twentieth century novels

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” (George Orwell)

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This is my second contribution to the 1937 Club, running all week and hosted by Kaggsy at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book.

I’ve really enjoyed the Molly Keane novels I’ve read, but I think The Rising Tide might be my favourite of them all. There’s lots here that is familiar to readers of Keane’s work: Irish upper classes, Gothic Big Houses, controlling matriarchs, a stomach-churning obsession with bloodsports… but the edges were softened a bit here. The matriarchs were horribly believable yet not skirting quite as close to Gothic caricature as some of her creations; the bloodsports were referenced frequently but from the point of view of two people who hated them; snobbery was less to the fore.  Keane’s astute characterisation and observational skills were as sharp as ever and the descriptive writing – especially regarding clothes and gardens – absolutely sumptuous.

The Rising Tide opens at the start of the last century. The big house is Garonlea, and Lady Charlotte French-McGrath rules over it in a constant display of her mean spirit. Her style has all the fuss and overdecoration of the Victorian period, but without any generosity:

“No lighting or heating. Tepid bathwater at best. All the wallpaper dark green or dark red. Festoons of red velvet curtains, tassels, fringes. In this room seventeen ‘occasional’ tables beside big ones and a vase of flowers on each one.”

Charlotte’s devoted husband Ambrose really just wants to be left to walk in his woods. They have four young daughters out in society: Muriel, Enid, Violet and Diana, as well as an heir in their son Desmond.

“Really, there was nothing else to be done except the things that Lady Charlotte did and she did them with wrath and speed and efficiency and throughout showed an unflinching social front.”

Things change when Desmond brings his glittering, selfish fiancée Cynthia to Garonlea:

“‘Muriel, my dear, you may take Cynthia up to her room.’

‘Yes, I’m rather a dirty girl, I think,’ said Cynthia, blinking like a cat, gold cat in the warm light room where white chrysanthemums smelt antiseptically and a majestic silver tea service glittered on an elaborately clothed table.”

Cynthia charms everyone, especially youngest daughter Diana. Cynthia likes to be charming and she likes to be adored by all. Hence, her and Lady Charlotte’s relationship is doomed from the start, and as awful as Lady Charlotte is, Cynthia is no better. She is only concerned with making people worship her and has no interest in them beyond that:

“She was always thrilled by it [the worship] and it called out at moments a dramatic feeling of goodness and humanity in her, rather an imitation sensation perhaps and one that never lasted long enough to cause her any serious personal inconvenience.”

Diana, the youngest and most rebellious of the sisters, dislikes men, enjoys it when the fashion changes so she can cut her hair, wears trousers and she adores Cynthia. But Keane is never condescending or stereotyping towards Diana and the portrait is subtle. I read Diana’s attachment as romantic, but it isn’t possessive and in fact this could easily be my twenty-first century reading of an intense chaste attachment. (There’s another character who is definitely gay, and again he is not judged for this.) Later, Keane points out that Diana, in being left to tend her gardens and live a useful life, becomes the happiest of all the sisters, rather than pitiable or bitter for remaining unmarried.

One reservation Diana has regarding her beloved Cynthia is the treatment of her children. Simon and Susan are very different to their mother and she is cruel to them, forcing them into pursuits they find terrifying and otherwise utterly unconcerned with their lives:

“Cynthia was rather impersonal about the children. If they had not had decorative value and if they had not excited Desmond so much, she would have had very little to do with them. Perhaps when they were older and started riding they would be more interesting.”

“Why could they not love hunting and dogs and ratting and badger digging and their ponies, as all right-minded children should, instead of having to be compelled and encouraged to take their parts in these sports and pleasures?”

Yet Keane demonstrates sympathy for Cynthia too. It’s a small SPOILER to say that Desmond dies in World War I, and Cynthia did truly love him. This isn’t apparent to the rest of her family in her behaviour, as she manages her grief by throwing herself into the role of society hostess. She is made for this, as are the 1920s. As she parties, drinks to excess and has affairs, very few recognise the deep pain she is running from:

“If she could fill the present moment so that she need not look before or behind it, she found that she had some ease and quietness of mind. Hunting she thought was best, but what really made her nearest to forgetting was her perpetual and indefeatable success with the men.”

“All the rest of her life was a dangerous shell of pretence, a thin shell against her ear full of screaming whispers.”

This makes Cynthia understandable, but not any more likable. She is entirely selfish and there is no kindness in her. After the death of Lady Charlotte, she is mistress of Garonlea and Diana lives with her. Cynthia knows the trauma experienced by Diana within the walls of the house but does not make any allowances for her, as this would not be convenient.

“It was a pity that all these changes at Garonlea altered it so little for Diana. To her Garonlea was more itself than it had been before Cynthia had tore down its red wallpapers and hurled the unwanted ancestors into attics with their faces to the wall […] The spirit and power of Garonlea still lived with a tenfold strength. It was as if it stored and reserved its power for a future day. Quite literally the breath of such places, the strong camphor-filled breath, on the still laden air of an outdoor place thick with old childish memories filled Diana with hatred and a tremendous consciousness of things as they had been at Garonlea all her life till now.”

