, artificial, indefinite, an abstract painting of a world.”

Secondly, after being in Rachel’s head, I looked forward to some comic relief from an author I always enjoy: Margery Sharp. Four Gardens (1935) was number ten in Simon’s list. But this wasn’t as comic as some of her other novels; it had a slightly elegiac tone and the relationships included a certain sadness. But it wasn’t a sad novel overall, and I sunk into Four Gardens with pleasure.

Four Gardens follows the life of Caroline Chase from late teens to middle-age and the titular spaces she finds herself in. The device with gardens isn’t remotely heavy-handed and for a significant section of the novel they barely feature. But Caroline is a gardener, given half a chance, and it is instinctive and natural to her:

“Her step, as she now redescended to the rose garden, was therefore a proper gardeners tread – slow, considerate, with long abstracted pauses for survey and meditation. She also, without thinking, removed her hat and gloves.”

This is her first garden, one she trespasses into, and as she meets her first love there, it has a dreamlike quality. Perhaps this is why her love of gardening is so easily disregarded when she leaves behind youthful folly to marry the determinedly sensible Henry:

“For all these things in themselves – love at first sight, undying devotion, and general aloofness – were very exciting indeed; it was only in connection with Henry that they became so curiously prosaic.”

And so for many years Caroline doesn’t garden at all. She runs a house and she raises her son and daughter in the town where she has always lived. She is the creator of a safe space for her children and an unwavering routine for her staid but affectionate husband.

Despite the love she feels for her family and the tranquillity of her home life, I did find an element of melancholy to Caroline’s domestic arrangements. Her family are near and dear, but there seemed to be very little intimacy: she and Henry rarely communicate about anything beyond practical considerations, and she doesn’t really understand her children at all. She also despises her closest friend in the village, Ellen Watts  – a monstrous and wholly believable creation. Caroline reflects very little though, and so any concerns are quickly subsumed in the relentless demands of domesticity:

“Thinking – the deliberate exercise of the brain – did not come naturally to her.”

But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that Four Gardens is ponderous or heavy-going in any way. It felt quite a realistic presentation of Edwardian contentment, though not without Sharp’s gentle jibes, such as this discussion of wallpaper where Caroline evokes her husband’s approval to counteract her mother’s reservations:

“Mrs Chase was at once silenced. […] It would have seemed perfectly reasonable to her that Caroline, who was in the house all day, should have suited her surroundings to the taste of a man who was out of it.”

I did want Caroline to exert herself in some way, to stake a claim beyond her roles meeting everyone else’s needs. Finally she does it, when she starts growing runner beans during World War I, and realises how much she is nurtured by time with her plants:

“there was usually a quiet space, between twelve and half-past, when the first work of the house was finished and before the children’s dinner became a pressing consideration; and these thirty minutes Caroline began to guard and cherish as a precious treasure.”

The war years are beautifully evoked by Sharp, with all their worry alongside self-serving censorious behaviour of some in the village.  After the war, everything changes. Caroline finds herself mistress of a large house, with a garden she can’t touch unless she wants to incur the wrath of a succession of gardeners:

“The garden was looking well. But it always did look well, and gave her no special pleasure […] It was perfectly designed and perfectly kept, and to Caroline completely uninteresting.”

Meanwhile, her children are vaguely affectionate, patronising strangers. They change the names she loves, Lily becoming Lall and Leonard, Leon. They are academically accomplished and having had money their whole lives, utterly contemptuous of it. These Bright Young Things live by a morality that is absolutely baffling to Caroline, and there is a lovely echo of an earlier scene between Caroline and her mother in a later conversation between Caroline and Lall. The reader can see they are so much more alike than either realises, dramatic irony at its lightest.

I’m not one for biographical readings of novels but something of the tone of Four Gardens – affectionate, gentle, slightly sad –  did make me consider the dates. In Caroline, Sharp is writing about her parents’ generation, so maybe that explains it… or maybe it has nothing to do with it at all, who knows?  

Caroline’s fourth garden finally sees her able to do as she pleases. I couldn’t help feeling she might really surprise her children, and herself 😊 A warm, engaging story of a woman’s outwardly ordinary adult life during great societal change.

To end, Paul Newman adapted A Jest of God as Rachel, Rachel for his directorial debut. This very odd trailer doesn’t make it seem overly appealing:

“There are no ordinary cats.” (Colette)

/ madamebibilophile / 25 Comments

Mallika at Literary Potpourri’s wonderful event  Reading the Meow has been running all week, do check out all the great posts prompted by our feline friends! Here is my post just in time…

I’m grateful to Reading the Meow for finally getting me to pick up The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (finished in 1940, published in 1966) which is part of my Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century Reading Challenge and has been languishing in my TBR for years. Although not ostensibly a book about cats, one does feature prominently as these various edition covers will attest:

The reason it had lain unread for so long was because I’m (aptly) a big scaredy-cat. I was really intimidated by this classic of twentieth-century fiction and I thought it would be far too complex and clever for me to understand. Which as it turned out, was broadly correct. I’m sure I didn’t pick up all the allusions and references, even with the notes in the back of my edition to help me (Alma Classics, trans. Hugh Aplin 2020 – I definitely recommend this edition and translation).  However, I still found it very readable and a lot to enjoy, especially regarding Behemoth, the character that meant I was reading it this week particularly.

The Devil arrives in 1930s Moscow as a Professor Woland, along with his entourage: red headed, bizarrely dressed Korovyev; sinister vampiric Azazello; beautiful Hella; and Behemoth, an enormous cat that walks on his hindlegs, talks, drinks vodka and plays chess.

The proceed to wreak havoc for three days in a series of carnivalesque scenes, using the greed and corruption of people against them.  It’s absolute chaos and carnage, but brilliantly Bulgakov shows that the devil doesn’t have to push very hard for all this to occur.

At the start of the novel, Woland predicts the shocking and absurd death of Berlioz, head of Massolit, a literary organisation. Once people hear of his death, this description of a barrage of statements in order to get Berlioz’s apartment is a good example of how Bulgakov balances social realism, satire, the comic and the desperate throughout:

“In them were included entreaties, threats, slanders, denunciations, promises to carry out refurbishment at people’s own expense, references to unbearably crowded conditions and the impossibility of living in the same apartment as villains. Among other things, there was a description, stunning in its artistic power, of the theft of some ravioli, which had been stuffed directly into a jacket pocket, in apartment No.31, two vows to commit suicide and one confession to a secret pregnancy.”

Meanwhile, Margarita, beautiful and unhappily married, is distressed because her lover, The Master, has committed himself to an institution and renounced his writing.

This is interspersed with the story of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua (Jesus), with the two stories echoing one another, and it emerges that this was the novel The Master was writing.

