Category: book reviews

HARPERS January 2011

A lovely article about Ralph Waldo Emerson in my favourite magazine this month. Here’s a quote of his to put in your pipe:

Days . . “come and go like muffled & vague figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nohting, & if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away . . . I find no good lives. I would live well. I seem to be free to do so, yet I think with very little respect of my way of living; it is weak, partial, not full & not progressive. But I do not see any that suits me better. . . We are all dying of miscellany”

Or,even worse:

“After thirty a man wakes up sad every morning”

FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen

I have only just begun this book, but I love it.

Let me give you a sample, describing a small girl:

. . . smitten with books, devoted to wildlife, . . . . not so pretty as to be morally deformed by it . . .

I freaking love it. Or this, description of a young middle class mother pushing her pram through her gentrifying neighbourhood:

Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint; and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.

And this, off hand, about a middle aged mother:

Merrie, who was ten years older than Patty and looked every year of it, had formely been active with the SDS in Madison and was now very active in the craze for Beaujolais nouveau.

THE WEST PIER by Patrick Hamilton


This came to me in the way I best like books to come: randomly. Someone else picked it out for me at the library.

The author’s voice was naggingly familiar, and eventually I placed it: it’s Patrick Hamilton! He wrote the fairly fabulous HANGOVER SQUARE, which I blogged earlier this year. (Here it is).

THE WEST PIER is the first in a trilogy of novels based on a real life confidence man, Neville Heath. It begins by telling of his time at school, and his love of ‘mischief’ – for example, he always carries a long pin about with him, so he can make punctures in the wheels of any bicycles he finds unattended. He attends a rather posh public (or private, depending on the country you’re reading this in) school, and is generally sheilded from the consequences of his actions. The story then catches up with him as a young man just after the First World War, and tells how he manages to defraud a working class girl of her life savings (£68; a great deal to her, and not very much to him) simply for the thrill of it.

Much that appealed about HANGOVER SQUARE also appeals about THE WEST PIER. There a sort of coldly comic edge to it which is often hilarious. Like this bit of schoolboy conversation in a changing room:

“You’d better not accuse me, you know” said Kerr, now anxious to be accused, and endeavouring to create the allusion that this had already happened. “Because I’ll jolly well punch your nose.”
“And you’d better not accuse me either,” said another boy named Roberts, perceving and rushing with all his belongings towards the glorious Yukon of quarreling with Kerr had discovered. “Or I’ll jolly well punch your nose too.”

For some reason, I just love that about the Yukon. Or this, about these same boys as young men in their early twenties:

All these boys were, of course, in what is deceptively called the ‘morning’ of life – deceptive because the vigorous word ‘morning’ does not at all suggest the clouded, oppressive, mysterious, disquieted, inhibited condition through which the vast majority have to pass at this age.

I don’t know if that’s so much funny as it is sadly true. And this is I think the reason I can’t really say I enjoyed this book. It’s written with great clarity, truly remarkable insight into human behaviour, and with painfully accurate analysis of how people act in social situations; but it’s all rather sad. The con man is a clever, cunning, and unpleasant man. His victims are greedy, vain, and rather credulous. These people are drawn clearly and intelligently, but I wasn’t sure to what effect. The bad man tricked the stupid people. That was basically it.

Perhaps I’m being rather Victorian about it all, but I didn’t really get the point. It was all rather sad and defeated, and no one emerged well or was any the wiser from their experiences.

I believe poor Mr Hamilton ended his life an alcoholic, and I think I would drink too if I found the world so very full of evil and idiocy. In fact, I might just go have a drink right now. I’m not sure how else I’ll get through the rest of the trilogy.

HANGOVER SQUARE by Patrick Hamilton


This is a fantastic little book. It’s subtitled ‘A story of darkest Earl’s Court,’ and is very much about the misery and anonymity of the big city. It’s certainly not a book to read when you are feeling sick of London, as I am.

Sample: At one point, our protagonist is trying to warm up on a cold day in front of a miserable gas fire. Comments the author, in probably my favourite line of the entire book: “To those whom God has forsaken, is given a gas-fire in Earl’s Court” You said it, baby.

HANGOVER SQUARE tells the story of one Harvey Bone, who is a sweet and slightly simple young man living in Earl’s Court. The year is very specifically 1939, and the war hangs over the entire book. Bone is very lonely, and conceives an obsessive love for one Netta Langdon. She is thoroughly nasty to him, but he hangs onto the edge of her hard drinking social group. Occasionally, Bone hears what is described as a click in his head, and suddenly the world becomes a bit silent and vacant, and he moves as if in a dream. During these periods, he plans to kill Netta. When his head clicks back, he cannot remember these ‘dead’ periods at all. Bone is a thoroughly symmpathetic character, and the book reels you in by continually keeping you in hope that he will come right. He keeps trying to give up drinking, and planning to move out of the city to the countryside, both of which, it is suggested, might yet save him. Eventually, in a particularly bad period, he does kill Netta, and on her friends, and then covers the apartment in lengths of thread, so the crime scene will not be touched by the police. Shortly afterwards, he kills himself. He had been looking after a stray cat, and his suicide note is mostly about making sure the cat is looked after. It is sad.