As the above paragraph shows, Keane makes Garonlea its own character too. It is a looming, energy-sapping, Gothic presence: “The ruthless benignancy of Garonlea and all that Garonlea stood for. It would always be the same, it always had been.”

This is such a long post and there’s loads I haven’t mentioned! Not least the descriptive writing. Details of clothes are used to emphasise the differences between the generations: the multi-layered, highly scaffolded dresses of the sisters, in contrast to the looser styles of the Bright Young Things who follow them. Keane’s love of gardening is apparent too, in detailed descriptions of the grounds:

“Near the house sunlight poured on flat grass and on groups of blue hydrangeas and thickets of red-hot pokers. It lay the length of the opened bank of the valley as hotly as in July. Black cattle standing close together in a ring of chestnut trees looked as if they were all carved from the same block and not yet unjoined from it. There was a shaken air of blue where the half turned bracken and the woods sloped down and up.”

The Rising Tide is such a rich novel and there’s so much to enjoy. Keane’s characterisation is sharp but never cruel, and her understanding of the societal changes that occurred in the first third of the twentieth century is acute. To those of you who have made it this far, thank you for sticking with me 😀

To end, a 1930s-style party tune on a Gothic theme, hopefully Cynthia would approve:

“In the humble nutmeg, lies the power to change destinies” (Giles Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg)

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When Kaggsy at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book announced the 1937 Club reading event, I went scuttling off to the TBR and found seven lovely books to read:

So my plan is to post on one book a day as this wonderful event is running all week. However, various bloggers suggestions of what to read in the meantime made me realise I’d missed some, so my best laid plans may well change! The start of the week is sorted, but the end of week could well be subject to alteration 😀

Today I’m starting with Margery Sharp, whom I adore, so I’m delighted that the 1937 Club has prompted me to pick up The Nutmeg Tree.

Sharp’s insightful but gentle, humane comedic tone is perfectly realised in Julia, a woman we meet taking a bath for as long as it takes the bailiffs to leave. Once they do, she hurriedly heads off to France at the behest of her daughter Susan, whom she hasn’t seen since she was a toddler.

“Those nineteen months of being young Mrs Packett had exhausted her supply of maternal affection; and she was also aware that for a young child the life at Barton was far more suitable than the life she herself looked forward to, in Town. She hadn’t yet any definite plans about it, but she hoped and trusted that it would be very unsuitable indeed.”

Susan has been raised by her paternal grandparents after her father died in World War I. She is a Proper Young Lady, while Julia has led a ramshackle life, entirely of her choosing. Now Susan wants to get married, her grandmother doesn’t approve, and Susan has called in Julia for reinforcements.

She arrives in France having become semi-engaged to an attractive trapeze artist on the way there. Julia is completely delightful and while she doesn’t always behave honourably, she does behave warmly. She understands and enjoys people. Her daughter is almost the polar opposite:

“Julia, who could get intimate with a trapeze artist after five minutes conversation – who was intimate with the salesman after buying a pair of shoes – had talked for an hour to her own daughter, about the girl’s own father and lover, without the least intimacy at all.”

As with The Stone of Chastity, I was struck by Sharp’s liberal attitude towards sex. As far as I know she wasn’t a controversial author, so maybe attitudes like this were more prevalent in the 1930s than I’ve allowed for:

“If she took lovers more freely than most women it was largely because she could not bear to see men sad when it was so easy to make them happy. Her sensuousness was half compassion”

However, safe to say Susan would not share that view. She is, her mother realises, “a prig”. “Strong on logic, weak on human nature.” Susan is entirely inflexible. It becomes apparent that no-one particularly likes her, though she is loved and admired. Sharp is too subtle to demonise Susan though, or make her a villain. She is a not an unpleasant person, but just someone who is better suited to ideas and projects than to the realities of human society and all its complexities.

“‘It takes all sorts to make a world,’ thought Julia. But it was no use saying that to Susan.”

Meanwhile, Susan’s lover Bryan is, Julia realises, more like Julia herself. Convinced he will make Susan very unhappy, she wonders how on earth to maintain her fragile reconciliation with her daughter while not encouraging the match. As if this weren’t enough to contend with, another love interest arrives for Julia…

Sharp has all this play out with great comic pacing. I enjoyed the broader running jokes, whereby her mother-in-law Mrs Packett is convinced Julia owns a cake-shop despite absolutely no evidence of this, and proceeds with organising an entire business plan; and Julia’s continued attempts to impress people and pretend she is other than she is, by reading The Forsythe Saga – no-one is fooled and no-one cares.

The older Mrs Packett is only a secondary character, but I thought she was wonderful and wished Sharp had given her a novel to herself:

“It seemed to her more likely that her mother-in-law was of the type, not rare among Englishwomen, in whom full individuality blossoms only with age: one of those who, at sixty-one, suddenly startle their relatives by going up in aeroplanes or by marrying their chauffeurs.”

