So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ (1980, transl. Modupé Bodé-Thomas, 1981) is only 89 pages long but covers major themes, around choices available to women in 1970s Senegal; polygamous marriage; Sengalese society emerging from colonialism; and generational difference. It is framed as a letter from Ramatoulaye to her long-term friend Aissatou, but as one long letter with no reply, it doesn’t really feel like an epistolary novel.
At the start of the novel, Ramatoulaye’s husband Modou has just died. As she undertakes four months and ten days of mourning as part of her Islamic faith, she reflects on the pain caused when Modou took his second wife, Binetou, a friend of their eldest daughter.
“I have enough memories in me to ruminate upon. And these are what I am afraid of, for they smack of bitterness. May their evocation not soil the state of purity in which I must live.”
Ramatoulaye trained as a teacher and works at the university, but finds herself considering what she gave up for married life:
“How many dreams did we nourish hopelessly that could have been fulfilled as lasting happiness and that we abandoned to embrace others, those that have burst miserably like soap bubbles, leaving us empty handed?”
Having met her husband during training, she has been married for thirty years and raised twelve children. Now the children are older and with her husband gone, she finds herself caught between generations:
“It was the privilege of our generation to be the link between two periods in our history, one of domination, the other of independence. We remained young and efficient, for we were the messengers of a new design.”
Yet her daughters are the ones achieving a marriage of equal partners, and while Ramatoulaye welcomes this, she struggles with other behaviours such as wearing trousers and smoking:
“The unexpectedness of it gave me a shock. A woman’s mouth exhaling the acrid smell of tobacco instead of being fragrant.”
The full extent of Modou’s disregard of Ramatoulaye emerges later in the novel: he didn’t tell Ramatoulaye he was courting Binetou or considering marriage, but leaves one day not to return. His friends arrive at the house to explain he has married again and left the family.
A strength of the story is Ramatoulaye’s refusal to outright condemn the young second bride. She recognises that Binetou has been pushed by her mother to marry for financial gain.
“Binetou, like many others, was a lamb slaughtered on the altar of affluence.”
And when Binetou doesn’t behave kindly, Ramatoulaye frames it thus:
“A victim, she wanted to be the oppressor. Exiled in the world of adults, which was not her own, she wanted her prison gilded. Demanding, she tormented. Sold, she raised her price daily. What she renounced, those things which before used to be the sap of her life which she would bitterly enumerate, called for exorbitant compensations, which Modou exhausted himself trying to provide.”
There is a strong sense of sisterhood running through So Long a Letter. In writing to her recently divorced friend, the narrative remains between two women, creating an intimacy and a focus on unmediated female experience.
“I am not indifferent to the irreversible currents of women’s liberation that are lashing the world. This commotion that is shaking up every aspect of our lives reveals and illustrates our abilities.
My heart rejoices each time a woman emerges from the shadows.”
To end, a film adaptation was released this year. From the trailer, it looks faithful to the book:
I really enjoy Barbara Comyns. Her voice is so distinct, uniquely hers. She can present traumatic events – in The Skin Chairs, parental death, bullying and poverty – with an equanimity of tone which offers an idiosyncratic resilience.
The Skin Chairs is narrated by ten-year-old Frances. It opens with her going to stay with horrible relatives to give her mother a break from her six children; four girls and two boys. Frances’ Aunt Lawrence is a bully and her daughter Ruby is completely cowed by her, while her daughter Grace is her favourite and as such, completely unbearable.
“It was no wonder that the Lawrence family were so spiteful; it was dreadfully catching and gave one such a feeling of power.”
Frances’ stay with her relatives is extended as while she is away, her father dies. Ultimately her mother and her siblings move into a new house nearby called The Hollies. This gives the Lawrences a distressing amount of power over Frances’ mother, who struggles to adapt to her straitened circumstances.
“She never went shopping, although she ordered meat when the butcher called at the house (the fishmonger soon stopped calling because he said it wasn’t worth it when we always ordered herrings), and I think she would have considered it the final degradation to have been seen carrying a shopping basket.”
Her mother does learn to cook, but even that isn’t quite right:
“Mrs Hand prepared vegetables and we washed up, so she had none of the drudgery. Delicious iced cakes appeared on the table at teatime, vol-au-vent, lobster croquettes and chicken soufflés at midday and savoury supper in the evening. The little ones became bilious and, when Polly discovered that we had spent nearly a month’s supply of money in a week, we went back to stews and rice puddings, fish pie and baked apples.”
There isn’t much plot, except as Frances takes us through her days. Dramas are generally short-lived. The family struggle for money, and Frances struggles with her schoolwork.