It is through the titular characters that Bulgakov prevents his satire becoming too bitter and alienating. Their devotion to each other and Margarita’s belief in The Master’s work is truly touching.

I don’t really want to say too much more as The Master and Margarita is such a complex, riotous piece of work that I think the more I try and pin it down the more I’ll tie myself in knots! It tackles the biggest of big themes; religion, state oppression, the role of art, love, faith, good and evil, how to live… It is a deeply serious work that isn’t afraid to be comical too.

But as this post is prompted by Behemoth, here is my favourite scene with him, getting ready for Satan’s Grand Ball on Good Friday and trying to distract from the fact that he is losing at chess:

“Standing on his hind legs and covered in dust, the cat was meanwhile bowing in greeting before Margarita. Around the cat’s neck there was now a white dress tie, done up in a bow, and on his chest a ladies mother-of-pearl opera glass on a strap. In addition, the cat’s whiskers were gilt.

‘Now what’s all this?’ exclaimed Woland. ‘Why have you gilded your whiskers? And why the devil do you need a tie if you’ve got no trousers on?’

‘A cat isn’t meant to wear trousers, Messire,’ replied the cat with great dignity. ‘Perhaps you’ll require me to don boots as well? Only in fairy tales is there a puss in boots, Messire. But have you ever seen anyone at a ball without a tie? I don’t intend to find myself in a comical situation and risk being thrown out on my ear! Everyone adorns himself in whatever way he can. Consider what has been said to apply to the opera glasses too, Messire!’

‘But the whiskers?’

‘I don’t understand why,’ retorted the cat drily, ‘When shaving today Azazello and Korovyev could sprinkle themselves with white powder – and in what way it’s better than the gold? I’ve powdered my whiskers, that’s all!’

[…]

‘Oh, the rogue, the rogue,’ said Woland shaking his head, ‘every time he’s in a hopeless position in the game he starts talking to distract you, like the very worst charlatan on the bridge. Sit down immediately and stop this verbal diarrhoea.’

‘I will sit down,’ replied the cat sitting down, ‘but I must object with regards your final point. My speeches are by no means diarrhoea, and you’re so good as to express yourself in the presence of a lady, but a series of soundly packaged syllogisms which would be appreciated on their merits by such connoisseurs as Sextus Empiricus, Martianus Capella even, who knows, Aristotle himself.’

‘The kings in check,’ said Woland.

‘As you will, as you will,’ responded the cat, and began looking at the board through the opera glass.”

I think overall I probably admire The Master and Margarita more than love it, and I enjoyed Bulgakov’s A Country Doctor’s Notebook more. But there is so much in this extraordinary, unique novel that will stay with me, and I’m sure it will reward repeat readings too.

To end, I tried to get my two moggies to pose with the book. With typical cattitude, they flatly refused 😀  So it’s back to 80s pop videos:

“Life has to be endured, and lived. But how to live it is the problem.” (Daphne du Maurier)

/ madamebibilophile / 14 Comments

I was disappointed to miss posting for Ali’s annual Daphne du Maurier Reading Week this year, due to the demands of blogging on novellas every day for a month, so once that madness was over I thought I would enjoy a visit to this ever-readable author.

(Also, thank you to everyone who commented on which Big Massive Tome I should pick up after so many novellas. Bleak House was far and away the winner, so I’m embarking on Dickensian legal wrangling next 😊)

Apparently DDM said that Frenchman’s Creek (1941) was the only romantic novel she wrote. This meant I went into it expecting a similar experience to when I read Jamaica Inn, that is: enjoying it but wishing I had read it as a teenager. Now I’m older I’m more inclined towards the psychological darkness of My Cousin Rachel and her frankly terrifying short stories.

However, these expectations were confounded. Frenchman’s Creek can definitely be read as a romance: a young beautiful noblewoman leaves her stifling court life and starts running around the Cornish coast with a sexy French pirate. But I thought there were some much more interesting themes being explored in this novel too.

Dona St Columb is married to the ineffectual Harry, and is part of the indulgent court of Charles II. After a particular prank that she regrets, she leaves London and makes her way to Harry’s country pile in Cornwall.

“The sense of futility had been growing upon her for many months, nagging at her now and again like dormant toothache, but it had taken Friday night to arouse in her that full sense of self-loathing an exasperation, and because of Friday night she was jolting backwards and forwards now in this damnable coach, bound on a ridiculous journey to a house she had seen once in her life and knew nothing about, carrying with her, in anger and irritation, the two surprised children and their reluctant nurse.”

Once there, her pompous neighbour lets her know that dangers lurk amongst the beautiful countryside and coast, in the form of a successful pirate from Brittany.

“‘No lives have been lost as yet, and none of our women have been taken,’ said Godolphin stiffly, ‘but as this fellow is a Frenchman we all realise that it is only a question of time before something dastardly occurs.’”

Throughout the novel anyone expressing xenophobia is shown to be monumentally stupid, which is not always what I expect in novels of this period and it was certainly refreshing.

It isn’t long before Dona crosses paths with the captain of La Mouette, Jean Benoit Aubréy. Undoubtedly his portrait is romantic: he sketches birds, reads poetry, and of course is extremely handsome. Dona finds she has much in common with Jean Benoit, namely the search for an authentic life and personal freedom. As his loyal man William explains:

 “’Approve and disapprove are two words that are not in my vocabulary, my lady. Piracy suits my master, and that is all there is to it. His ship is his Kingdom, he comes and goes as he pleases, and no man can command him. He is a law unto himself.’”

Dona longs for something similar, but it is clearly demonstrated how limited she is due to being a woman. She has to meet the expectations of domestic roles, and also of her class. It is the insistence of her male neighbours that brings Harry to Cornwall, and his mendacious friend Rockingham, who poses a real threat to Dona.

Du Maurier expertly builds the tension as a trap is laid for the pirate, and he takes phenomenal risks to outmanoeuvre his enemies. Frenchman’s Creek is real page-turner, but it is also a believable exploration of a woman’s search for meaning and personal agency in her life. Her romantic partner is fully portrayed but not overly dwelt upon – this is Dona’s story and the romantic relationship is one that brings her back to herself:

“She felt, in a sense, like someone who had fallen under a spell, under some strange enchantment, because this sensation of quietude was foreign to her, who had lived hitherto in a turmoil of sound and movement. And yet at the same time the spell awoke echoes within her that she recognised, as though she had come to a place she had known always, and deeply desired, but had lost, through her own carelessness, or through circumstances, or the blunting of her own perception.”

Du Maurier really is so good at what she does. In Frenchman’s Creek she creates a compelling adventure alongside some lovely evocations of the natural world while highlighting the enduring challenges of the expectations placed on women. Dona’s quest for a life that will enable a fulfilling expression of self remains as relevant and compelling as ever.