The Nutmeg Tree is not a fluffy read though. There’s a strong theme around choices – or lack thereof – for single women without money.  Julia has moments of real despair, Bryan reveals a really quite vicious side to himself, and I was very struck by this paragraph about dating soldiers home on leave from the war:

“You could be dining out with a man, having a perfectly lovely time, and suddenly across the room he would catch another man’s eye, or a man would pause by your table, and all at once they were somewhere else and you were left behind. It had seemed as if war were a sort of fourth dimension, into which they slipped back without even noticing, even out of your arms… so you never really knew them”

The Nutmeg Tree is a wonderful character study set within a well-paced comedy. In Julia, Sharp has created a well-rounded, wholly believable chancer, who the reader roots for because she is entirely without malice. Margery Sharp really is a joy.

To end, The Nutmeg Tree was adapted as Julia Misbehaves in 1948. Has anyone seen it? From the trailer it looks like it could be fun:

“All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.” (Anthony Powell)

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It’s month three in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

Either I’m getting used to Powell’s syntax, or as he developed as a writer he found a fondness for full stops, because I found The Acceptance World (1955) had a much more comprehensible prose style than its two predecessors.

As usual Powell doesn’t explicitly state when the story is set, but a reference early on to “the country’s abandonment of the Gold Standard at about this time” means it starts around 1931. Economics feature heavily in The Acceptance World and the privileged circles Nick moves in are not entirely immune. There are frequent references to “the slump” taking a toll. Unfortunately political satire never seems to date;

“’Intelligence isn’t everything,’ I said, trying to pass the matter off lightly. ‘Look at the people in the Cabinet.’”

Schoolfriends and university friends reappear: Templer, Widmerpool, Stringham and Manners. The title is taken from recurring talisman/character Widmerpool’s new job. Templer tells Nick “’Widmerpool is joining the Acceptance World. […] he is going to become a bill-broker.’” This work, like most City work, makes absolutely no logical sense and reaps large financial rewards. Essentially Widmerpool accepts the transitory debts of companies and takes them on based on their reputation. Later in the novel Nick sees this principal applying more widely:

“The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element – happiness, for example – is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill. Sometimes the goods are delivered, even a small profit made; sometimes the goods are not delivered, and disaster follows; sometimes the goods are delivered, but the value of the currency is changed. Besides in another sense, the whole world is the Acceptance World as one approaches thirty; at least some illusions are discarded. The mere fact of still existing as a human being proved that.”

The tone felt more sombre in this volume. Having spent time with Nick through his schooldays and at debutante parties in the first two volumes, he is now nearing thirty. Europe’s economic and political situation, while not given lengthy consideration, is creeping into everyday life. On a smaller scale, there are divorces, disillusionment and alcoholism amongst his peer group. If this sounds too depressing, Powell’s satire keeps a sharp, humorous eye on proceedings, such as Stringham’s divorce:

“Soon after the decree had been made absolute, Peggy married a cousin, rather older than herself, and went to live in Yorkshire, where her husband possessed a large house, noted in books of authentically recorded ghost stories for being rather badly haunted.”

He also sets a humorous tone from the beginning, detailing a meeting with his Uncle Giles in an unprepossessing Bayswater hotel:

 “He spoke slowly, as if, after much thought, he had chosen me from an immense number of other nephews to show her at least one good example of what he was forced to endure in the way of relatives.”

The ‘her’ in quote above is Mrs Erdleigh, a dreamy woman who reads cards: “She seemed hardly to take in these trivialities, though she smiled all the while, quietly, almost rapturously, rather as if she were enjoying a warm bath after a trying day shopping.”

The novel expands on Nick’s circumstances of work a bit further, although it remains all a bit vague. He has published a novel but he says very little about it:

“‘I liked your first,’ said Quiggin.

 He conveyed by these words a note of warning that, in spite of his modified approval, things must not go too far where books were concerned.”

There is also consideration of women, as Nick begins an affair with an old friend. His observations are callow generalisations, but I don’t think the reader is supposed to find Nick particularly insightful or wise in this regard. In contrast, his observations about men are astute, from the comic summation:

“Like most men of his temperament, he held, on the whole, rather strict views regarding other people’s morals. […] In any case he was not greatly interested in such things unless himself involved.”

To a thoughtful consideration of those slightly older than him affected by the previous war:

“He seemed still young, a person like oneself; and yet at the same time his appearance and manner proclaimed that he had had time to live at least a few years of his grown-up life before the outbreak of war in 1914. Once I had thought of those who had known the epoch of my own childhood as ‘older people’. Then I found there existed people like Umfraville who seemed somehow to span the gap. They partook of both eras, specially forming the tone of the post war years; much more so, indeed, than the younger people. Most of them, like Umfraville, were melancholy; perhaps from the strain of living simultaneously in two different historical periods.”

I really enjoyed The Acceptance World and there’s so much I haven’t covered here. I’m starting to find returning to the sequence like sinking into a big squashy chair. Although it’s not a comfort read, Powell’s writing, his comedy and insights, and the (now) familiar world he creates are a joy to return to.

I’m also beginning to really understand the complexity and subtlety of what Powell is doing in A Dance to the Music of Time. His style is so deceptive; he seems to be writing about nothing while in fact he’s writing about everything:

“I began to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things observed.”