We get to know others on the village. There is an appalling ongoing thread with a mother neglecting her child so she can have an affair with a Major. There is also the utterly eccentric Mrs Alexander who bombs around in a bright yellow car, wears gold shoes polished daily by her chauffeur, and keeps a menagerie of animals in cages:
“She had once kept a bear, but people had complained because it used to break into church during the services, and it had to be given to a zoo. ‘I sometimes wonder why I ever returned to England, so many unpleasant things happen here’.”
As with all the Comyns I’ve read there is cruelty present. Not least with the chairs, belonging to a General and said to be made from human skin. The cruelty is never dismissed although no-one is demonised, and Frances’ child’s view doesn’t obfuscate. It is presented without sensation.
Thankfully there is kindness too. Mr Blackwell arrives in the village, incredibly rich and kind to Frances during a time of acute distress. He doesn’t meet the Lawrences’ standards however:
“Then Aunt Lawrence told us the man was not a ‘gent’ at all, but a retired brass-founder. He was rolling in money, he owned an appalling Birmingham accent and would be quite impossible to know. I imagined him rolling in brassy coins all alone and felt sorry for him planning to live in a village where no one would know him.”
The horrible central image of The Skin Chairs suits Comyns well. She is so clever at presenting the domestic, but making it unnerving and almost Gothic. Yet The Skin Chairs is also gentle, and the characters – even the dreadful ones – treated with compassion. I’ve a few other Comyns’ languishing in the TBR and this made me keen to get them!
This is a contribution to Kaggsy and Simon’s1952 Club, running all week. One of the many great things about the Club weeks is that they encourage me to raid the TBR and get to books which could have languished there forever. Today’s book is a perfect example: an author and a novel I knew nothing about but which I greatly enjoyed.
Laura Talbot was the pen-name of Lady Ursula Chetwynd-Talbot, and her knowledge of the land-owning classes informs The Gentlewomen throughout. It tells the story of Miss Roona Bolby, a single woman growing older who has to earn her living as a governess. She clings desperately to her family’s genteel background and colonialism while around her the world changes irrevocably.
“When she had been sent back to England she had been seven. She had been told so much since that memories which had been sharp had become blurred by that which she had been told. It was difficult now to sort her own from Sita’s and Mavis’s. India had not faded with the journey home; from then on it had grown, it had become as much a part of her own life as of her Mother’s and Sita’s and Mavis’s.”
Thus she will tell anyone – repeatedly and incessantly – that she was born in India, as she wears gold Indian bangles and uses an Indian silver brush set. She remains oblivious to the fact that her background is a matter of utter indifference to everybody.
At the beginning of the novel she leaves her shabby boarding house Hillstone in Birmingham, (filled with characters which could have made a great novel in itself!) and heads to the country seat of the Rushford family.
The Second World War is ongoing, and so the house is not as it once was. Lord Rushford is overseas, there are two Italian POWs and Land Girls have working on the estate, and my favourite character, straight-talking Reenie, has never been a kitchen maid before.
Miss Bolby has been employed to tutor to the various children from both parents’ first marriages, while Nanny Becca cares for the younger toddler Bella. Jessy, Barby, Louisa and Ruth dislike their tutor, and why wouldn’t they? She is completely devoid of any warmth towards them, won’t call them by the names they use, and seems a pretty dull teacher.
In Miss Bolby, Laura Talbot has not created a likable protagonist. She is so bound up in outdated societal structures, she entirely fails to respond to people as people. Her snobbery infects all her thoughts and actions:
“I always think it helpful to know from what milieu people come, especially in these days when one so frequently find the unexpected.”
The Introduction to my edition suggests that the portrait of Miss Bolby is without compassion, but I disagree. While she is petty, silly and resentful, we see how thwarted she is through her memories. Her mother used phrases like “rather deuxième” about those she deemed socially inferior, failing to recognise the crassness of such a phrase – one which Miss Bolby echoes later in the novel. She also wished to be a singer, which her mother prevented.
And so while she declined suitors in her youth as never good enough, it is really only she who suffered, and continues to do so. She was beautiful, but rejected the chances that this gave her, and now when roles and opportunities for women are still so circumscribed, she is losing her looks too. Her world is getting smaller and smaller, and she exacerbates this.
“Drawing-rooms and dining-rooms were as passages, her presence in them transitory: she had been forced to grope as a moth gropes before flying out into the night.”