Hamilton is a bit naughty, as he really makes you hate Netta. I have to admit its a tiny bit mysoginist. Apparently ‘her thoughts resembled those of a fish – something seen floating in a tank, brooding, self-absorbed, frigid . . . she had been born, apparently, without any natural predilection towards thought or action . . .’ You get the picture. You seriously totally don’t care when she gets drowned in her bath.

JB Priestly in the introduction makes the excellent point that Hamilton is one of the first writers to really deal with the way one can be homeless in a big city – homeless in the sense of anonymous, and without any kind of community – just floating. Let me just quote you one other little bit! Speaking of a young man: “For he was alone in London for the fist time, and at an age when the external world generally bears a totally differnet aspect from the one it bears to its more battered and jaundiced inhabitants – at an age, indeed, where even the scenery of SW7 might be associated with the beginning of life rather than the end of all hope, and its streets and people charged with a remarkable mystery and romance of their own.”

Fantastic.

DARK MATTER by Michelle Paver

I needed to read this for a job I have. It is a ghost story, and a pretty successful one, judging by the fact that I had to sleep with the lights on for three days after. Either it’s pretty good or I’m a pretty big wuss. It’s about an expedition in the 1930s to the Arctic. Once the sun disappears entirely for the winter, they start seeing a man who walks the shore near their cabin. Nothing much more than that happens, there’s not much gore, but it’s still impressively scary.

ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT by Jeanette Winterson


This book begins charmingly. It is unpretentious and seemingly honest; and rather sweet. It’s about a little girl growing up with an exceedingly religious mother. As she grows, the little girl begins to realise she is a lesbian, with predictable results as respects the mother.

It seems quite a common or garden coming out story to me, but I think at the time it was very new subject matter. Thus the fame?

It all goes a bit wrong at the end, for me anyway, when she starts inserting sections of a rather naff and quite fakey fairy tale into the story.

I sort of love the introduction. Many thanks for typing out this extract to A Literal Girl Blog

“Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was written during the winter of 1983 and the spring of 1984. I was 24. At that time I was sharing two rooms and a hip bath with the actress Vicky Licorish. She had no money, I had no money, we could not afford the luxury of a separate whites wash and so were thankful of the fashion for coloured knickers which allowed those garments most closely associated with our self-esteem, not to be grey. Dinginess is death to a writer…the damp small confines of the mediocre and the gradual corrosion of beauty and light, the compromising and the settling; these things make good work impossible. When Keats was depressed he put on a clean shirt. When Radclyffe Hall was oppressed she ordered new sets of silk underwear from Jermyn Street. Byron, as we all know, allowed only the softest, purest and whitest next to his heroic skin, and I am a great admirer of Byron. So it seemed to me in those days of no money, no job, no prospects and a determined dinginess creeping up from the lower floors of our rooming house, that there had to be a centre, a talisman, a fetish even, that secured order where there seemed to be none; dressing for dinner every night in the jungle, or the men who polished their boots to a hard shine before wading the waters of Gallipoli. To do something large and to do it well demands such observances, personal and peculiar, laughable as they often are, because they stave off that dinginess of soul that says that everything is small and grubby and nothing is really worth the effort.”

PIED PIPER by Nevil Shute


My cousin gave me this to read on the plane last week. I was glad to see it. I’ve only ever read one other Shute – when I was about fourteen – ON THE BEACH, which made a really big impact on me (in the way things do much more often at fourteen than at thirty three). Essentially, it tells the story of a bunch of people waiting on a beach in Australia for the nuclear cloud that has obliterated the rest of the world to float towards them. I loved it. So much so, that I’m scared to re-read it in case I don’t love it anymore. Anyway, PIED PIPER makes me feel I could go back to the BEACH, because I really like it too.

It tells the story of an elderly British man who decides to go to France for a spot of fishing. Not too much to make a novel out of there, except that the year is 1940, and Germany is very much on the move. Once he’s been there for a little while, it begins to look more likely that France will fall, the man decides to leave for London, and another guest at the hotel asks him to take their children (aged 5 and 8) with him. He agrees, thinking that this will entail simply a train ride to the coast, and then the ferry – a journey of less than 24 hours.

Unfortunately, on the way, one of the children becomes ill, so they are forced to wait in a hotel. By the time they can leave they are having to constantly change their travel plans, as word reaches them of this or that train or port shutting down as the Germans advance. You get very much the sense of what it would really have been like to be in France at this time: everything is based on rumours and surmise, and no one thinks for a minute that Paris will actually fall, until it really does. Eventually, he is reduced to walking with the children, while the roads are machinegunned, and attempting to keep his nationality a secret to avoid arrest and internment by the Germans. As they proceed, they pick up other lost or abandoned children on the way, till he eventually is looking after five children.