“Much will be forgotten then, perhaps, the sound of the tide on the mud flats, the dark sky, the dark water, the shiver of the trees behind us and the shadows they cast before them, and the smell of the young bracken and the moss. Even the things we said will be forgotten, the touch of hands, the warmth, the loveliness, but never the peace that we have given to each other, never the stillness and the silence.”

I wanted to end with a trailer for the 1944 film adaptation with Joan Fontaine, but alas I couldn’t find it anywhere. So here is a clip from the 1998 BBC adaptation, which for reasons best known to itself has moved the story to the time of the Glorious Revolution and completely invented a scene. Has anyone seen this version? It doesn’t look very enticing but I do think Tara Fitzgerald is a good actor:

“Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.” (Colette)

/ madamebibilophile / 25 Comments

Mallika’s annual Book and Author Anniversaries post alerted me to the fact that today is the 150th anniversary of Colette’s  birthday, and the perfect prompt for me to get two of her books out of the TBR (in Women’s Press editions which pleases me – how I regret clearing out loads of my The Women’s Press books when I was trying to streamline before a move one time. Never get rid of books kids – better to die under a toppling pile than live with regret 😉 )

Firstly, Duo and it’s short sequel Le Toutounier (1934 & 1939; trans. Margaret Crosland 1974). Duo follows the discovery by Michel and immediate aftermath of his wife Alice’s short-lived affair with a colleague. They are on holiday in the south of France, somewhat isolated and under the watchful eye of Michel’s family retainer Maria. The novel is primarily dialogue between the couple as they try and decide what remains for them.

Colette’s love of the natural world is very much in evidence as she captures their holiday home and Alice’s feelings of suffocation:

“On the poplars the golden bronze of the new leaves still wrongfully occupied the place of the green. A crabapple tree, its white petals lined with bright red, had defeated the somewhat sickly Judas tree and the syringas in their attempt to escape the destructive shade of the shiny aucubas, extended their slender branches and their butter white stars through the broad grasping leaves, which were mottled like snakes.”

Her precise descriptions of people and their mannerisms also suit this tale especially well, expertly capturing the tension and careful watchfulness between two people fearful of their disintegrating relationship.

“He caressed her with a few crude words, which she heard with a quiver of her eyelashes, as though he had shaken a bunch of flowers over her. They both accepted these exchanges, which were caused by chance, travel, a sudden change of season.”

Michel and Alice don’t tear each other apart, but at the same time their relationship seems doomed. However, the precision and containment of the story to a few days in a specific place, doesn’t make for a heavy or oppressive read. Colette’s humour is always present, with some surprising phrases:

“Out of modesty the servant placed a saucepan lid over the milk.”

During Duo, we learn something of Alice’s family, her sisters Colombe, Hermine and Bizoute.

“When I think about my family as much as that, it’s because I’m finding Michel terribly boring.”

In Le Toutounier she visits their stuffy, smoke-filled Paris apartment with the titular “huge, indestructible sofa of English origin, battered down like a forest road in the rainy season.”

It’s a short novel (80 pages) and I can see why it was put in the same volume as Duo as I think it is best read following on from its predecessor, forming a portrait of an interlude in Alice’s life.

Bizoute is away from home, leaving Colombe and Hermine together with their complicated love lives. Neither of them are with available men and the situation escalates. But the focus in Le Toutounier is not on relationships between the sexes but rather between the sisters, and what it means for women in a family to be close to one another. As so often, Colette focuses her sensual descriptions on women, showing appreciation but not sentimentality:

“The fine woollen dressing gown with a pattern of embossed stitching fell over her quivering shoulders, and it’s pink glow rose to her cheeks, where the makeup had lost its delicate morning colour beneath successive layers of powder.”

Secondly, Break of Day (1928, trans. Enid McLeod 1949) which nowadays would probably be called autofiction, occupying a place between biography and outright fiction. ‘Colette’ spends the summer in Provence, contemplating her past and wondering about the future. All her preoccupations are here – the natural world, animals:

“After dinner I mustn’t forget to irrigate the little runnels that surround the melons, and to water by hand the balsams, phlox and dahlias, and the young tangerine trees, which haven’t yet got roots long enough to drink unaided in the depths of the earth, or strength to break into leaf without help, under the steady scorching of the heavens. The young tangerine trees, planted … for whom? I don’t know. Perhaps for me. The cats will spring sideways at the months when by ten the air is blue as a morning glory. The pair of Japanese hens, perching drowsily on the arm of a rustic arm chair, will chirp like birds in a nest. The dogs, already far away from this world, will be thinking of the coming dawn, and I shall have the choice of a book, bed, or the coast road”

Men and women:

“My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.”

“When a man’s glance is following certain household preparations, especially those for a meal, there is apt to be a look on his face that combines religious attention, boredom and fear.”

Her mother:

“On an autumn morning she was the first and only one to see herself reflected in the first disc of ephemeral ice in the well bucket, before her nail cracked it.”

“She would, alas, have judged us plainly, with that divine cruelty of hers which was innocent of wrath.”

Break of Day is fairly plotless save for a slight drama with two young people, but not quite stream of consciousness either, written in a more structured style. If you enjoy Colette’s writing then this is a little gem, but definitely not one to read when you want to be pulled along by a cracking yarn.

Overall the sense is of Colette (author/character) coming to terms with the last part of her life, with aging and with what remains. It isn’t sad but it has a melancholy quality, although I sensed few regrets and an acceptance of how her life had been lived so far and how it would continue.

“Everything is much as it was in the first years of my life, and little by little I recognised the road back.”

I loved all of these reads. It’s been a while since I picked up Colette and I wondered why I’d left it so long. She’s funny, incisive, precise, sensual, and absolutely in command of her own voice. There’s no-one like her.

To end, a 1970s performance to match my 1970s editions, about the breaking of day:  

“I’ve always been in love with Melbourne.” (Kerry Greenwood)

/ madamebibilophile / 28 Comments

Well, we’ve reached the end of November and contrary to my plans but entirely in keeping with my expectations, I’ve barely managed to blog at all despite all the wonderful reading events that take place. Still, I’m delighted that I am at least managing to join in with AusReading Month 2022 hosted by Brona at This Reading Life. (Even if it is at the eleventh hour and I’m conveniently ignoring the fact it’s already 1 December in Australia right now – I really must do better.)

I chose two novels out of the humungous VMC pile and they both turned out to be entertaining considerations of the roles of women in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Melbourne.

In reverse chronological order, Painted Clay by Capel Boake (1917). Set in 1913-14, this coming-of-age story follows Helen Somerset as she tries to forge her own way in a society that places considerable strictures on women.