When Miss Pickford arrives at Rushford, the reader is shown another way for someone in similar circumstances to live. The other gentlewoman of the title, Miss Pickford has little advantages in her favour, but she enjoys people and is interested in them, is entirely without Miss Bolby’s pettiness and relentless judgements, and has genuine skill in her work as secretary. The children warm to her and call her Picksie, and no-one seems to consider her an “old bag” – an epithet frequently associated with Miss Bolby.
As this disparate group rub along together, there is a threat to Miss Bolby’s fragile sense of worth, grounded as it is on meaningless external attributes rather than who she is as a person. Her sister Sita made a marriage to Arthur Atherton-Broadleigh and lives abroad, so Miss Bolby puts great store by the connection (and by constantly referring to it) despite little knowledge of the actual realities of the relationship. Unfortunately for her, there is someone who knows Arthur’s past very well…
At the same time her Indian bracelets go missing, and this additional pressure on her psyche means she starts to behave quite viciously. While there is never quite the psychological disintegration that occurs in William’s Wife or Wish Her Safe at Home, The Gentlewomen did remind me of these novels, with the portrayal of societal pressure and delusion for women who wanted so much more from life.
The war is far away physically, but the drudge of various privations and the frequent noise of aeroplanes bearing down to the local airbase add an atmosphere of bleak strain, which becomes almost Gothic as it turns out Rushford has been burned out from fire in many places, and sits in overgrown, unmanageable grounds.
“War was a lonely battle for the lonely, for those not urgently connected with it, and in her case a lonely battle for what?”
In case this sounds very heavy, I should say I disagree with the Introduction in another way, when it says Talbot had no humour. I think she is easy to underestimate because she is not interested in drawing attention to her writing at all; there is no strong authorial voice. Her style is to present the characters, and leave judgement to the reader. Often Miss Bolby’s pretentious assertions go ignored by her interlocutors which speaks volumes.
And so I found there were various moments of humour, from the wonderful Reenie, to the neighbour Lady Archie who consistently baffles her devoted husband by acquiring modern slang from the Squadron-Leader at the RAF base. Needless to say, this doesn’t fit in Miss Bolby’s schema at all:
“She had wondered all evening about Lady Archie, and who Lady Archie was and why she used such phrases as ‘It seems to ring a bell’ and ‘Same here’, which one expected from a Mr Billings, but not from a woman such as Lady Archie.”
“ ‘Wizard!’ said Lady Archie. ‘But I’ll have to consult Hughie about the car.’”
The tension builds in The Gentlewoman towards a somewhat melodramatic climax, but while I felt this came close to clumsy, it was also a real page-turner. On the strength of this novel, I would definitely be interested in reading more by Laura Talbot. (And although I’m not usually bothered by writer’s biographies particularly, I’m also intrigued by her third marriage, which took place two years after she published this novel, to Patrick Hamilton. How on earth did that come about?!)
Sadly, ultimately Miss Bolby’s harshest judgements are in the fleeting ones she puts upon herself:
“A failure, who had not lived fully in any sphere – who had always lived up on the fringe.”
This is the first of what I’m hoping will be two posts for Margaret Atwood Reading Month 2024 (#MARM2024) hosted by Marcie at Buried in Print, as I aim to read the two short story collections I have in the TBR.
Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales (2014) turned out to be perfect autumn reading with its edge of darkness, verging on Gothic at times.
The first three tales are connected. Alphinland sees fantasy writer Constance negotiate heavy snow after the death of her husband; in Revenant, the poet she loved in her youth, Gavin, tries to manage the frustrations and isolations of older age; in Dark Lady one of his lovers with whom he cheated on Constance is back living with her twin brother.
All of these are grounded in reality, but Atwood weaves through touches of unreality to destabilise any certainty the reader has about what is being portrayed. Constance’s fantasy world is entirely real to her, and there are hints that it is an effective means of controlling people. But is this psychological or metaphysical?
“How did he manage to work his way out of the metaphor she’s kept him bottled up in for all these years?”
Atwood’s portrayal of Constance and Gavin allows for some light satire as to the vagaries of literary trends, and the uses writers make of their art. Gavin enjoyed the male privilege of 1960s bohemianism and is disappointed that the world has moved on alongside his aging body:
“His regret is that he isn’t a lecherous old man, but he wishes he were. He wishes he still could be. How to describe the deliciousness of ice cream when you can no longer taste it?”
Dark Lady portrays the life of an aging muse, using the Shakespeare reference to make Jorrie a slightly ghoulish presence. As her brother Tin reflects on her appearance:
“at least he’s been able to stop her from dyeing [her hair] jet black: way too Undead with her present day skin tone, which is lacking in glow despite the tan-coloured foundation and the sparkly bronze mineral-elements powder she so assiduously applies, the poor deluded wretch.”
