twentieth century literature

“This situation is just plain silly. It isn’t a love affair; it’s an obstacle race.” (Pamela Frankau, The Willow Cabin)

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Unfortunately I didn’t have time to finish The Willow Cabin during Kaggsy and Simon’s marvellous 1949 Club, but I’m catching up now! This was my first Pamela Frankau and I’m so glad the Club prompted me to pick this up, because a basic summary would not especially appeal to me: a young woman enters into an affair with a still-married-but-separated older man, then the war starts… So far, so meh. But The Willow Cabin is a mature and interesting exploration of adult relationships, far beyond the central romance.

At the start we have a Prologue dated 1936, where young actor Caroline Seward is twenty-two years old and unhappy at home. She is unconventionally attractive, and pretty sweary (although her language seems mild to a twenty-first century reader.) At an afterparty she meets Michael Knowle, a married surgeon in his late thirties…

In Time Stolen we are in 1939 and the affair between the two is well-established. Caroline has matured, having had to face the realities of loving a man who will not divorce his wife, despite their living apart.

“Slowly, she had learned to rage in secret and to weep alone. She had learned to hide from him the small worries that he begged to be allowed to share. She had discovered early that she could make him laugh, and it became an obligation always to make him laugh, to save the funny things for him and hand them over, as toys to a child, at the day’s end. She had cured herself of questioning him, rebuking him and sulking at him.”

Their circle of friends is accepting, and Frankau demonstrates brilliantly how there is always the shadow of a third person in their relationship, Mercedes Knowle. Mercedes remains unknowable, as Michael will not discuss her, and people have widely differing opinions of her. Michael’s loyal sister Dorothy believes:

“Mercedes was a woman, and Mercedes was therefore to be blamed…. Michael’s sins she saw always in proportion. They were male, with his virtues.”

Huh! While Jay, Caroline’s professional collaborator, warns her:

“You know, of course, that Michael could get his divorce anytime that he wanted it; that his martyred attitude is a superb piece of bluff. That, being Michael, he is completely devoted to his career and completely set in the pattern that he has made. He has, at the moment, just enough freedom to suit him. You protect him from Mercedes and Mercedes protects him from you. A nice balance. Neither can encroach too far.”

I have to say this chimed with my sceptical twenty-first century reading of the situation. But really the focus isn’t on the relationship. Michael remains a somewhat unformed character, and I think this is entirely deliberate. Frankau’s interest in The Willow Cabin lies with the women (the title quote is from a love speech in Twelfth Night, but it is spoken by one woman (Viola in disguise) to another woman, Olivia, as part of a love triangle with Lord Orsino.) Frankau considers the effect of the relationship on Caroline, rather than evoking the relationship itself. And a huge part of that is her idea of Mercedes.

My favourite sections were the last two: The Calendar of Long Hours which covers 1943 to 1944, followed by Time Harvested, 1948.

During the war, Caroline works for the ATS, separated from Michael who is an army surgeon. A standout scene for me was a group of friends waiting for Caroline in a London bar, with the Blitz raging outside.

“He could see nothing ahead for any of them, the tight little circle of temporarily-favoured persons to whom all this was important. ‘It is the last spring; the guillotine is coming down. And after that it won’t matter who loves and who is unloved; … How foolish not to be able to be happy now, when there was so little time left.’”

It is a sad scene, made all the more poignant by the overlay of social ease. The war has made them all cynical. Dennis observes:

“’Need we have D-Day? I’ve had several of those. All I want is to do is to stay here and drink this reasonable gin and watch the top of the steps for Caroline.’”

Then later on, Caroline remarks on the terror of flying bombs:

“’I still don’t know why these things appear to have shattered my morale. I never minded the quaint, old fashioned Blitz.’”

The callowness of some of the characters which made them not entirely likable in the earlier sections now seems a marker of youth, gone forever although they are still so young. It is one of so many losses which Frankau evokes without sensationalism or sentimentality.

After the war, Caroline is touring a successful play in the USA, where Mercedes now lives, having nearly died in France and still struggling with the aftermath the conflict on her health.

“Where was she, the tough crusader responsible for this wrecked body? Absent tonight. There was only the image of the younger person who had failed.”

And so the two women eventually meet, and it as a subtle, complex and affecting as the rest of The Willow Cabin had led me to expect.

“‘Your Michael isn’t mine, nor mine yours. And there was, I imagine, a Michael whom we neither of us knew.’”