At the start of the novel, lonely and isolated Helen is only a few years older than the century, as she living in a suburb with her distant father:

“Several women had watched carefully and had made sure their curtains had not been down for months. They always took their curtains down, washed them, and put them up again, every four weeks. The end house did not do this. Therefore there must be something very wrong with the occupants of the end house.”

Determined for change, she makes overtures to the young women who live next door, and finds herself invited in. She is shy and awkward, but the family is warm and welcoming.

“She knew that if she were alone she could have carried on the most brilliant conversation with everybody, but now she seemed to have nothing to say.”

Belle is engaged to sleazy Bert, while her sister Irene moons over the picture of a matinee idol. They are full of life and show Helen another way to live. She joins Irene in working in a shop, suffering under the deliberately unpleasant work given to her by the jealous supervisor. We follow Helen from shop to office work, as she learns to wrestle with the bullying of women and the unwanted attentions of men, struggling to work out what she wants when it seems to be so different from other women her age:

“She fled from the thought of sex; it horrified her – but it came back and back. She tried to close her mind against it, but it came insistent and whispering, distorting her view of life full in despair she went to her books again.”

Helen is not a wet blanket though, or a naïve and priggish beauty which can sometimes make heroines of this era hard to warm to. She’s quite determined to live her own life, away from the life paths everyone seems to expect of her.

“Helen had a soft, but unyielding obstinacy against which all argument beat in vain.”

Things begin to change for her when she is taken into a bohemian artistic set. She falls in lust with Alick Russell, and one thing leads predictably to another … what is less predictable is Helen’s reaction to sleeping with a man outside marriage:

“She wondered why she did not grieve over it, why she was not overcome with sorrow and repentance. She puzzled over it with frowning brows, but could reach no satisfactory conclusion.”

[…]

“I can’t see the difference between being married and not. It doesn’t seem to me to matter very much, and yet it does. I wish I were either a very bad woman or a very good one. If I were a bad woman nothing would bother me, and if I were a very good woman I wouldn’t think about it. I would just be married, and that would be the end of it.”

Painted Clay is a carefully non-didactic exploration of women’s roles and choices at this moment in time. Female characters are not judged for choosing unsatisfactory marriages, when the alternative may be worse for them. Older unmarried women are not shown as leading happy lives due to how limited their choices are, yet Helen is consistent in her belief that marriage is not for her.

Although not explicit, female desire is dealt with frankly, as is the fallout from its expression – fallout which lands disproportionately on women rather than men, despite their equal involvement.

What struck me most though, was not the attitude towards female sexuality or marriage, but towards sex work. It is referred to more than once in the novel and Boake is determinedly non-judgemental of those who undertake it. There is this interview Helen undergoes with a recruiting Madam:

“Helen shook her head, ‘No’ she said. ‘I can’t.’ Her tone was final, and the woman recognised it, though she made a last effort to persuade her. ‘Why not?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know why not,’ answered Helen. ‘It’s not my way, that’s all.’”

Then later in the novel she takes a woman from the street for a hot meal:

“Helen looked round with a frown. She found that everyone in the room was staring at them. She looked at them with bitter scorn. She hated them for their smug complacency. She felt neither love, liking, or even pity for the girl she was with, but she preferred her to the smug suburban women with their intolerable air of conscious virtue.”

I expected a much more judgemental attitude for the time, and it was refreshing to have this assumption undermined. (Also on the subject of the streets – the urban setting and changing seasons are wonderfully evoked. Sadly I don’t know Melbourne but I’m sure those who do would find much to enjoy in this evocation of it in the early decades of the last century).

Painted Clay was Capel Boake’s first novel and on the strength of this I would definitely be interested in reading more. It’s not the most sophisticated novel but it’s concise, well-paced and very readable.  Boake died in her 40s having published three novels (one further was published posthumously) and some poetry.

Secondly, The Three Miss Kings by Ada Cambridge (1891) which I was encouraged to take off the shelf by Emma’s escapism list. Although depicting a far more conventional life of middle-class mores and marriage than Painted Clay, The Three Miss Kings still manages to cast an askance, humorous view at late Victorian life.

At the beginning of the novel the titular heroines – Elizabeth, Patty and Eleanor – find themselves all alone in the world after their father dies.

“It was a curious position altogether. As far as they knew, they had no relations, and they had never had a friend. Not one of them had left their home for a night since Eleanor was born, and not one invited guest had slept there during the whole of that period. They had never been to school, or had any governess but their mother, or any experience of life and the ways of the world save what they gained in their association with her, and from the books that she and their father selected for them.”

Cambridge is at pains to stress the young women’s refinement and ‘breeding’ to an extremely tedious degree. However, later in the novel she stops banging on about this quite so much, which was certainly a relief, and gets on with telling an oft-told tale in a very readable way (excepting a couple of clunky passages with characters voicing long opinions on topical issues such as the role of the church).

The women travel from their rural home to Melbourne to be shocked and then embraced by city life, under the guiding light of their self-appointed guardian Mrs Duff-Scott:

“The only drawback to her enjoyment in them was the consciousness that, though they were nobody else’s, they were not altogether hers. She would have given half her fortune to be able to buy them, as she would buy three bits of precious crockery, for her absolute possession, body and soul—to dress, to manage, to marry as she liked.”

Three comely young ladies, refined of manner and naïve of just about everything – what will possibly happen? Mrs Duff-Scott has an idea, and lines up potential suitors for all of them with alarming ineptitude. I particularly enjoyed her assessment of Mr Westmoreland:

“He was the richest of them all, and the most stupid, and therefore he seemed to be cut out for Patty, who, being so intellectual and so enterprising, would not only make a good use of his money, but would make the best that was to be made of him.”

Cambridge does undermine some of the conventions she is focussing on, or at least mocks them lightly. For example, how to describe her heroines:

“like a tall lily, I feel I ought (and for a moment was tempted) to add, only that I know no girl ever did look like a lily since the world was made, nor ever will, no matter what the processes of evolution may come to.”

She’s also very pragmatic alongside the romance, such as the consideration of marrying for money:

“If these motives seem poor and inadequate, in comparison with the great motive of all (as no doubt they are), we must remember that they are at the bottom of a considerable proportion of the marriages of real life, and not perhaps the least successful ones. It goes against me to admit so much, but one must take things as one finds them.”

She even allows some feminist commentary regarding commanding male heroes:

“’Who would marry a chicken-hearted milksop if she could get a splendid tyrant like that?’ exclaimed Patty, fervently, for the moment forgetting there were such things as woman’s rights in the world.”

So although a romance in many ways, The Three Miss Kings is not unwaveringly romantic. I’ve never read Ada Cambridge before and I really enjoyed this first encounter. She brought a different voice, humour and interesting characterisation to make a familiar story include some surprises.