“He has to keep reminding her not to halt the sparkly bronze procedure halfway down her neck: otherwise her head will look sewed on.”
Gavin’s nostalgia for the sexual politics of the 1960s is given further short shrift in the titular tale. I was delighted to learn that the idea came about on an Artic cruise, where Atwood’s late husband started to work out how to murder someone on a ship and get away with it. Atwood decided to finish the tale and the logistical details are closely observed.
All the tales are memorable, and the collection finishes on one that feels truly terrifying as an external threat builds towards vulnerable people in a nursing home. Like the tales that have preceded it, Torching the Dusties is touched with the fantastical while staying rooted in the recognisable. Wilma has Charles Bonnet syndrome, hallucinating due to her failing eyesight:
“she locates the phone in her peripheral vision, ignores the ten or twelve little people who are skating on the kitchen counter in long fur-bordered velvet cloaks and silver muffs, and picks it up.”
Atwood relentlessly builds the tension in the tale, ending it on a jovial note that is brilliantly inappropriate.
There’s so much here for Atwood fans to enjoy: the sharp observations (particularly on ageing), the wry societal commentary; the mischievous humour, and of course the fierce intellect. She’s clearly having fun here and encouraging her readers to have fun too. I’m looking forward to the other collection I have to read, Old Babes in the Wood (2023).
The 1970 Club is running all week hosted by Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book. The Club weeks are always great fun, so do check out the posts!
Whenever the club weeks are announced I always go straight to the TBR to see what I’ve got available. 1970 didn’t yield as many fruits as 1937 Club back in April, but it did offer four choices. Unfortunately I don’t think 1970 is my year as far as my TBR pile goes…two DNFs and a third I wish I had DNF’d rather than ploughed through. Thankfully the fourth I found to be excellent!
Daddy Was a Number Runner was the first novel by Louise Meriwether and widely acknowledged to be bona fide classic in its evocation of 1930s Harlem, through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl, Francie Coffin. In the Foreword, James Baldwin writes:
“she has so truthfully conveyed what the world looks like from a black girl’s point of view, she has told everyone who can read or feel what it means to be a black man or woman in this country. She has achieved an assessment, in a deliberately minor key, of a major tragedy.”
From the opening lines as Francie helps her father with his titular illegal lottery, her voice is so direct and distinctive. As she runs home to try and get to school on time, we are thrust into a hot summer’s day in Harlem.
“The air outside wasn’t much better. It was a hot, stifling day, June 2, 1934. The curbs were lined with garbage cans overflowing into the gutters, and a droopy horse pulling a vegetable wagon down the avenue had just deposited a steaming pile of manure in the middle of the street.
The sudden heat had emptied the tenements. Kids too young for school played on the sidewalks while their mamas leaned out of their windows searching for a cool breeze or sat for a moment on the fire escapes.”
Francie’s family are incredibly poor, and running the numbers brings some money in. If lotteries are a tax on hope, Harlem is full of hope. It’s also full of bed bugs, rats and roaches. Poor Francie is eaten alive every night and has to go armed into her favourite pastime:
“I was sitting at the dining room table reading a library book, armed with my usual supply of weapons. Tonight I had a hammer, a screwdriver, and two hairbrushes. When I heard a noise I threw the hammer toward the kitchen and the rats scurried back into their holes. When I got down to my last piece of ammunition I would give the dining room up to the rats and go on to bed.”
Reading and schooling are seen as a way out of the ghetto. Francie’s older brother Sterling is bright and just about staying in school. Her other brother, James Junior, found school hard and, much to the worry of his loving parents, he is running with the local gang:
“He wasn’t mean enough to be an Ebony Earl nohow. How could he ever mug anybody, good-natured and nice as he was. Why, when he smiled his whole face laughed. He wasn’t like old Sterling who didn’t like anybody and whose narrow, old man’s face was full of dark, secret shadows.”
Francie’s parents are loving and kind, and how they hold onto those traits against the relentless grind of poverty is a miracle.
“[Mother] was always either soaking clothes or scrubbing them or hanging them out on the line. With all of that activity we should have been super clean but somehow we weren’t.”
“Daddy played by ear and could swing any piece after he heard it only once.”
Francie’s father is proud and doesn’t want to accept state relief or for his wife to work. But eventually he has to give in on both counts:
“They don’t give you enough money to live on so you have to bootleg some kind of work, then they deduct that from your relief check, too. I wonder how they expect you to live. Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want to mess with those people?” But for once he didn’t shout, seeming to be more tired than angry.”