We learn that the reason he chose such an odd time to go on a French holiday was because his son was killed in the very early days of the war, and he spends much of the book trying to come to terms with the loss. He does eventually get all the children to safety, and, in a beautifully handled parallel arc, comes to accept the death of his own child.

This is a cleanly and intelligently written page turner with lots of heart. It kept me up till 3am finishing it, which I do not think was just the jetlag.

FREE FOR FOR MILLIONAIRES by Min Jin Lee


This is the story of one Casey Han. Her parents moved from Korea to America to escape the troubles there in the aftermath of the war, and have provided her with a solid upbringing in Queens. She received a scholarship to Princeton, and the story tells of her attempts to find a job and a happy relationship as she grows into her twenties.

It’s enjoyably Victorian, which a giant cast and lots of interweaving plots, and maintains your interest, if not your sympathy, throughout. The main character is always re-reading MIDDLEMARCH, and I will eat my bra (and its got a LOT of underwire) if the author is not a great lover of the Victorians.

Actually, I’ve often noticed that immigrants are fond of the Victorian style (another example is Vikram Seth’s A SUITABLE BOY, the first book of this blog), and you may not be surprised to learn that I’ve got a theory about it. It’s this. Ready?

Now, you can’t play variations on a theme until you know what the theme is. Or: you can’t remix a track that doesn’t exist. European and American writers can have a fine compempt for narrative, and for character; they can mix it up and spit it out all they like, because the basic narratives in which they live have all been formed already. Thus they can mix and remix. They can be modern, and post-modern, and tear the Victorian novel apart, because they already have the Victorian novel. A lot of people from outside this tradition, however, have never really had their stories told. Thus, they need plot, and character, so their grandchildren can rip them all up. They need to write their own Victorian novels.

It’s kind of the same thing with modern art. You can’t mess with the visual world until you’ve agreed what the world looks like.

I can’t think that I’ve ever read a book as absolutely immersed in consumer culture as this one is. Casey has a bizarre sense that the world has somehow treated her unfairly, because she is not as wealthy as some of her fellow students at Princeton. She honestly seems to consider herself poor, and, also bizarrely, the author seems to agree with this anaylsis. This is a book in which not being able to afford 500 count Egyptian cotton sheets is regarded as being a genuinely difficult thing, for which Casey deserves sympathy. It makes it a little hard to relate to.

Eventually, Casey decides to go to business school (irritatingly referred to as B school throughout), and the world of business is written about with such familiarity that I think I learn a little something about the author’s background, and about why the absence of 500 count sheets might be perceived as such a problem.

I just googled her, and if you look here you’ll see I won’t be needing to eat my bra.

CHARITY GIRL By Georgette Heyer


Georgette Heyer is an author of historical romances, usually set in the Regency period. Her novels are comic and well-plotted, and remind one for obvious reasons of Jane Austen. They don’t remind one too much however, as Austen is a great writer, while poor Heyer is more in the trying hard department. But! She’s charming and fun, and I loved her when I was in my early teens, so I was quite pleased to find her in another camping site’s book exchange.

It was a tiny bit of a letdown. It’s still funny and sweet, but I’m afraid my 33 year old self can see that it’s also horribly overwritten, and rather cynically plotted. Also, I don’t think anybody in any period speaks with quite as much period detail as her characters do. For example: I should like to know ma’am, what the dev – deuce – you mean by setting the servants to spy on me? By God, I think it beats the Dutch! I’ll say what I dashed well choose” etc etc and etc.

She was on the best-seller lists consistently from when she was seventeen though, for which I give her mad props. Note that CHARITY GIRL was first published in 1970, and my copy is the ninth edition, published 1981 (charmingly, it’s price was £1.50)

Apprently she was quite contemptuous of what she did, which I find rather sad. In 1943, speaking of a new novel of hers she said: “Spread the glad tidings that it will not disappoint Miss Heyer’s many admirers. Judging from the letters I’ve received from obviously feeble-minded persons who do so wish I would write another These Old Shades, it ought to sell like hot cakes. I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense, but it’s questionably good escapist literature and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter, or recovering from flu. Its period detail is good; my husband says it’s witty—and without going to these lengths, I will say that it is very good fun.” More here.

IT’S NOW OR NEVER by Carole Matthews


As you can see from this little beauty, things were not going well in the finding books to read while camping department. This one I found at one of those book swap things they have at campsites. I think the cover is trying to let me know that this is chick lit.

There are a pair of twin sisters, one trapped in a dull marriage, one in a painful affair with a married man, who decide to change their lives. They are inspired to do so by attending the birthday party of their older and more successful sister. You will not be amazed to learn that they succeed.

It was okay, in sort of a dumb way.