The story is firmly rooted in 1880 and in Melbourne, with descriptions of the International Exhibition. Melbourne Cup, public gardens, streets and crowds which were very evocative. If I’ve not said much about the plot it’s because I don’t think it’s really needed – you get the idea!

“I don’t think it is that things are going wrong, dear. It is only that we have to manage them, and to steer our way, and to take care of ourselves, and that is so trying and perplexing.”

To end, forward a century for service as usual with a 1980s pop video, from a Melbourne band:

Novella a Day in May 2022 No.24

/ madamebibilophile / 21 Comments

The Love Child – Edith Olivier (1927) 138 pages

The Love Child has been reissued as part of the British Library Women Writers series, a wonderful endeavour which has my fellow Novella a Day in May-er Simon Thomas as series consultant 😊

From the opening of The Love Child, I knew I was in for a treat:

“Agatha Bodenham had unconsciously moved a pace or two from the others, and she stood, isolated, near the head of her mother’s grave while the clergyman finished the service. She was wearing a dress of the shape and the tone of black which her dressmaker thought suitable for morning orders, and her hat was quite without character.”

Such a clever opening, and such detailed characterisation in so few words. This continues with clear-sightedness, yet with compassion too.

“She and her mother were women of peculiarly reserved natures, finding it hard to make friends, and holding their country neighbours at a distance. So reserved, too, that they had been barely intimate with each other, living through their days side by side without real mingling of experiences or sharing of confidences. Indeed, they had neither experiences nor confidences to share.”

Now her mother has died, Agatha is deeply, despairingly lonely. It has always been a lonely life in many ways, and she has never had many friends. Then she remembers a childhood imaginary companion, Clarissa. She wills Clarissa back to her, and the scamp – fleet of foot, irrepressible of nature – reappears. It’s not unheard of to retreat into fantasy at times of stress, but what lifts this from the psychological to the fantastical is that other people can see Clarissa too.

“She hardly believed it herself when she thought about it. She just didn’t think about it at all – she lived, and for the first time in her life.”

This presents a particular problem for Agatha as to how to explain Clarissa’s presence, the solution of which is the title.

“There was a special flavour about this scandal, because nobody believed it, however often it was repeated. The thing was unthinkable. To look at Agatha was to know that the policeman’s story was an impossible one, and yet its very impossibility made it the more amusing.”

Clarissa grows up with Agatha and the two are very much bound together. Clarissa encompasses all the behaviours that were supressed in Agatha long ago: appetites for food, for books, for life. However, as a person with those traits grows older, they are naturally going to want to experience more and varied things. Agatha feels Clarissa moving away from the insular world they have created together to beyond Agatha’s limits.

“Now Clarissa would be the guiding spirit, and it appeared she would at once step out of the artificial world which Agatha had created for them to live in, and go to the everyday world which had always been so comfortably and remotely outside, a world which seemed to Agatha at once more commonplace and more disconcerting than their own.”

In many ways The Love Child is a very sad novel. Agatha is so lonely and the solution to that loneliness is one that will cause her further pain. It’s not made clear in the novel whether Agatha is experiencing mental ill health or a truly wondrous manifestation. In a sense it doesn’t really matter because what is being portrayed, in a compelling and involving way, is the quiet desperation that could exist within an ordinary woman’s life in this period.

Agatha has no troubles or ostensible difficulties to contend with, but what she has is an entirely unfulfilled life and no idea of how to live differently. Her solution is extreme, and in many ways is one borne out of fear. She has been equipped with almost no life skills, and a fear of the wider world. It is no wonder that her solution is one that possibly lives only in her own head, and thrives in her domestic realm.

“Agatha thought she liked picnics, and in the long winter evening she often played at going to them with Clarissa. She felt rather differently about them in the summer, preferring them at a distance, like most things.”

I found The Love Child to be a sensitive and inventive novel. It was also highly readable and made me keen to seek out more of Edith Olivier’s work.

Novella a Day in May 2022 No.6

/ madamebibilophile / 12 Comments

In Pious Memory – Margery Sharp (1967) 160 pages

Today Simon and I are both reviewing In Pious Memory by Margery Sharp, given that Simon had recently acquired a copy, and I’d been meaning to drag mine out of the TBR since Ali’s wonderful review for Novellas in November.

I’m a big fan of Margery Sharp and I enjoyed In Pious Memory a lot. It has her gentle sense of the ridiculous and her fond acceptance of human foibles to the fore, making it a solid comfort read.

It opens with the death of Arthur Prelude, a man who, while inoffensive, seems to have been a monumental bore to all who knew him personally, giving all his energies to his professional life.

“His giant intellect was housed in but an average body –  indeed rather below average; average only in the sense of being unremarkable: all the more startling therefore was the effect when on rostrum or at banquet board he suddenly rose to his feet and let his intellect loose like a line from a mouse-trap. Mrs Prelude naturally never witnessed this transformation herself, she was always at home in the hotel bedroom sterilising his inhaling-apparatus with water boiled over a portable methylated-spirit stove; but other wives told her about it.”

His wife was utterly devoted, his adult children a lot more clear-sighted:

“‘Well. of course,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Mother’s of her generation. She behaved quite marvellously, after the crash, and if she’s been crying ever since, it’s only natural.’

‘As it’s natural for us to remain dry eyed?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Elizabeth. ‘After all we didn’t know father very well.’”

Despite Elizabeth and William’s resolution that “‘We must all be very kind to mother, and find her that flat in Hove at once.’”, their younger sister Lydia – determinedly romantic, and set for a career on the stage – decides her father is wandering around the Alps and needs to be found. In this endeavour, she enlists the help of her cousin Toby, and they go biking off across mainland Europe.

Meanwhile, Arthur Prelude is becoming a lot more likable in death than in life, as fictitious memories of his warmth and affection grow and take on a life of their own:

‘We should have lied to mother sooner,’ said Elizabeth.

‘How could we, while father was still alive?’ countered William.

Will Mrs Prelude be able to see past the false memories of her crashing bore husband towards new romantic opportunities? Will Lydia and Toby find Arthur wandering round the mountains in amnesiac shock? Will William get married and will Elizabeth avoid marriage? Absolutely nothing of serious consequence occurs, thank goodness.

In Pious Memory gently ribs questionable veneration of the dead and reminds us all to appreciate the now, imperfect as it may be.

You can read Simon’s thoughts on this novella here.

“When a Welsh person loves you, you’ll finally know how it feels to belong to poetry.” (Kamand Kojouri)

/ madamebibilophile / 17 Comments

This is a contribution to Reading Wales 2022 aka the Dewithon, hosted by the lovely Paula over at Book Jotter. My VMC pile is reaching ridiculous proportions so I googled “Wales Virago” and was delighted to find that there were two authors I could take off the TBR for this year’s Dewithon.