The structural racism faced by Francie, her family, and everyone she knows is brilliantly evoked. Meriwether displays it through various characters, and there is an enormous tragedy looming for several families. The fallout on children is vivid, through Francie but also her peers. Her best friend Sukie is always filled with fury, which young Francie fails to see is due – at least in part – to Sukie’s father seeking release in alcohol and her sweet sister China Doll working for a violent pimp who beats her in front of onlookers.
Meriwether also articulates issues directly to the reader in her portrayals of, or references to, real life characters who Francie encounters, such as Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Father Divine, Marcus Garvey, and the Scottsboro case.
There is so much hardship in Daddy Was a Number Runner, and outside of the home Francie has to navigate violence and sexual attention from many that grows into assaults. There’s also a horrible scene with a cat. What stops the novel being unremittingly bleak is her loving parents; her love of books; and Francie’s resilient, honest, humorous, indignant voice.
“I walked to 110th St and looked across Central Park at the lights twinkling in the skyscrapers. That was another world, too, all those lights way over there and this spooky park standing between us. But what good would those lights do me anyway?”
I’ve really enjoyed the three EH Young novels I’ve read but it’s been ages since I picked her up. I’m thankful to the 1937 Club, running all week and hosted by Kaggsy at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book for prompting me to get back to her!
Like the other novels by Young that I’ve read, Celia is set in the fictional Upper Radstowe (based on lovely Clifton in Bristol) amongst middle-class domestic life. Celia is forty-five, living in genteel shabbiness with her husband Gerald and their son Jimmy and daughter Catherine. She is quietly despairing.
Gerald is an architect who designs unimaginative houses that Celia despises: “here was the same puzzle of gain and loss, more money for the family and a little less beauty in the world.”
Young portrays with frankness that Celia and Gerald have a sexless marriage, because Celia cannot bear the thought of physical intimacy with her husband:
“by neglecting some of the duties of a good housewife, she stored the energy necessary for avoiding friction; by avoiding as much as possible, Gerald’s demonstrations of affection, and she had almost perfected her technique, she could give him the friendship and the kindness which vanished when more was asked of her.”
But in all honesty, she also neglects those other housewife duties too because they hold no real interest for her. She is an indifferent housekeeper (I can definitely relate) and cook, and spends a lot of her time at step removed from her surroundings. She dreams of a lost love – Richard, the brother of schoolfriend Pauline – and talks to herself.
“She had always a secret pride in its intangible persistence, its difference from a love nourished by the senses, and a more secret fear that what gave it life was its dreamlike quality.”
Those around her are used to vagueness and detachment. Living nearby is her “very stupid” sister May, her solicitor husband Stephen and their daughters including Susan. Celia’s brother John inherited the family drapery business and also lives close by, with his wife Julia and their various offspring. Another sister Hester is living a scandalously single life in London.
May and Julia form a pair, keeping each other company with their distracting daily small rivalries.
“She was congratulating herself on a superior wit because these two had supplied her with so much unintentional amusement, but she knew she had supplied them with something they valued more than laughter, an opportunity for criticism and disapproval.”
As the above quote shows, Celia can be judgemental of others. There are times when she is really quite cruel to her relatives, telling them what to do and not being entirely kind about it. But she is also fond, loving, intelligent, silly and funny. She’s a wonderful, fully-rounded, very believable creation.
The least likable character is her brother John: “John’s sense of duty towards his family was chiefly confined to criticism.” Even loving wife Julia loses patience with him at one point:
“She was enraged by John’s masculine belief in the sufficiency of his lasting passion for her, his primitive conviction that she was honoured by it and for its sake must gladly endure his faults of character and his intolerance of her own. In this rarely candid moment, she searched her mind for any other reason why she should like him and could not find one, but he was a habit and she would have been lost without him.”
We follow the extended family through various dramas, some larger than others. Stephen takes himself off for a few days, leaving May wondering if she’s been abandoned. John has to face his eldest son not wanting to follow him into the business. Celia’s son Jimmy has a crush on May’s daughter Susan (first cousins – eek). Celia has to wrestle with her mother-in-law, and there various intrigues which amount to very little. As Celia observes:
“I live in a teacup and forget it isn’t the whole world.”
However, Celia isn’t a comfort read. It is concerned with the realities of married life at a time when divorce was very rare and opportunities for women generally were very limited. Young portrays the frustrations, sadnesses, tedium, and even fear her characters experience alongside the small joys, affection and love in their lives. It feels very real, and while it is not depressing it also doesn’t offer any false hope or sentiment either.
“The art of living, the only one Celia tried to practise, was as exacting as any other.”