To end, in honour of Mrs Erdleigh:

“The business of her life was to get her daughters married.” (Jane Austen)

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It’s month two in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. It was published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s. The sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

After reading A Question of Upbringing in January, I think I’ve adapted to Powell’s unusual prose style with long, meandering sentences. I had to remind myself in A Buyer’s Market (1952) that it was likely that very little was going to happen. Once I’d readjusted to the lack of plot, the style made more sense. It has the feel of extended reminiscences, with the reader listening in.

In A Buyer’s Market, Nick has left university and is working for a publishing house focussed on art books. That is about as much as we hear of his career, as the novel is concerned with the social life of the upper classes and the parties that form part of the season for debutantes. The time isn’t specified but it seems to be around the late 1920s.

Sometimes I joke with my mother that she gave birth 77 years too late. That, had I been born in 1900, it would have worked perfectly for me in terms of an adulthood in the era of my tastes in books, films, fashion, decor and architecture. But, as I don’t fancy being poor before the invention of the NHS, I’d have to be born into much richer circumstances and become a flapper. Well, A Buyer’s Market thoroughly disabused me of that notion. Goodness me, the round of parties seemed unutterably tedious. It says something for Powell’s writing that the novel wasn’t tedious at all.

The novel begins, after a brief flashback scene, with Nick attending a dinner party at Lady Walpole-Wilson’s:

“her comparative incapacity to control her own dinner parties, at which she was almost always especially discomposed, seemed to me a kind of mute personal protest against circumstances – in the shape of her husband’s retirement – having deprived her of the splendours, such as they were, of that position in life owed to her statuesque presence; for in those days I took a highly romantic view, not only of love, but also of such things as politics and government: supposing, for example, that eccentricity and ineptitude were unknown in circles where they might, in fact, be regarded – at least insofar as the official entertaining of all countries is concerned – almost as the rule rather than the exception.”

(Please note the quote above is one sentence!)

At this point Nick believes he is in love with Barbara Goring, but it is when she plays a prank on Nick’s old Eton associate Widmerpool, that he rapidly changes his mind. This is not through sympathy for Widmerpool to whom he still has ambivalent feelings, but there remain hints at the greater role he will play in Nick’s life:

“I did not, however, as yet see him as one of those symbolic figures, of whom most people possess at least one example, if not more, round whom the past and the future have a way of assembling.”

Nick and Widmerpool are having coffee at a street stand when they bump into Mr Deacon, an old artist friend of Nick’s parents, who is touting  disarmament pamphlets with a young woman, Gypsy Jones. Nick’s old schoolfriend Stringham arrives, and this unlikely quintet go to a second party at Mrs Andriadis’ – a more bohemian affair than the dinner, but one where Nick identifies  “almost exactly the same chilly undercurrent of conflict”.

If the cynicism wasn’t apparent enough in this volume’s title, Powell makes his feelings abundantly clear. The parties of this circuit are not joyful affairs, they are occasions where everyone wants something: spouses, social advancement, career advancement, money.

“Everyone used to say that dances bored them; especially those young men – with the honourable exception of Archie Gilbert – who never failed to respond to an invitation, and stayed, night after night, to the bitter end. Such complaints were made rather in the spirit of people who grumble at the inconvenience they suffer from others falling in love with them.”

It all sounds a bit desperate and boring.

Later in the novel Nick attends a party at Sir Magnus Donner’s castle, where many of the characters from the party appear again. It is a small social set but not an intimate one. Sir Magnus seems particularly unlikable and even sinister. One of my favourite passages was Nick’s spiky assessment of his host:

“Sir Magnus himself did not talk much, save intermittently to express some general opinion. His words, wafted during a comparative silence to the father end of the table, would have suggested on the lips of a lesser man processes of thought of a banality so painful – of such profound and arid depths, in which neither humour, nor imagination, nor indeed, any form of human understanding could be thought to play the smallest part – that I almost supposed him to be speaking ironically, or teasing his guests by acting the part of a bore in a drawing room comedy. I was far from understanding that the capacity of men interested in power is not necessarily expressed in the brilliance of their conversation.”

I mentioned when reading A Question of Upbringing that it was the satire that saved the novel for me and it is the same here. I doubt Anthony Powell saw himself as a subversive but he definitely has an assessing gaze regarding the privileged upper classes. I also thought it was notable what he doesn’t comment on. The need for an abortion is detailed but not judged, gay male characters have their sexuality mentioned in passing but again not judged. Both these were still illegal in the UK when this novel was published.

Although the theme of the novel is about commodification and how “Human life is lived largely at surface level”, I did feel the reader had a growing intimacy with Nick. Barely present in his own story in the first volume, in A Buyer’s Market Nick reported more of his own speech, motivations and feelings. This strengthened the storytelling and I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next.

To end, after reading this novel, not even Liza can persuade me to come to the debutante’s ball:

“Some things I cannot see until I write about them.” (Yuko Tsushima)

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I wasn’t planning on joining in Japanese Literature challenge 17 hosted by Meredith at Dolce Bellezza other than enjoying other bloggers wonderful posts. However this enthusiastic post by Marina Sofia on Tsushima Yūko’s Territory of Light meant I immediately started rooting through the TBR to find Child of Fortune (1978, transl. Geraldine Harcourt 1983), which I knew I had buried somewhere…

This is the first of her novels I’ve read and on the strength of this I definitely want to read more. Novella length, it tells the story of Kōko, a 36-year-old single mother to eleven-year-old Kayako. Told in the third person from Kōko’s perspective, it is a compelling examination of one woman’s inner world and her barely articulated resistance to the expectations placed on her.

Early in the novel, Kōko suspects she is pregnant. She is ambivalent about Osada, the father, as she is about most things. But gradually she realises that she wants to keep the child:

“Maybe she was reaching an age when it was senseless to want a fatherless child; but, precisely because of her age, she didn’t want to make a choice that she would regret till the day she died. Lately she was more convinced than ever that there was no point in worrying about what people thought. She would soon be thirty-seven. The only person watching Kōko at thirty-seven was Kōko. When this obvious fact finally came home to her it was still a surprise – what a very lonely fact it was!”

Geraldine Harcourt’s informative introduction explains that pregnancy at that age in Japan around this time could still be viewed as shameful even within marriage, so Kōko’s decision is doubly transgressive.

Kōko is an intriguing character, as she lives an unconventional life which places her in opposition to so many, by barely doing anything. Her lack of decision-making is an act of quiet but determined resistance.

Her sister Shoko is much more conventional and doesn’t approve; Kōko’s daughter Kayako much prefers to spend time with her more affluent, conformist aunt. Kōko tries to explain to Shoko:

“No, that’s not it – don’t think I’ve liked using choosing a different world from other people. I know I’ve been stubborn – but not about Kayako alone. All my life, though I often haven’t known which way to turn, I have managed to make choices of my own. I don’t know if they were right or wrong. I don’t think anyone can say that.”

But really she hasn’t made that many choices. She married because of pregnancy; husband Hatanaka organised the divorce years later, unsurprisingly as Kōko didn’t love him, still holding a candle for her lover Doi. She doesn’t enjoy her job teaching piano, but she also takes no steps to do anything else. She doesn’t take great care of herself and she doesn’t have many friends or interests.

Two driving forces in her life are her love for her brother, who died many years earlier, and sexual desire. The latter has led to her current predicament, the former suggests one reason that may be contributing to her lack of attachments.

“A little over a year ago, Kōko had understood something for the first time: the in the end she had let everything slip away from her, that in reality she hadn’t a single resource. It was an alarming discovery.”

Her lack of attachment includes reality – we are taken into Kōko’s dreams and daydreams, woven in seamlessly but disconcertingly.  As we move back and forth in time, learning about Kōko’s childhood, marriage, griefs and pains, Tsushima builds a picture of a woman who may not be completely likable but who is recognisably human and flawed, and muddling through the best way she knows how.

I was really rooting for Kōko to find a more articulate agency, and the penultimate scene was unbearably tense in this regard. Child of Fortune is never didactic yet absolutely achieves a compelling portrait of a woman fighting for her life, against immense societal pressure.   

“Kōko was shaken by the realisation that even now, more than twenty years later, she still lacked any compelling reason to go on living. And by the fact that the will to live was still there.”

To end, Kōko has fond memories of a visit to Karuizawa, which does look lovely:

PS When I was looking for a title quote for this post, I found this great conversation between Tsushima and Annie Ernaux.

“Books do furnish a room.” (Anthony Powell)

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I’ve decided that 2024 will be the year of a reading project I’ve been considering for a while – a book per month throughout the year from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

What’s that you say? I have half-completed reading projects still languishing? I have a spiralling TBR that doesn’t need 12 more books added to it? Be gone! You are clearly a pragmatist and such attitudes have no place in my reading life 😀

In the first novel, A Question of Upbringing (1951), we follow Nick Jenkins from his school days at a thinly-disguised Eton to his university days at a thinly-disguised Balliol College, Oxford. Starting at School, we meet Jenkins’ friends Stringham and Templer, and hear of their frustrations with housemaster Le Bas.

“’He started life as a poet,’ Stringham said. ‘Did you know that? Years ago, after coming back from a holiday in Greece, he wrote some things he thought were frightfully good. He showed them to someone or other who pointed out that, as a matter of fact, they were frightfully bad. Le Bas never got over it.’

‘I can’t imagine anything more appalling than a poem by Le Bas,’ said Templer, ‘though I’m surprised he doesn’t make his pupils learn them.’

‘Who did he show them to?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Stringham. ‘Henry James, or Robert Louis Stevenson, or someone like that.’”

The boys are varying degrees of privileged, from uber-wealthy to moderately wealthy, from landed gentry to new money. The societal hierarchies are complex and imperfectly understood, even by those in their midst:

“Clearly some complicated process of sorting out was in progress among those who surrounded me: though only years later did I become aware of how early such voluntary segregations begin to develop; and of how they continue throughout life.”

In theory I have limited patience for such stories, after the enormous damage Eton-educated men and their cronies have done in UK politics. Yet I found myself enjoying A Question of Upbringing. I think because Powell doesn’t suggest the superiority of anyone he’s writing about or the systems in place, casting a satirical eye over it all.

For example, when Nick begins his travels, he finds himself hopelessly ill-equipped to comprehend any culture beyond his own:

“I had seen a provincial company perform The Doll’s House not many months before, and felt, with what I now see to have been quite inadmissible complacency, that I knew all about Ibsen’s countrymen.”

It is during these travels that he meets Widmerpool again, a boy somewhat disregarded as figure of fun at school, who shows himself to be more astute than Nick and the other pupils allowed for.

“Later in life, I learned that many things one may require have to be weighed against one’s dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction.”

Nothing of huge significance seemingly happens in A Question of Upbringing, but it wouldn’t surprise me if events somehow cast a long shadow in later volumes. As a standalone novel, Powell keeps the narrative compelling by picking out certain moments and impressions, rather than plodding through years with equal weighting. It’s a short novel, only 223 pages in my edition and this length worked well – satisfying but also with a sense of setting the scene for later novels.

It took me a while to adjust to Powell’s dense writing style; he likes long sentences of several clauses. Once I had got used to this though, I found myself swept along.

“The evening was decidedly cool, and rain was half-heartedly falling. I knew now that this parting was one of those final things that happen, recurrently, as time passes: until at last they may be recognised fairly easily as the close of a period. This was the last I should see of Stringham for a long time. The path had suddenly forked. With regret, I accepted the inevitability of circumstance. Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.”

Nick is an enigmatic narrator. In this first volume he describes many people and events, observes whole scenes, without appearing to have spoken or acted himself at all. We learn very little about him. I found myself wondering why Powell had opted for an omnipresent narrator over an omniscient one, when Nick barely seems present. But that’s not a criticism, just what seemed a curious choice. Maybe Nick will emerge from his own story in the subsequent volumes. I’m looking forward to finding out.

To end, a dance from the 1950s, looking back to the 1920s:

“Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow.” (Wassily Kandinsky)

/ madamebibilophile / 23 Comments

This is my contribution to Dean Street December hosted by Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running, and Working From Home. Tom Tiddler’s Ground by the delightfully named Ursula Orange (1941) is part of their Furrowed Middlebrow imprint and I thought it was an absolute joy.

It tells the story of Constance Smith and her childhood friend Caroline Cameron, who find themselves living together again in the early days of World War II. Caroline is urbane and worldly, leaving behind her life in London with her husband John. She is entirely self-focussed and amoral, but also quite caring regarding people. Despite her shortcomings, I really liked her.

Constance could not be more different. We are introduced to her early on through the thoughts of the billeting officer who is trying to persuade people in the quiet village of Chesterford to take evacuees:

“Mrs Latchford grimaced and lit a cigarette. A thoroughly unenviable job altogether, and she felt she deserved a few minutes respite with nice, schoolgirlish, foolish Constance Smith. Foolish? Well, of course, it always looked a little foolish to see a woman of over thirty behaving like an enthusiastic bride, even after two years of marriage. But apart from that and her volubility and her poppings out and her nippings in and all her silly mannerisms, was Constance at all foolish? Certainly she handled the relations-in-law-in-the-village situation well, or rather did not handle it at all, but accepted it so naturally and pleasantly that she might really be said to be on the best of terms with her sister-in-law, Mary Hodges, the local greengrocer’s wife.”

Her husband Alfred is an utterly self-centred snob, intent on social climbing and ashamed of his sister. He married well-to-do Constance for social advancement and he doesn’t love her. Caroline sees this clearly on arrival in the village with her daughter Margeurite.

The other evacuee is Mrs Gossage, who seems entirely disinterested in everyone, including her baby son Norman.  

We follow this unlikely group of housemates as they adjust to their much-changed living arrangements. The story moves between the characters but is told primarily from Caroline’s point of view, which I thought worked well. She has good insights into other people and is entirely clear-sighted about herself too:

“There was a certain note in her voice that led Caroline to suspect that Lavinia belonged to that large class of people who find children sweet, but rather prefer they should go and be sweet upstairs in the nursery. It was an attitude she entirely sympathised with and absolutely hated people for.”

Constance as narrator would be far too guileless to carry the reader along. And of course, Caroline’s arrival in the village offers an outsider’s view on the characters and various intrigues. But what is lovely too, is Caroline’s changing attitude towards the village. Initially she is greatly amused by everyone, but as time moves on she starts to see them as real people, her “strange lapses into sincerity” possibly becoming longer lasting. This isn’t a trite city-girl-learns-the-true-value-of-Things-when-forced-into-small-town-life tale however. Orange is not at all sentimental about people:

“Caroline, looking at the expression on Mary’s face, marvelled at the extraordinary cruelty of the thoroughly respectable woman.”

“There was no doubt Constance, in her misery, was very pathetic. There was no doubt she was also rather irritating.”

But there’s not a bitter tone either. I found the characters recognisable and portrayed with human understanding. Caroline would be rather a controversial figure for the time, but Orange doesn’t judge her.

“It’s my red finger-nails that put the idea of asking me into her head, I’m sure.”

I liked the fact that Caroline didn’t overly judge herself, which would seem somehow hypocritical, but she does recognise that her actions hurt people, which she regrets.

There are serious concerns in Tom Tiddler’s Ground; adultery, bigamy, child neglect and lack of choices for women. Somehow Orange balances that with a knowing humour without belittling the issues at all.

My favourite character was George, Constance’s gentle, drifting brother:

“What could you do with a man who loved women, who loved domestic life, but who (according to Constance) had never seemed to want to marry anyone in particular? A man who obviously adored other people’s children, but who had none of his own? A man who had plenty of personality and probably (under all that indolence) considerable abilities, but who had never settled any profession or career? The only answer was – nothing, you could do nothing with him. And […] that was, of course, what George preferred. Caroline liked him enormously.”

We learn more about George’s background, who to my twenty-first century eyes had PTSD from World War I. Orange builds to a satisfying denouement, tying up many characters pasts with the present in a way that promises a better future, despite the war.

I really loved Tom Tiddler’s Ground, and got very excited about the thought of exploring Ursula Orange further, thinking the humour and characterisation made her another Margery Sharp. However, Stacy Marking’s excellent introduction to this edition explains the publishers took exception to Caroline as a character, and so she adjusted her style for later books, which also contained more snobbery (somewhat in evidence here but not overly stressed – Mrs Gossage is definitely treated with condescension, but also compassion). If anyone has read any other novels by Ursula Orange I’d love to know how you found them, especially as DSP publish some other titles.

“‘I suppose we ought to be thinking about Christmas,’ said Constance, a few days later. Everybody became conscious of a very strong disinclination to think about anything of the sort.”

To end, it’s a time of year when Nat King Cole is on heavy rotation, and quite right too. Here he is singing about orange (sort of 😉 )

“Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.” (Georges Simenon)

/ madamebibilophile / 22 Comments

November is the month of many reading events, and I definitely won’t manage them all, but I’m starting with Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and BookishBeck.

I’m taking this as a good opportunity to carry on with my much-neglected Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century reading challenge, reading Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon (1930, transl. David Bellos 2013) which is No.84 in the list.

This was Maigret’s first outing and Simenon clearly had a very thorough understanding of his policeman from the start. Like many Maigret stories it is novella length, coming in at 162 pages in my English translation.

“Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn’t have a moustache and he didn’t wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands.

But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man. Iron muscle shaped his jacket sleeves and quickly wore through knew trousers. He had a way of imposing himself just by standing there. His assertive presence had often irked many of his own colleagues.”

In this first story, Maigret is in pursuit of a thief and conman, Pietr the Latvian, who may not even be from Latvia. (I was anticipating some xenophobia, which there wasn’t in the novel, but be warned there is Antisemitism at points.)

There is intelligence that Pietr has travelled to Paris from the Netherlands and Maigret is tasked with apprehending him. At the Gare du Nord he thinks he spots Pietr, but is then called to a train to identify the body of a man who also matches the description.

Following the first man takes Maigret into the world of well-heeled Parisian hotels:

“Maigret persisted in being a big black unmoving stain amidst the gilding, the chandeliers, the comings and goings of silk evening gowns, fur coats and perfumed, sparkling silhouettes.”

Things become more complex as Maigret follows various leads around the first man. His unshowy, procedural approach is evident from the start as he doggedly pursues evidence throughout Paris and to Fécamp at the coast. The conman knows Maigret is closing in and the danger grows.

I’ve not read all the Maigrets as there are at least eleventy million of them, but I would say from my limited knowledge that this isn’t the strongest. For such a short novel, it is repetitive at times and I wonder if this is because it was published firstly as a serial. In that format the repetitions would work well, but in the novel they weakened the story and it could have done with an edit with the new format in mind.

However, there is still so much to enjoy. The evocation of Paris, the character of Maigret and the novella length make this a quick, entertaining read. Simenon’s affection for his creation is evident and this makes his Detective Chief Inspector so appealing.

“The Latvian was on a tightrope and still putting on a show of balance. In response to Maigret’s pipe he lit a cigar.”

“For me writing is an act of the will.” (Elizabeth Jolley)

/ madamebibilophile / 23 Comments

I’ve been meaning to read Elizabeth Jolley for ages so I’m pleased to be finishing AusReading Month 2023 hosted by Brona at This Reading Life with one of her novellas.

Milk and Honey (1984) has quite a Gothic feel to it, so it’s worked out well with Hallowe’en too…

The story is narrated by Jacob, who at the beginning of the novella is an unhappy, unfulfilled door-to-door salesman with an injured hand.

“Sometimes, after my cup of real coffee in the Beach Hotel, I sat outside on the small, sandy cliffs, looking down onto the sea as it came up in long, slow waves to the rocks and sunk sighing back down the beach, and I felt the profound melancholy that all my life has come over me from time to time. It was the melancholy of dark trees standing alone and the quiet sadness of the colours of the land, dark greens and browns and the sand subdued. As I sat, the colours deepened, tawny, dun coloured blending beneath the low grey sky. And from somewhere hidden, the sun lit up the sea.”

We then go back in time to when Jacob was a teenager and sent by his father to live with the Heimbachs so he can be tutored in the cello by Leopold.  The widowed tutor adores Jacob, calling him ‘Prince’, but his sisters Tante Rosa and Aunt Heloise may be more ambivalent. Certainly Jacob’s lauded genius may not be as evident as Leopold proclaims. But Jacob does play with feeling:

“When I played the cello and the cello hesitated, poised on a single note so pure and restrained and lovely, I closed my eyes with an exquisite love of the cello. I was in love with the cello.”

Also in the house are Leopold’s children. His daughter Louise is a romantic interest for Jacob, and there is his son Waldemar who has unspecified disabilities. The household is insular and claustrophobic, but Jacob willingly relinquishes external experiences:

“I had no wish to be free. I preferred not to go to school, and, though the house and garden were open to the street, I never went out into the street. I read and studied and lived in the household which seemed to contain all in the way of books and musical instruments and teachers I could ever need.”

For the reader though, the household is deeply unsettling. We never really know what anyone’s motivations, views or plans are. Jacob is self-focussed and so as a narrator he doesn’t tell us. We piece together certain aspects of the wider life of the household – I guessed an unpleasant twist towards the end – but so much is left unspecified.

Conspiracies abound in this small household. A major decision is taken early in the novel that is traumatising for Jacob but we’re not completely sure why such action is taken. Jacob is having an affair but it seems entirely likely that everyone knows about it. A wedding ceremony is sprung on him, and yet everyone seems to think this is completely acceptable:

“But even after the surprise celebration of our engagement, on the day of my inheritance, the idea of marriage had seemed remote, something vague, talked about in laughter while eating apples and trying on rings made from human hair, something looked forward to from childhood but, like a disease experienced by adults, never reached.”

Milk and Honey is an odd novel and at times I wasn’t sure it was for me. There was so much that was unexplained that it could be entirely discombobulating, and Jacob was so oblivious and callow I wasn’t sure he could carry me through. I’m glad I persevered though, and I would definitely be interested to read more by Jolley. From this, I would say she writes about nature beautifully and is expert in creating an unsettling, memorable atmosphere.

You can read Lisa’s excellent review of Milk and Honey here.

To end, a bit of a departure from my usual 80s cheese – I always find Elgar’s cello concerto in E minor so moving (and this is with the City of Birmingham symphony orchestra, which was Elizabeth Jolley’s place of birth before she emigrated to Australia – see what I did there? 😀 ):

“Borderline, feels like I’m going to lose my mind.” (Madonna)

/ madamebibilophile / 20 Comments

Somehow I’ve accumulated several Janette Turner Hospital books in the TBR, without ever managing to get round to reading any of them. So thank goodness for AusReading Month 2023 hosted by Brona at This Reading Life which finally got me to pick one up!

Borderline is JTH’s third novel, published in 1985. The blurb on the back describes it as a metaphysical thriller, but I don’t think that’s a helpful description. There are thriller elements but what JTH is more concerned with is the unreliable narratives we tell ourselves and others; how we can love those who remain so unknown to us; and the unpredictability of all our lives that can change in an instant. These themes don’t lend themselves to definite resolutions, so those seeking a thriller will be disappointed.

However, if you’re happy to go along with an exploration of these ideas that ends without any neat answers, there’s a lot to enjoy in Borderline.

The narrator is Jean-Marc, a man who has always had a slightly Oedipal relationship with his father’s girlfriend, Felicity. Seymour aka Old Volcano, was an artist much older than Felicity, who was nearer in age to her stepson.

“When I was five, my father was already famous and my mother was mostly distraught. Later she escaped. She made a quantum leap into banality. Which is the true secret of happiness – a second marriage, a very ordinary life, other children. Naturally she does not care to see me, a revenant from that earlier bad time, and I do not blame her at all.”

Felicity and Seymour’s relationship inevitably ends, and Felicity becomes a successful art dealer. She is returning from a trip when, at a border crossing between the United States and Canada, she makes the impulsive decision to smuggle Dolores Marquez, a refugee from El Salvador, with the help of a man called Gus.

Gus’ full name is Augustine, he’s a salesman who is routinely unfaithful to his wife. Felicity calls Dolores La Magdalena after a painting. People in this novel have different names, different roles, splintered lives. They disappear and no-one knows where to begin looking for them.

Gus’ daughter Kathleen turns up at Jean-Marc’s house, and their relationship seems to almost transgress boundaries, but not quite. As they try and locate their loved ones, Jean-Marc acknowledges that he is filling in a lot of gaps with very little to go on:

“Her stories bombard me, they seem to have become my own memories, they writhe and change and regroup in the way true memories do. They are like photographs in her grandfather’s dresser, a deluge of the ever-present past.”

The plot of Borderline is enough to pull the reader along, but this is not the novel to read if you want a plot-driven story. Jean-Marc tracks Felicity as best he can, but she remains out of reach. The stories in Borderline are unclear in origin: what Jean-Marc has experienced, what he has been told, what he is making up.

“Her days are baroque, they curl into each other like acanthus leaves, she lives somewhere between now and then. She moves in and out of her life.”

“Still, I have to admit, there has always been a quality of absence about her; which is why her disappearance itself seems insubstantial, merely a figure of speech, or a trick of the light, a momentary thing.”

I would completely understand if someone experienced this novel as a frustrating and disappointing read. However, I felt Borderline was an effective exploration of how human beings try and make sense of themselves, each other and the world when so much remains unknown and chaotic. It has some truly breathtaking passages and JTH is absolutely a writer I’d like to explore further.

To end, let it never be said that I shy away from the obvious in my 80s song choices 😀