Firstly, I chose Penelope Mortimer, as I’d enjoyed Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting and The Pumpkin Eater a great deal, finding her writing spiky and incisive. Mortimer was born in Rhyl, Flintshire and My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof (1967) was her sixth novel.

Muriel Rowbridge is a journalist on a trip to Canada, the only woman in a group of men, warned by her editor:

“Don’t go wandering off in one of your Virginia Woolf fits.”

She is very much the outsider, wanting to focus on her writing while the rest of her group view it as a bit of a jolly:

“they were pleased with themselves, thawing toward each other, throwing out remarks about wives, children, secretaries, which were immediately understood, as though they were giving a particular handshake or flicking back their lapels for identification.”

This is the working world of the 1960s, which we’re all familiar with from Mad Men at least. Her colleagues think it’s totally acceptable to comment on what she’s wearing and the attractiveness of her legs. Thankfully Muriel doesn’t spend much time with them, or indeed much time working. The trip is a time of reflection and recuperation for her, as she recovers from a mastectomy for breast cancer.

“How to deal with it, except with vague attempts at courage and acceptance, she had no idea.”

Although Penelope Mortimer did have lung cancer later in life, I’m not sure she had personal experience of breast cancer at this point. But I thought this was a sensitive exploration of a woman working out who she is after a life-changing experience. Muriel isn’t remotely self-pitying, but she does need to find self-compassion.

”the anger against herself raged brightly, a clear fire. She had never felt this anger before; she could never remember feeling it before. It was enlivening, making her very defined and sharp, as though she had become a weapon.”

She had left her married lover Ramsey when she was diagnosed, and he is back with his wife Flora, a situation neither Ramsey and Flora are sure they want. This led to some of the pithy observations on relationships between the sexes that I expect from Mortimer:

“Between us, he said, he was being eaten alive. If this was so, I don’t know why we were both starving.”

While in Canada, she meets Robert: “what had been an indeterminate distance between their hands, knees, faces, was now measured exactly: they were accessible to each other.”

While she feels ambivalent about their relationship, the sex does lead her towards a new acceptance of her changed body.

“She leant against the lift wall and slowly remembered the night; then realised that this was the first time she had woken, and dressed, without any sense of mourning.”

Amongst the sexist or paternalistic colleagues; the self-centred married lover; and the surgeon who possibly took an entire breast when a lumpectomy would suffice without considering what it would mean for Muriel, Robert is a reminder of what can be positive in male/female relationships. This doesn’t necessarily mean that its happily ever after either… Mortimer is determinedly realistic.  

I didn’t think My Friend Says Its Bullet-Proof was quite as strong as the other two Mortimers I’ve read, but it was an interesting examination of the choices available to women in the late 1960s. It questions how to navigate independence in a world that marginalises and objectifies you both professionally and personally.

Secondly, a new-to-me author despite the vast number of novels she wrote; Rhoda Broughton, who was born in Denbighshire. Belinda (1883) was written roughly in the middle of her career, and my edition tells me she was alongside Mary Braddon as ‘Queen of the Circulating Library’.

Belinda is a satire, but that double-edged royal appellation did make me wonder if it was always read as such. Maybe I’m doing the fare of circulating libraries down, but I would have thought a tale of simpering Victorian virgin lovers was more typical of their stock than a satire of such stories. Regardless, if you read it straightforwardly as a romance because that’s what you were looking for, or as a satire because you were sick of such stories, Belinda would deliver.

The titular heroine is in Germany with her feckless, charming sister Sarah at the start of the novel:

“Away they go to Moritzburg, when the noon sun is warm and high; away they go, handsome, gay, and chaperoneless. There is no reason why their grandmother, who is a perfectly able-bodied old lady, should not escort them; but as she is sixty-five years of age, has no expectation of meeting a lover, and is quite indifferent to spring tints and German Schlosses, she wisely chooses to stay at home.”

Sarah is hugely popular with young men and is on her seventh fiancée. Belinda is unpopular, except with student David Rivers (aptly named, as he’s totally wet). The sisters wonder if Belinda’s nose is behind her lack of societal success:

“It is not case of measurement,’ says Sarah gravely; ‘I have seen noses several hands higher that were not nearly so alarming. It is a case of feeling; somehow yours makes them feel small. Take my word for it,’ with a shrewd look, ‘the one thing that they never can either forgive or forget is to feel small’”

It isn’t Belinda’s nose, unsurprisingly; it’s her fairly dull personality and her social awkwardness, matched only by that of her love interest:

“Is it her fault that all strong emotion with her translates itself into a cold, hard voice, and a chill set face? With other women it translates itself into dimples and pink blushes and lowered eyes. Ah!  but do they feel as she does? Sarah, for instance. When do men ever leave Sarah’s company with the down- faced, baffled, white look with which Rivers has more than once quitted hers? Preening themselves rather; with sleeked feathers and cosseted vanity.”

As you can see from the quote above, Broughton uses Belinda to poke fun at romantic mores, the silliness of them and the uselessness of them. She demonstrates how those who cannot master the light-hearted conventions end up tied in knots.

“‘And you were — and you were — one of the heavenly host up there!’  ends the young man, baldly and stammering.    But love is no brightener of the wits.

One of the heavenly host?’  repeats she, justly infuriated at this stale comparison.  ‘An angel, in short!  Must I always be an angel, or a goddess?  If anyone knew how sick I am of being a goddess!  I declare I should be thankful to be called a Fury or even a Ghoul, for a change!’

So saying, she turns her shoulder peevishly to him; and leaving the garden, begins to walk quickly along the road by the water, as if to make up for her late loitering.  He keeps pace with her, dumb in snubbed contrition, stupefied by love and, unhappily for himself, fully conscious of it; burningly aware of the hopeless flatness of his last simile, and rendered by his situation quite incapable of redeeming it by any brighter sally.”

The course of true love inevitably does not run smooth for the young lovers – ‘twas ever thus. However, Belinda’s understandable frustration with Victorian female conventions leads her to make some very questionable choices. For those of you who have read Middlemarch, these questionable choices will be most familiar. I don’t know what Oxford Rector Mark Pattison did to the women writers of late Victorian society but whatever it was, he really, really annoyed them. He provided the model for Casaubon in Middlemarch and here he is rendered as Professor Forth:

“She had known that she did not love him, but she had not known that he wore carpet slippers in the drawing-room.”

Belinda is well-paced and witty, but I think I would have like the satire to be slightly more explicitly evoked. At one point there seemed a never-ending round of cheeks blushing, lips whitening, words stumbling… and a pretty major suspension of my disbelief that Belinda and Rivers could really be in love, given they had barely spoken to each other but only mumbled vaguely while experiencing various body temperature changes.