To end, the source of the title quote:

“Heroes came and went these days. When they were gone, it seemed they were gone forever.” (Olivia Manning, Friends and Heroes)

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Earlier this year Marcie and I decided to buddy read Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, with The Great Fortune (1960) in June, The Spoilt City (1962) in August, and finishing with Friends and Heroes (1965) in October. I’ve just managed to get the final volume read in time!

At the start of the novel, Harriet Pringle has left behind war-torn Bucharest and made it to Athens. She is anxiously waiting for her husband Guy to join her:

“She glanced about her, bewildered by her safety, unable to believe in a city so becalmed in security and comfort. Her nerves reacted still to the confusion of their last months in Romania.”

Guy does manage to escape and reach her, but as his work arrangements with the British Council were for Cairo, he finds himself somewhat adrift, compounded by old adversaries Lush and Dubedat conspiring to keep their positions of minor power in education, and Guy well away from it all. For relentless extrovert Guy, this is challenging:

“Throwing himself into one occupation or another, he had managed to keep anxiety on the periphery of consciousness; now, without employment, without friends, without money, he was trying to follow his old escape pattern. But there was no route open to him.”

The faultlines always so apparent in the Pringles’ marriage start to become real cracks in Friends and Heroes. Harriet needs intimacy and to be prioritised, Guy is not uncaring but he is entirely unable to provide either of these things:

“He loved her, but his love must be taken for granted. If she put it to the proof according to her needs, she found herself sacrificed to what he saw as a more important need: his need to be free to do what he wanted to do.”

Guy is also not so generous that he values other people for their differences. Alan Frenwen is a sweet, socially awkward man, who loves Greece and his little dog Diocletian. Guy disregards him as he cannot provide the political echo chamber and admiration Guy needs. Instead, he has an intense friendship with the generally unpleasant Ben Phipps, because they can slap each other on the back regarding their shared communist beliefs.

Manning is very good at portraying unlikeable characters. Three books in and I’m still not especially keen on either Guy or Harriet, or their circle. Yet they are so recognisable and believable, young and out of their depth personally and politically.

“This was a world in which only the ignorant could be happy.”

Even my favourite character, Prince Yaki, remains thoroughly reprehensible, forever sponging off people. Except he has finally sold his Hispano-Suiza and so for once has money:

“In funds, he had no need of friends. When he could buy his own food, he ate well and ate alone.”

Terrible! Yet at times he is a good friend to Harriet, and I do find him irrepressible despite his constant proclamations of being “poor Yaki”.

We spend time with this community as they wait to see if Greece will be pulled into the war, wondering if they should leave, and if so, where to go. The tension builds as the situation worsens in world politics and in the Pringle’s marriage; the first leading to soldiers swamping the city and a handsome one of these named Charles Warden threatening the second.

I had a sense in Friends and Heroes of Manning really growing in accomplishment as a writer. The interweaving of the Pringles marriage portrait alongside vivid descriptions of Greece and the growing threat of invasion is finely balanced. The characterisation of well-established figures becomes more complex, and there are two scenes in particular of true sadness, highlighting the human destruction both physically and spiritually during war.

“Pale and unhappy, he returned to his books, wanting to hear no more. Harriet pitied his disillusionment, but had no patience with it. Reality was not to be altered by an inability to recognise fact.”

Friends and Heroes builds to a long, tense final chapter as the Pringles try and decide how severe the threat is to them if they stay, and if they want to evacuate to Egypt how on earth they will even manage it. I thought it was brilliantly done and the Levant trilogy is absolutely on my 2027 reading list!

(I can see on Goodreads that some readers found the Balkan trilogy too long, which makes me think it is best to continue with spacing the books out a bit. Reading as Marcie suggested in alternate months meant I didn’t find them overlong at all. So now I just need to work out which months will be Levant months…)

“War was the time when mediocrities came to the top and better men must rot or die in the conflict.”

To end, of course Bowie, but I thought I’d be marginally less predictable and choose Seu Jorge’s version:

“Relationships of people are never established, are ever mutable, wavering like seaweed on a tide.” (Emma Smith, The Far Cry)

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After a slight disappointment previously with Death of Jezebel, I wanted a sure-fire winner to continue my 1949 Club reading. hosted by Kaggsy and Simon, and where better than a Persephone Book? Number 33 is The Far Cry by Emma Smith,  which I really enjoyed.