By end of the novel the characters know themselves and each other slightly better, and have gained some wisdom and insight through small incremental steps. There are no major epiphanies and no huge outward changes. It is a finely written and closely observed tale of interwar middle-class lives that above everything else, carry on.
While it was an involving and affecting novel, I didn’t feel Celia was the strongest of Young’s work that I’ve read – there were too many superfluous characters and the light plotting couldn’t quite sustain the length. For me, it would have benefitted from cutting one branch of the family and around 100 pages. But EH Young not at her tip-top best is still so very good and there is a great deal to enjoy in Celia.
“She had a calm indifference to what anyone might think of her, not because she herself was indifferent people, but because while she was interested in herself, as any intelligent person must be, she did not expect or wish to arouse interest in others, she had no apologies to make for what she was not, or explanations of what she was.”
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:
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 😀
The 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, starts today and is running all week which I am very excited about 😊 The Club weeks are always great and I’m really looking forward to seeing the posts. This is the first of what I hope will be three contributions, but as I never blog as much as I mean to, failure is almost inevitable!
The Golden Spur was Dawn Powell’s last novel, and it’s a humorous look at the bohemian arts scene of late 1950s New York, specifically Greenwich Village. This was a world Powell was very much a part of and my edition features an effusive introduction from Gore Vidal who was one of her close friends.
We are introduced to the artists and writers – both up and coming, and those very much faded and failing – their hangers-on and their varied associates through the outsider view of Jonathan Jaimison. He is in his late twenties and recently discovered that his father isn’t the domineering tyrant he grew up with, but someone from this scene, back when his mother was hanging out with Prohibition-era flappers.
So Jonathan leaves his Ohio home and soon makes his way to the titular bar, at the start of his quest to find his biological father:
“Through a gap in the plum velvet cafe curtains he could see the bar … He breathed deep of the heady New York air, that delirious narcotic of ancient sewer dust, gasoline fumes, roasting coffee beans, and the harsh smell of the sea that intoxicates inland nostrils. Then he pushed open the door.”
He’s quickly adopted by Lize and Darcy, two frenemies who sleep with the same male artists, although it’s not entirely clear why, as they seem to have no great fondness for men or for art:
“The girls never asked questions about a man’s private interests or listened when he tried to tell them. For them it was enough that he was a man and that he was there. Who needs a talking man?”
“That his newest canvas was gone should have told her something, but she wasn’t sure which was the new one because all his pictures looked alike to Lize. Great lozenges of red and white (‘I love blood,’ he always said), black and grey squares (‘I love chess,’ he’d say), long green spikes (‘I love asparagus’). All Lize had learned about art from her life with painters was that the big pictures were for museums and the little ones for art.”
As Jonathan makes his way in New York, he moves between two generations: the young artists and the fading interwar generation. There is a nostalgia for the Prohibition period and what New York was then which is beautifully evoked, alongside a recognition that New York is a city that continually makes itself and its inhabitants anew:
“Jonathan recognised New York as home. His whole appearance changed overnight, shoulders broadened, apologetic skulk became swagger; he looked strangers in the eye and found friendship wherever he turned. With the blight of Jaimison heritage removed, his future became marvellously incalculable, the city seemed born fresh for his delight. He took for granted that his mother’s little world, into which he had dropped, was the city’s very heart.”
Although The Golden Spur is described as a comic novel, I didn’t find it laugh-out-loud funny. Rather I’d describe it as affectionately satirical. It ribs the 1950s arts scene and the vacuous people drawn to it, but it never has a bitter or nasty tone:
“Anybody with a tube of paint and a board was an artist. But writers were not writers unless decently unpublished or forever muffled by a Foundation placebo.”
“‘I just want to be overestimated,’ Earl shouted, ‘like everybody else, goddammit.’”
Despite the overarching plot being Jonathan’s search, this really isn’t a plot-driven novel. Rather, the question of his paternity is a device to introduce the various characters and their world. It’s a novel to read for the evocation of the city, of a particular society found within it, and for the characterisation and the wit. In the way that Tales of the City was serialised in the San Franciso Chronicle, I felt The Golden Spur could have worked similarly in The Village Voice. It’s almost a series of sketches, albeit well realised ones.
I can’t say I loved this quite as much as Gore Vidal clearly did, but then he probably recognised a lot of the characters and situations within the novel. I still found a great deal to enjoy, and Powell certainly has a way with words:
“She was making more and more passes at the wrong men, then trying to recoup with stately cultural pronouncements in her refined Carolina accent, which she kept polished up like her grandfather’s shotgun, ready to bring recalcitrant suitors into line.”