I would have liked a slightly sharper authorial voice, or more scenes with witty, pragmatic Sarah and the frankly reprehensible grandmother, with whom I could only agree when she observed:

“Belinda is too everything, except amusing.”

I did enjoy Belinda though, and there was broad comedy too, including some nice scenes with pug dogs, and with social bull-in-a-china-shop Miss Watson:

“I shall certainly mention it to his mother. Lady Marion, when next I meet her,’ says Miss Watson resolutely; I do not think it would be acting a friend’s part not to do so.  I do not actually know her, but there is a sort of connection between us; I was at school for six months once at Brussels with a cousin of hers, and there is no doubt that there is something uncommonly louche about it.’”

To end, the BAFTAs earlier this month featured a performance from an 85 year-old Welsh singer/legend:

“Serious fiction is a dream which can become a nightmare.” (Brian Moore)

/ madamebibilophile / 26 Comments

Thank you to everyone who left kind comments last week. Covid is dragging on with me but I do seem to be slowly improving – it’s not been great, despite my being tripled vaxxed (and very careful). I sincerely hope you all stay safe and well. Here is my second contribution to Reading Ireland Month 2022 aka The Begorrathon, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books. Do join in with the event if you can!

My choice this week was inspired by the Brian Moore at 100 readalong which Cathy also hosted throughout last year. I really wanted to join in, but my reading was pitiful. It’s not massively improved now to be honest, but it has improved enough that I was finally able to pick up this lovely hardback edition out of the TBR pile:

The only other Brian Moore I’ve read was The Colour of Blood, which I didn’t massively get on with. I didn’t dislike it, and I could tell it was really well written, but I just didn’t connect with it. All the Brian Moore love during last year’s event persuaded me to give him another try and I’m so glad I did. I Am Mary Dunne (1968) was an expertly written, engaging read and a complex character portrait.

We spend a day with the titular 32-year-old narrator, and it’s a bad day she’s having. A receptionist at her hairdressers asks for her name and she finds it escapes her. This sends her into a spiral of anxiety and reminiscences.

“When people say they remember everything that happened in their lives, they’re deceiving themselves. I mean if I were to try and tell anyone the story of my life so far, wouldn’t it come out as fragmentary and faded as those old snapshot albums, scrapbooks, and bundles of letters everyone keeps in some bottom drawer or other?”

She has been married three times, changing her name each time. With each of her husbands, escape seems to be motivating factor driving the marriage. She marries Jimmy in order to leave Canada and escape her home; she marries Hat to escape Jimmy; and she marries Tee because she wants to escape Hat, although with her third husband she also finds love and sexual satisfaction.

The narrative is fragmented, flicking back and forth between her past and present. We gradually piece together her life but Mary remains somewhat unknowable. Her husbands and her friend Janice – with whom she rows in restaurant – are more fully realised.  It’s a really clever piece of writing by Moore, where as readers we don’t get to know Mary despite the first-person narrative, because she doesn’t know herself.

“ ‘You’re an ingenue type.’ It was my acting epitaph, although I did not know it at the time. And in real life it’s no different. I play an ingenue role, with special shadings demanded by each suitor.”

Mary is attractive and Moore demonstrates how her physicality means people project their fantasies on to her. Because Mary is so obscure to herself, she easily gets lost in other people’s versions of her. She believes her first husband when he calls her insatiable, and she believes her second husband when he says she is a cold virgin. She accepts an older woman with a crush calling her Maria and attempting a Pygmalion scenario, and a full obliteration of her name through her third marriage “I am introduced to everyone as Mrs Terence Lavery”.

But Mary is not wholly sympathetic. She doesn’t always behave well, or kindly. She uses derogatory terms that I’m pretty sure would have been outdated and offensive in 1968. She sheds friends like she sheds identities. She changes people’s names too: Jimmy, Hat, and Tee are her husbands’ abbreviated names; the older Miss MacIver becomes Mackie. A man with a long-standing crush is amazed she doesn’t remember a nickname she gave him.

Mary refers frequently to an evil twin throughout the day, the part of her that behaves badly which she attributes to PMS. She says things she doesn’t mean and shakes uncontrollably. Part of the ambiguity around Mary is that by the end of the novel, I didn’t know if she was having a really bad day compounded by PMS (or PMDD); or whether she was seriously unwell. I did enjoy this bitchy thought that popped into her head about the portraits in her husband’s study:

“When I think of it, the arrogance of a man who could do the trivial work he does under the scrutiny of the likes of Tolstoy and Yeats. Proust gave up a world for his work. Terence wouldn’t even give up a party.”

I Am Mary Dunne sees the narrator having an existential crisis, fearing obliteration without any idea of who is being obliterated.

“I am beginning to die because some future me cannot keep me in mind.”

Yet I didn’t feel particularly hopeful by the end that the assertion in the novel’s title was any further realised than at the start of the story. It wasn’t a depressing tale, but Mary still seemed to have no idea of who she was. It was one of those stories that left me wondering what happened the next day, after the novel finished…

“I am no longer Mary Dunne, or Mary Phelan, or Mary Bell, or even Mary Lavery. I am a changeling who has changed too often and there are moments when I cannot find my way back.”

To end, a song about shifting identities by a master of reinvention:

“Idleness is an appendix to nobility.” (Robert Burton)

/ madamebibilophile / 31 Comments

A little while ago I saw an epidemiologist on tv saying that eventually everyone will have had covid. And I thought, ‘no thank you all the same’, and carried on distancing as far as I could and wearing a mask. You can guess what’s happened, Reader. This post is brought to you from my covid-addled brain, apologies in advance if it’s even more waffly and incoherent than usual…

This is a contribution to Reading Ireland Month 2022 aka The Begorrathon, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books. It’s a great event so do join in if you can!

I’ve chosen two late novels by Molly Keane for this post and I really enjoyed revisiting this author who isn’t like anyone else. Her evocation of moneyed families in early twentieth-century Ireland is so deeply strange and disturbing, I always feel a sense of trepidation opening one of her stories…

Good Behaviour was published in 1981, when Keane had not published a novel for 29 years and nothing at all since the play Dazzling Prospect 20 years earlier. It was a huge success and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is a blistering, dark comedy of manners, perfectly paced and sharply observed.

It begins:

“Rose smelt the air, considering what she smelt; a miasma of unspoken criticism and disparagement fogged the air between us.”

I knew from that line that I’d love Good Behaviour, and now having finished the novel I can say it sets up the story and themes brilliantly: the domestic setting, sense of things rotting, the odd power dynamics, the uneasy roles, the undercurrents of anger.