Teresa is a young teenager living with her unbending Aunt May. They constantly lock horns, while her father is an intermittent presence, and her mother… “Lilian was his second wife who, for 10 years, had pleased everyone by living in America.”

One day, Teresa and May are in usual domestic conflict, when everything changes:

“As this was plainly a lie, the fright increased. Teresa’s face appeared to go even thinner and Aunt May’s face to grow fatter, in the same way as the qualities of light and shade alter immediately before a thunderstorm. However, no storm broke as at that moment Teresa’s father arrived.”

Randall Digby, her father, has decided to take Teresa to India, where her half-sister Ruth is living in Assam with her tea-planter husband. Mr Digby is doing this to spite his ex-wife, who he believes is returning to England to take Teresa back. Teresa isn’t asked her preference regarding her living arrangements.

Smith isn’t afraid to make her characters unlikable: May is inflexible, Teresa is volatile and spiky, and Mr Digby is vain and self-indulgent. Yet the author shows compassion towards her characters:

“The tender gesture she needed from her father he was unable to give, having for too long expected tender gestures from others, and for too long been disappointed. It was difficult to imagine anyone loving Mr Digby: he was not lovable. Nor was Teresa.”

The two of them set sail from Southampton. Smith was part of a documentary team for the BBC who had gone to India a few years previously to take footage for the Tea Board (scripted by Laurie Lee!) She kept a diary which directly informed The Far Cry and there are many wonderful descriptions of the journey:

“On either side of the boat stretched miles and miles of sun coloured land, drier than raisins, not steaming, as green and earthy places steam, but nervously shimmering, as though the whole wide territory was on the move and might at any moment take off into space as easily as its sand, having no weight, shifts and sorts and piles itself when the desert winds blow. Now and then, growing close to the water, were date palms and tamarisk trees.”

Teresa and her father don’t become particularly close onboard the ship or subsequent train journey. Mr Digby finds Mr Littleton, a friend who will indulge his stories of his hard-done-by life, his unrecognised writerly genius. Again, Smith is more forgiving of her characters than I am and even I found the following passage truly affecting, despite my dislike of Mr Digby:

“Mr Digby was at heart an honest man, but his moments of lucid honesty were few and far between, and as he grew older he had contrived to space the more and more widely. They were, when they came, so devastating, they showed him such terrifying sights, such abysmal depths, such snows and glaciers ahead, such scorched earth behind, that he lost courage to face another day, and, but for his fear of dying, would have liked to cease upon that very midnight with as little pain as possible.”

When Teresa falls ill, she is cared for by Miss Spooner, a truly wonderful creation. Elderly and a spinster, Miss Spooner refuses to compromise to social niceties beyond politeness, but is always open to new experiences. Mr Digby dislikes her of course, because she doesn’t soothe his immense fragile ego. Although he tells himself his dislike is because:

“Miss Spooner had never justified her womanly organs by being the comforter and support of a man, or the maker and preserver of little children (little boys whom he hated, little girls who bored him—but it was the principle that counted).”

Ha! There are moments of humour like this in the novel, but although some critics, including Elizabeth Bowen, describe The Far Cry as a comedy, for me it wasn’t comedic. There is an awful lot of sadness, yet Teresa’s adolescent awkwardness and indignation stop it from being depressing.

When they arrive at their destination, the perspective shifts somewhat, from Teresa to her deeply unhappy sister and husband. I thought this description of beautiful, vacuous Ruth was blistering:

“Ruth revolved in a world of mirrors, for every person she met was her looking glass in front of which she arranged herself, blind to everything but her own image reflected in faces that were, on their own account, of no interest to her whatsoever.”

Her husband Edwin is loving but cannot make her happy:

“He looked about him and liked almost everything he saw. He was curious, as a child is curious, about everything, only unlike a child he seldom asked why. He drew no conclusions and made no pronouncements.”

And so in the latter part of the novel we follow this fractious and fractured family as they adjust to life together and Teresa falls in love with her new home. She adores India, feeling more strongly for it than she does for any of her relations. Smith gives her more insight into the people she lives with than anyone else has, but she is also too young to make any meaningful gestures towards intimacy.

While a 1949 portrait of India by a white British woman has undoubtedly dated, particularly in one character portrait, one surprising element of the novel for me was that I expected more racism. Mr Digby is racist, but this is portrayed as one of his myriad character-failings, there is no authorial endorsement. Edwin holds a strange mix of racist views and progressive attitudes around cultural appropriation. I was genuinely surprised, and if similar concerns were causing you to hesitate about picking this novel up, I hope this helps!

The Far Cry is a coming-of-age novel in the gentlest sense, although major life events happen for Teresa. We see her gradually grow and change, deepening her understanding of people and the world, but without huge epiphanies. She has to deal with tragedy along the way, and this is portrayed without sensation.

“There was no one to teach to them what they had to know to be peaceful: that they were their own experience. That they were equally everything and nothing. That they could only be everything when they were content to be nothing. That they carried this balance like air and water wherever they went, whatever they saw, whoever spoke to them, whatever happened.”

I tried to find the BBC footage that Emma Smith and her team may have shot, as BBC Archive has uploaded so many incredible old stories to YouTube. I couldn’t locate it but I did find this wonderful report from the Club year; the footage of ‘Blitzed acres’ around St Paul’s four years after the war is particularly striking:

“We are looking for a murderer who can play the clarinet.” (Cyril Hare, When the Wind Blows)

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I really loved An English Murder by Cyril Hare when I read it the Christmas before last, so I was excited to pick up his novel When the Wind Blows for the 1949 Club this week, hosted by Kaggsy and Simon.

The story opens with barrister Francis Pettigrew in a self-congratulatory mood, having married a younger, affluent woman. But his music-loving wife Eleanor is no doting push-over:

“Pettigrew had, of course, taken a ticket for the concert; but it was not until the morning of the event that he learned that he was expected to attend the rehearsal as well. Eleanor broke the news to him at breakfast, while they were discussing the arrangements for the day.

“Mr. Dixon asked me at the party yesterday whether you could come,” she remarked. “You were busy talking to someone else at the time, but I told him that you would be delighted.”

“I wonder how you guessed,” said Pettigrew thoughtfully.

“Honestly,” Eleanor persisted, “it will be quite amusing, and I know you haven’t anything else to do.”

“To answer your second allegation first, I had promised myself a delightful day with the current Law Quarterly Review. There’s an article in it entitled ‘Prolegomena to Pufendorf’ that simply cries out to be read.”

Eleanor’s brilliant blue eyes expressed the liveliest sympathy.

“Do take the Quarterly with you to the rehearsal then, darling,” she said. “You needn’t listen if you don’t want to. Shall I fetch it for you? I think it’s still where you put it last month to prop up the leg of your dressing table.””

Eleanor is part of the local orchestral society and somehow Pettigrew has been drawn in too, with all their internal politics and tensions. There’s a brilliant scene of one of their meetings whereby the reader is introduced to the main characters: Mrs Bassett, obsessed with Debretts and, for reasons no-one really understands, also fairly fixated on the conductor Mr Evans; Mr Dixon whose wife is expecting their first baby, just as his inheritance comes in for a large estate; and Mr Ventry, a cad and a bounder.

At a party to welcome the guest of honour for the upcoming concert – violinist Lucy Carless and her husband – tensions run high. New first clarinettist Tadeuz Zbartorowski knew her before in a tangled history, and she also used to be married to Mr Dixon. Pettigrew is frustrated:

“He felt that he had been pitchforked into a business which he did not in the least understand and about which he really cared nothing, merely through yielding to a fatal impulse of good nature. Why had he ever allowed himself to be connected with the confounded Orchestral Society? Why had he consented to come to the rehearsal, instead of staying quietly at home, reading the Prolegomena to Pufendorf? He was feeling distinctly allergic to clarinets, and didn’t care two hoots whether Mendelssohn’s violin concerto was played with one of them or two, or none. What was more, he was morally certain that nobody in the audience would notice the difference.”

It doesn’t take much guesswork to decide that Lucy Carless’ days are numbered, and she’s found strangled with a silk stocking in her dressing room. Enter Inspector Trimble and Sargeant Tate…

It’s here that I started to enjoy When the Wind Blows less. The set-up is great, the characters well-established, and there’s plenty of humour. Hare was a judge, and very knowledgeable about music, and this shows too. The difficulty is, Pettigrew is his detective and he more or less disappears.

While Inspector Trimble stumbles, Chief Constable MacWilliam brings in Pettigrew, reputation established from previous crime-solving (this is Pettigrew’s third appearance, but I didn’t feel a lack of having not read the others.) We’re told that Pettigrew pretty quickly has the whole thing sewn up, but the explanation happens in a conversation the reader isn’t privy to. To work out motive and means, the reader needs to know mid-twentieth century law, David Copperfield, and the orchestral arrangement of Mendelssohn. I managed one out of three 😀

It’s a bit odd and unsatisfying but there’s still plenty to enjoy and I definitely wouldn’t want to put anyone off (there are plenty of enthusiastic reviews on Goodreads). The characters, readable style and humour carry it through. I particularly enjoyed a cameo appearance by Jenkinson, the clarinettist who was supposed to fill in but was sent on a wild goose chase to a neighbouring village and is distinctly unhappy about it:

“”To add insult to injury, the fellow suggested that I should, as he put it, ‘join the boys’ and take part in, and even add to, the hideous riot of cacophony which had by then broken out in another part of the building. After disabusing him of this idea, which was not easy, I set about looking for a conveyance to bring me here. There appeared to be no cars to be obtained in Didford Parva, and I was eventually reduced to waiting in a queue … for the local omnibus, which finally brought me to the door of this police-infested place. That is my story, sir, and if its recital has been as valuable as its experience was distressing, it should rank as the most important piece of evidence ever recorded. Have I your leave to go?””

So, a wee bit disappointing after the heights of An English Murder which is probably my favourite GA mystery so far. But I still enjoyed this and I’d be interested to read more Hare and meet Pettigrew again.

To end, for people around my age, When the Wind Blows will always mean one of the most harrowing viewing experiences of childhood:

“Being unmarried has its own status.” (Barbara Pym, The Sweet Dove Died)

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I’ve been meaning to get back to reading Barbara Pym, and what better time than #SpinsterSeptember, hosted by @pear-jelly. Pym fills her novels with ‘excellent women’ spinsters, although the character of Leonora Eyre in The Sweet Dove Died (1978) is a bit of a departure. Pym observed in a letter to Phillip Larkin “I didn’t try to make it so, but tended to leave out boring cosiness and concentrate on the darker side.”

The novel opens with Humphrey Boyce, a middle-aged antique dealer and his young nephew James, helping Leonora Eyre from a Bond Street salesroom and taking her to lunch. Leonora has been overcome placing the winning bid for a Victorian flower book (!)

Everything about Leonora is performatively Victorian, summed up brilliantly in this description of her bedside table:

“Browning and Matthew Arnold—her favourite poets—took their place with her Guerlain cologne, a bottle of smelling salts, soft aquamarine paper tissues, a phial of brightly coloured pills to relieve stress and strain, and presiding over all these the faded photographs of a handsome man and a sweet faced woman in late-Victorian dress. Leonora had long ago decided that her grandparents were much more distinguished looking than her father and mother whose photographs had been hidden away in a drawer.”

Her romanticising of the bygone era doesn’t ever acknowledge that during that time, she would not have been allowed to inherit her parents estate or own property, two things which allow her to live out her entirely self-focussed twentieth-century life.

There is absolutely no generosity to Leonora, everything and everyone is about meeting her own needs. Thus as a love triangle of sorts emerges between the three, her motives are not inspired by who Humphrey or James are, but what they can do for her.

In fairness, James has no idea who he is either. He is in his twenties but remains curiously unformed, even allowing for his young age.

“James was not yet sure what he wanted from life, and had so far tended to avoid violent extremes of any kind.”

He has sexual dalliances with Phoebe, a young woman who he cares for very little, and Ned, a visiting American academic who is entirely uncommitted to him despite James wanting more. There is a lack of intimacy in James’ closest relationships, which is perhaps why he and Leonora are well-suited. She likes the flattery of an attentive younger man, but really wants very little else. Proud of her history of male suitors, none of them seem to actually have amounted to a relationship.

Aware she is losing her looks, Leonora still has admirers:

“One day, Humphrey flattered himself, she would become bored with the novelty of James’s youth and realise the more lasting qualities—virtues, almost—of a man nearer her own age who was tall and kept his figure and was bald only in the most distinguished kind of way.”

But even Humphrey is beginning to lose interest towards the end of the novel.

As we follow these curious three for a while, there is all of Pym’s brilliant social observation around English niceties and the exposure of character in the smallest of details. Yet there is more cruelty portrayed in this novel than I expect with Pym. Leonora behaves appallingly at times, and is truly unpleasant. Ned is in many ways her match, a young man at ease with hurting others to get what he wants. However, the author’s eye remains compassionate to them all, and so there is never a bitter taste left by what the reader witnesses. Rather it is all the foibles and follies Pym usually turns her attention to, but with a darker edge.

Although less humorous than some of her earlier novels, there is still humour to enjoy here, such as Humphrey’s vanity over his baldness, or the check he places on one flight of fancy:

“But he soon dismissed the picture from his mind as impossible and ludicrous. A woodland seduction scene between two middle-aged protagonists could only end in disaster.”

Towards the end, there is a real sense of impending, true sadness for Leonora, unless she mends her ways:

“She had always cared as much for inanimate objects as for people and now spent hours looking after her possessions, washing the china and cleaning the silver obsessively and rearranging them in her rooms.”

But Pym’s light touch remains, and so situations and people remain unresolved but not without hope.

This would be a great choice for a book group, as the characters remain somewhat enigmatic. No great insights or changes occur, their motivations and feelings oblique and unknown even to themselves. It would be interesting to hear a group discussion of how they each interpreted them…

I really enjoyed returning to Pym’s world, masterfully drawn, sharply observed, sympathetically portrayed without sentimentality. I’m hoping to get to Less Than Angels before the month is out!

“It’s the mystery that’s important, somehow very important.” (Tove Jansson, Art in Nature)

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Those of you who follow Paula’s Book Jotter blog will know what a huge fan she is of Finnish author Tove Jansson, creating the wonderful resource Tove Trove. When Paula pointed out 9 August was Tove Jansson Day, I resolved to read the two collections of short stories I had in the TBR, also perfect for Women in Translation Month. I read one, then promptly forgot all about today until this morning, so apologies in advance for this hastily written post!

Art in Nature (1978, transl. Thomas Teal 2012) and Letters From Klara (1991, transl. Thomas Teal 2017) are both published by Sort Of Books, who have done such a brilliant job of making Jansson’s work readily available in English translation.

I’m going to pick one story from each, as I find writing about short story collections really difficult.

Art in Nature was the collection I preferred, with some truly unnerving psychological studies within it. However, I’ll choose one of the lighter stories, White Lady.

Three women in their sixties are dressed up and slightly tipsy, ready for a good time at a restaurant on an islet. Ellinor is a writer who “loved similes” and is tempting to read as a self-portrait; nostalgic Regina and troubled, girlish May make up the threesome.

“They were going to eat and drink well, and for this one evening they had left everything behind and were going to enjoy themselves in a new, unusual place, an island from the turn of the century, a building that was almost old when they were children.

‘That’s what’s so exciting,’ Regina said. ‘Having it all ahead of us. I’ll have a White Lady. I’m wearing a white dress, so I want a White Lady.

‘Is that strong?’ May asked. ‘I’ll have the same.’”

Over just fourteen pages, Jansson conveys so much. The women are fully realised as individuals. Their determination to have a good time is underpinned by grief and pain, yet is resilient more than sad. Their coming to terms with aging and lost time is sensitively portrayed. It has moments of humour and moments of great pathos.

“The young people were not dancing. Why should they? They could afford not to. Wherever they went, their own music followed them.”

In Letters from Klara, the titular story opens the collection in great style. Klara is spiky, affectionate, clear-sighted, uncompromising. As she explains to her solicitor, she has decided to change her will to give an annuity to a retirement home:

“The idea –  as I’m sure you understand, cunning as you are – is that, with this income in mind, the home will try and keep me alive as long as possible. I will be their mascot and will be allowed certain obvious liberties. Whatever is left when I die will be distributed exactly as specified earlier.

I will only add that I am at the moment in excellent health and hope you are the same.”

But as she explains to her sad friend Cecilia, clearing out belongings towards the end of life isn’t so easy:

“The little treasures you try to give young people just make them uncomfortable – more and more polite and more and more uncomfortable. Have you noticed that?

You know what? There’s now a flea market on Sandvik Square every Sat and Sun. What do you think of that? People can wander around and find stuff for themselves and no one has to feel ill at ease or grateful. Brilliant idea.”

I could have read a whole book of Klara’s letters, she was such a forceful joy. Alas, I had to make do with just ten pages.

I highly recommend both these collections. Jansson has a perfect understanding of the short story form and doesn’t waste a word. They are precisely written yet never feel lacking; each is story is fully realised in itself. Concision is never at the expense of depth or insight.

To end, I didn’t know the Moomins had a YouTube channel! As well as their own adventures they’ve uploaded this lovely clip about the tradition of Tove’s birthday flower wreath:

“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.

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.