To end, I was going to go with the song Little Lize because that’s the only other time I’ve come across the name. I thought it would be easy to get a good quality version as the massively successful Fisherman’s Friends have recorded it. But I couldn’t find a decent one so here they are instead singing about never leaving home. New York isn’t for everyone…
I had such a book hangover after Bleak House. I couldn’t settle to anything. A friend of mine who loves a certain 80s singer has a phrase when she hears other warblers: “He’s alright, but he’s not George Michael.” Well, I kept picking up books that were alright, but they weren’t Bleak House. So few books are, I find…
Then I remembered that when Simon did his books of the year round up last year, I’d recognised two were on my TBR pile. Surely books good enough to make the final cut would see me right? Of course they did 😊 Hooray for bloggers and their brilliant recommendations!
Firstly, the novella which made the top of Simon’s list, A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence (1966). This was the second in Laurence’s Manawaka sequence, but thankfully they can all be read as standalones as I’d not read anything by her before. On the strength of this, I’ll definitely be seeking out her writing again.
A Jest of God is an intimate character study of Rachel Cameron, a thirty-four-year-old teacher who lives with her emotionally manipulative mother above the Manitoba funeral business her father ran until he died.
The novel is narrated in the first-person, and Rachel’s mind is an oppressive and tense place to be. She is highly anxious and self-censoring:
“There. I’m doing it again. This must stop. It isn’t good for me. Whenever I find myself thinking in a brooding way, I must simply turn it off and think of something else. God forbid that I should turn into an eccentric. This isn’t just imagination. I’ve seen it happen. Not only teachers, of course, and not only women who haven’t married. Widows can become extremely odd as well, but at least they have the excuse of grief.”
This anxiety and second-guessing is not helped by her mother’s behaviour, which is self-pitying, judgemental and highly manipulative. Rachel recognises this, but is at a loss as to how to extricate herself:
“Her weapons are invisible, and she would never admit even to carrying them, much less putting them to use.”
“All such words cling to the mind like burrs to hair, and I can never seem to brush them away, as I know I should do.”
Rachel’s mother is not an out-and-out baddie though, and Laurence expertly demonstrates the vulnerability and fear that underlies her machinations. Similarly, Rachel does not always behave well. In one particular scene early in the book, she actually behaves despicably and doesn’t make amends despite her instant remorse. She is a complex, contradictory character, wholly believable. Laurence treats her tenderly but unflinchingly; without judgement but also without sentiment.
Rachel could so easily be a stereotype: a lonely single woman, living with her mother. But Laurence side-steps clumsy characterisation, or easy dismissal of Rachel, by delicately exploring the true meaning of the adjective so often attached to unmarried women approaching middle-age: she is desperate. She is absolutely desperate and despairing. She is lonely, and feels trapped in the life she has always known, with no way out. She wants things to be different, but she doesn’t know how. She is deeply, existentially sad.
1966 is a time of societal change, when women like Rachel could feel stifled by convention and also have some sexual freedom. So when Nick, and old schoolfriend appears, there are brief moments of physical connection. But in only seeing things from Rachel’s point view, the reader is able to realise how little intimacy there is. And that is what Rachel needs, more than the sex which Nick offers. Yet she doesn’t know how to achieve this:
“I talk to him, when he is not here, and tell him everything I can think of, everything that has ever happened, and how I feel and for a while it seems to me that I am completely known to him, and then I remember I’ve only talked to him like that when I’m alone. He hasn’t heard and doesn’t know.”
In some of Nick’s reported speech, the reader picks up on things Rachel ignores. She is so bound in her own intense feelings, she can’t really hear the cues Nick gives, over her relentless inner voice.
“He’s thirty-five, not fifteen. His past such gauche public performances. What he worried about Rachel? I’m not worried. I’m perfectly alright. Well, relax, then. I am relaxed. Oh? Shut up. Just shut up.”
A Jest of God is such an accomplished novel that is also so approachable. I found Rachel’s voice got under my skin very quickly and distinctly, and I had to read on. I think it works very well as short novel, longer would have been too oppressive and difficult to sustain I suspect. But at the length it is it remains powerful and impactful, and not as depressing as I’ve made it sound!
Ultimately there is resilience and change for Rachel, even some defiance. And there are brief moments of humour, such as Rachel trying to duck her colleague Calla’s constant invitation to attend Tabernacle with her:
“At least I have postponed it, and perhaps by that time some reasonable excuse will come along, or I’ll be dead.”
A stunning novel: a precise and compassionate character study, clever and humane. I’m so glad to have discovered Margaret Laurence at long last.
“Something must be the matter with my way of viewing things. I have no middle view. Either I fixed on a detail and see it as though it were magnified – a leaf with all its veins perceived, the fine hairs on the back of a man’s hands – or else the world recedes and becomes blurred, artificial, indefinite, an abstract painting of a world.”
Secondly, after being in Rachel’s head, I looked forward to some comic relief from an author I always enjoy: Margery Sharp. Four Gardens (1935) was number ten in Simon’s list. But this wasn’t as comic as some of her other novels; it had a slightly elegiac tone and the relationships included a certain sadness. But it wasn’t a sad novel overall, and I sunk into Four Gardens with pleasure.
Four Gardens follows the life of Caroline Chase from late teens to middle-age and the titular spaces she finds herself in. The device with gardens isn’t remotely heavy-handed and for a significant section of the novel they barely feature. But Caroline is a gardener, given half a chance, and it is instinctive and natural to her:
“Her step, as she now redescended to the rose garden, was therefore a proper gardeners tread – slow, considerate, with long abstracted pauses for survey and meditation. She also, without thinking, removed her hat and gloves.”
This is her first garden, one she trespasses into, and as she meets her first love there, it has a dreamlike quality. Perhaps this is why her love of gardening is so easily disregarded when she leaves behind youthful folly to marry the determinedly sensible Henry:
“For all these things in themselves – love at first sight, undying devotion, and general aloofness – were very exciting indeed; it was only in connection with Henry that they became so curiously prosaic.”
And so for many years Caroline doesn’t garden at all. She runs a house and she raises her son and daughter in the town where she has always lived. She is the creator of a safe space for her children and an unwavering routine for her staid but affectionate husband.
Despite the love she feels for her family and the tranquillity of her home life, I did find an element of melancholy to Caroline’s domestic arrangements. Her family are near and dear, but there seemed to be very little intimacy: she and Henry rarely communicate about anything beyond practical considerations, and she doesn’t really understand her children at all. She also despises her closest friend in the village, Ellen Watts – a monstrous and wholly believable creation. Caroline reflects very little though, and so any concerns are quickly subsumed in the relentless demands of domesticity:
“Thinking – the deliberate exercise of the brain – did not come naturally to her.”
But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that Four Gardens is ponderous or heavy-going in any way. It felt quite a realistic presentation of Edwardian contentment, though not without Sharp’s gentle jibes, such as this discussion of wallpaper where Caroline evokes her husband’s approval to counteract her mother’s reservations:
“Mrs Chase was at once silenced. […] It would have seemed perfectly reasonable to her that Caroline, who was in the house all day, should have suited her surroundings to the taste of a man who was out of it.”
I did want Caroline to exert herself in some way, to stake a claim beyond her roles meeting everyone else’s needs. Finally she does it, when she starts growing runner beans during World War I, and realises how much she is nurtured by time with her plants:
“there was usually a quiet space, between twelve and half-past, when the first work of the house was finished and before the children’s dinner became a pressing consideration; and these thirty minutes Caroline began to guard and cherish as a precious treasure.”
The war years are beautifully evoked by Sharp, with all their worry alongside self-serving censorious behaviour of some in the village. After the war, everything changes. Caroline finds herself mistress of a large house, with a garden she can’t touch unless she wants to incur the wrath of a succession of gardeners:
“The garden was looking well. But it always did look well, and gave her no special pleasure […] It was perfectly designed and perfectly kept, and to Caroline completely uninteresting.”
Meanwhile, her children are vaguely affectionate, patronising strangers. They change the names she loves, Lily becoming Lall and Leonard, Leon. They are academically accomplished and having had money their whole lives, utterly contemptuous of it. These Bright Young Things live by a morality that is absolutely baffling to Caroline, and there is a lovely echo of an earlier scene between Caroline and her mother in a later conversation between Caroline and Lall. The reader can see they are so much more alike than either realises, dramatic irony at its lightest.
I’m not one for biographical readings of novels but something of the tone of Four Gardens – affectionate, gentle, slightly sad – did make me consider the dates. In Caroline, Sharp is writing about her parents’ generation, so maybe that explains it… or maybe it has nothing to do with it at all, who knows?
Caroline’s fourth garden finally sees her able to do as she pleases. I couldn’t help feeling she might really surprise her children, and herself 😊 A warm, engaging story of a woman’s outwardly ordinary adult life during great societal change.
To end, Paul Newman adapted A Jest of God as Rachel, Rachel for his directorial debut. This very odd trailer doesn’t make it seem overly appealing:
madame bibi lophile recommends 