Someone dies early on, in a way that leaves the reader uncertain as to how far they were nudged towards it, and this sense of not quite trusting that we are being given the full story continues as we are taken back in time by Aroon St Charles, daughter of an aristocratic family living in Temple Alice, a decaying pile, with her indifferent mother and philandering father.

“Behind him the green luminous gloom of glass within glass retreated inside the doors of a breakfront cabinet that filled one end of the dining room. Mummie had lined it with grey linen, so that all the glass objects floated and were lost in its spaces. It was like water or air at his back, as though the end wall were open to air or water. The austere outdoor look I knew had melted from him into the air, like the glass in the cupboard. Sitting there, he seemed extraordinarily dulled, dulled and happy.”

The novel is Aroon describing her childhood and early adulthood amongst the trappings of her class in 1920s Ireland. This being Keane, of course there is hunting and horses, but aside from a few pages where I thought the litany of dead animals was never going to end, it wasn’t too bad for squeamish readers such as myself.

Aroon does not fit in: she is not her adored brother Hubert; she is not physically adept; she is not charming and witty; and she is not beautiful. She enjoys food and is tall, in a time where women were expected to be flat-chested and dainty. She is not rich and so no men are interested in her. Her father likes her but is absent in various different ways throughout her life; her mother is at best indifferent to her but often mentally abusive.

“I turned away, my loneliness walking with me, taller than my own height as a shadow is tall – and irremediable as my height was.”

Aroon is a complex creation. At times I felt she couldn’t possibly be as naïve as her narration would have us believe. Did she really think the housekeeper was rubbing her father’s missing leg under the bedclothes to relieve phantom pain? Does she really not realise her brother is gay and his best friend is his lover? Does she really think she is concussed rather than completely sloshed? This isn’t me viewing it with twenty-first century eyes; other characters are perfectly aware of her father’s behaviour, the full extent of the housekeeper’s role, and her brother’s sexuality. They try to tell her but she doesn’t hear it and blunders on regardless.

Whether or not Aroon is an unreliable narrator or just hopelessly naïve, this characterisation is a master-stroke by Keane in balancing out the pitch black comedy of Good Behaviour. Aroon’s voice is so credulous, the novel written with such a light touch, that it means you whizz through the story without becoming hopelessly depressed at how grim Aroon’s situation is or how deeply unpleasant many of the people are. Good Behaviour is both eminently readable and deeply disturbing.

Queen Lear (also known as Loving and Giving, which I tell you so you don’t make the same mistake as me and end up blissfully unaware that you own two copies of the same novel) was published in 1988. Like Good Behaviour it features a female protagonist, Nicandra (named after her father’s favourite horse “the first Nicandra”), daughter of gentry, lonely and unhappy.

The story opens with eight-year-old Nicandra doing a round of the enormous home she lives in, visiting her parents and servants, barely tolerated by all. Again, the opening is lovely piece of scene-setting, telling the reader all we need to know about the characters and setting.

Nicandra’s mother is glamorous and engaging, and entirely uninterested in her daughter:

“When she was absent, the shadow of her presence was the assurance of a world of love. To earn her displeasure was to forgo all delight; through the days Nicandra devised love tokens, as much to stimulate interest towards herself as to express her deep affection.”

In one particularly unpleasant scene, Maman ties Nicandra to a chair, not to be released until she eats the cold spinach she hates. Her Aunt Tossie rescues her, much to Nicandra’s dismay, who was trying to psych herself up to eating the spinach and making this sacrifice for her mother.

In a novel full of selfish, unpleasant people, Aunt Tossie was the nearest I got to actually liking someone:

“She enjoyed nearly everything, even widow’s weeds, as her married life had not been as exciting as she might have wished”

That day, her mother runs off with one of the servants. She doesn’t say goodbye to her child, and no-one explains to Nicandra what has happened.

“Whatever it was that had come over her family today, Nicandra could not guess at. She had done her utmost to excite, please, soothe, serve; yet everything had gone awry. Pigeons, butterfly, bantams, Maman, Aunt Tossie – she had given her all to each, only Dada was left.”

From these inauspicious beginnings, the novel jumps forward to Nicandra as a young woman in the interwar years. Unsurprisingly, she has grown up naïve and desperate for love. She remains almost wilfully blind to everyone else’s relentless self-focus, to the extent where it’s hard to feel for her. She seems so determinedly oblivious as to be as self-obsessed as everyone else.  

There are also repeated references to her childhood bullying of Silly-Willie, a child on the estate who initially seems to have learning difficulties, expressed in the derogatory terms of the 1920s/1930s. Despite these prejudices, he grows up to essentially run the entire estate – albeit in a dilapidated condition due to Dada racing through money. Nicandra struggles with this arrangement as “a little incident” between them, buried in the past, is something she feels extremely uncomfortable about.

Nicandra of course falls for the first charming bounder to show her any interest, desperately seeking his love as she once did her mother’s, with about the same level of reciprocity.

“Although in manners bound, he held and played with her hand for the rest of the drive home, he felt he could have done instead with a nice talk about hunting.”

With very little else to occupy her, Nicandra marries Andrew. He enjoys her beauty and money, as well as an affair with her best friend Lal (this isn’t really a spoiler as the prospect is introduced almost simultaneously with the awful characters).

There are some very nasty elements for a novel titled Loving and Giving:  the bullying, and Andrew’s crass and cruel suggestion of how Nicandra should procure money from her family for an abortion (that she doesn’t want) “say it’s to drain the West Bog”. Repulsive.

What stops Loving and Giving from being absolutely relentlessly bleak in its portrayal of “cheap and amusing” lives where “tragedy gets tidied away” is the humour. We aren’t supposed to take these characters particularly seriously, or think that they are admirable or lead remotely useful lives. I particularly liked this pithy comment on the butler’s behaviour:

“the slight upwards twist he gave to the bottle took the place of the wry smile he would never allow himself to give”

And this observation on family politics:

“Properly speaking, Aunt Tossie should have presented Nicandra at court, which she would have greatly enjoyed doing. Dada, however, raised every obstacle and objection he could think of to baulk this plan because, as he put it, (only to himself), the dear old girl might feel her oats and something unfortunate could happen.”

Molly Keane is pretty blistering in her characterisation of the upper classes and in portraying the lives they live. Her novels are almost Gothic – certainly there are ruined buildings, hauntings from the past, almost ghoulish characters – but no supernatural elements. I enjoy her original phrasing and sharp observation, I even enjoy her awful characters (some of them anyway) when I’m in the right mood. I do find I need a palate cleanser afterwards though!

To end, a song about a family house, albeit a very different one to the those which Keane’s characters live in, and which provided the title of last week’s post: