Category: fiction

THE NONESUCH by Georgette Heyer

In this novel a wealthy man falls in love with the governess.  Based on the novels, I’ve read, apparently this used to happen all the time in the old days.  I don’t know what these governesses had going on but it was REAL effective.

Of course the other option is that this is all wish fulfilment, and that in the past, just as today, people typically ended up with someone who was in the same income, same age, and same level of attractiveness.  Also, and this is very important, same level of willingness to settle and decide they can’t do any better. 

Definitely I prefer the wish fulfilment. 

THE UNKNOWN AJAX by Georgette Heyer

I needed some cheering up so decided to whip through a Heyer. My blog tells me I have read fifteen of her books in the last ten years, and this one was as comforting as any of them.

AJAX tells the story of a bankrupt aristocratic family who, due to a boating accident, are suddenly faced with an unknown cousin as their heir. Their scheme is to marry off the oldest daughter to this man. She violently objects. Being a Heyer, you know this is 100% what is going to happen.

It does indeed happen. But unusually for Heyer it does via lots of social issues, including customs duties, Napoleonic wars, champagne used for boot blacking, and the invention of the spinning jenny. But however she gets there, it happens cheerfully and all ends well. If only real life could step up to the Heyer bar. We seem to have all the social issues with none of the happy endings.

THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN by Wallace Stegner

Well here are some pretty serious #daddyissues.  This book tells the story of a couple who get married, have two children, and move restlessly across the Midwest looking to strike it big.  At least the father is looking to strike it big.  The mother is just hanging on.

It’s a broad sweep of middle America across decades, involving possum-hunting and gold-panning and bootlegging and the Spanish Flu.   (This was remarkably like todays’ COVID.  They went on lockdown, they wear masks, it made me wonder if really medical science has not come on that far after all)

The book is so jam packed with incident, some of it so random, that I started to suspect it must be based on  real life.  I also wondered this because it was so completely judgemental towards the father character.   This dad came from poverty, and pulled himself up into wealth.  He couldn’t stand the idea that he was going to be trapped in a $100/month job because of his lack of education and was always looking for the next big break. I found this kind of inspirational, like he was a class warrior.   His youngest son doesn’t take it that way, and is horrified by his bootlegging (but not so horrified that he doesn’t take that sweet moonshine money to pay for his law degree). 

I learn from the Introduction that indeed this is the story of Stegner’s own family.  Sadly his mother, brother and father all died within three years of each other, and it was then he decided to write about them.  This casts the book in a different light for me.  I see what it is, his effort to record and remember them, to create a monument to their messy lives.   I can’t imagine what it must be like to be the only one who remembers your childhood, though I guess that if I am lucky enough to live to a great old age I will find that out.    I wonder if I’ll want to write about it, when its only me left. 

EXCITING TIMES by Naoise Dolan

This writer wishes she was Sally Rooney.  So do I. 

Their settings are similar, being mostly about an Irish millennial’s love life, but for me it lacks Rooney’s clarity and intelligence.  It also has some extremely contradictory axes to grind about left-wing politics. 

Ava is teaching English in Hong Kong.  She moves in with a banker she is sleeping with, Julian, largely because she does not want to pay her own rent.  This makes her sound venal, and she is.  Meanwhile, she enjoys lecturing everyone about left-wing politics.  On the other hand, no one can say she is cheating Julian, because he emphasizes repeatedly that they are not in a relationship.  This upsets her, but as she says:  

I couldn’t even feel truly, sumptuously sorry for myself, because it wasn’t reciprocation I was craving.  My desire was for Julian’s feelings to be stronger than mine.  No one would sympathise with that.  I wanted a power imbalance, and I wanted it to benefit me.

So the book wasn’t all bad.  It had some sharp and accurate observations such as the above.  But it really fell apart when it came to social commentary.  Here she is meeting Julian

People who had gone to Oxford would tell you so even when it wasn’t the question.  Then, like ‘everyone,’ he (said he’d) gone to the City.  “Which city?” I said.  Julian assessed whether women made jokes, decided we did, and laughed. 

I mean this is just nonsense.  Generally people who have gone to e.g. Harvard will go out of their way to stay they studied in Boston and similar.  And in general young men will laugh at your jokes. It’s older men who struggle with that. So to me it was all came across as rather pat, academic social commentary about income inequality, by someone who has so far had rather a good time.   Take the fact that she refers to her teaching English as the whole “neo-colonial TEFL thing.”  This just drips privilege, as if it would be better for kids not to be able to speak the international language of business because it would make history neater.  Or try this, justification of her living with Julian:

Who would believe me if I said it made no difference whether I lived in his apartment or a dingy Airbnb?  Yes, I’d say, I am perfectly apathetic as to whether I spend most of my income renting a tiny room with people who hate me.  These things are quite subjective.  I could have soft towels and five-star dinners, or I could check my windowsill every morning to see how many cockroaches died there in the night.

What a heart-breaking analysis of the challenges of inequality.  An expensive Airbnb: I mean. 

THE THORNBIRDS by Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCollough was working as a medical researcher when she found out she was making less than male colleagues.  Determined to make more, she turned to art.  Incredibly, this gambit worked.  This epic of an Australian family was a bestseller and spawned a very popular mini-series. (“Instant vomit,” according to McCollough).

While I can see many issues with this book, including extreme cheese and really stilted dialogue, I have to go ahead and confess: I enjoyed it.   Partly, I enjoyed the plot, with this much older priest falling in love with this young girl.  But mostly I enjoyed the setting.  For example, did you know that if you can shear sheep fast, (three hundred a day) you are a ‘dreadnought’ and can make as much money from betting how fast you can go as from actually shearing.  Also did you know that in shearing sheds:

At each’s man’s stand . . . was a circle of flooring much lighter in color than the rest, the spot where fifty years of shearers had stood dripping their bleaching seat into the wood of the board

Despite this being in many ways an old-fashioned book, McCullough certainly is unafraid to advance a specifically female view of the world.  She has a lot to say about domestic drudgery, and about how no one actually loves any of their kids after the fifth, and about how the men in rural Australia think they are good kissers only because the women are good liars. 

That instant vomit thing tips you off. This lady was a character.  She was convinced all critics knew ‘in their hearts’ she was just smarter and better than them.  She wrote 30,000 words a day, and virtually ‘never made mistakes’ because she had perfect spelling and great grammar.  And she died a millionaire many times over, so take that, other medical researchers

Let me note that I read this in my absolute favourite format, which is a very elderly second hand paperback, with browned pages, and as an amazing bonus it even had a weird newspaper clipping as a bookmark.  Enjoy the mysterious caption especially: “I used to be a teenage doctor until I discovered eminence.”

NOTES ON A SCANDAL by Zoe Heller

This is a book about loneliness.  It titillates us with the idea that it is about an extraordinary scandal, but really it is about ordinary loneliness.    

The narrator is one Barbara, an unmarried woman who has been teaching for decades.  She recounts the story of her friend and colleague, 41 year old Sheba, who gets into a relationship with a 15 year student.  This story is ‘not about me,’ Barbara says, but of course it is.  Every story is about its teller.

It opens in the aftermath of the relationship becoming public in the papers.  I found this an interesting description of the press:

. ..  I could never have predicted the hysterical prurience of the response.  The titillated fury.  These reporters write about Sheba as if they were seven-year-olds confronting the fact of their parents’ sexuality for the first time. 

This made me laugh.  I have always thought it incredibly creepy how interested British people are in talking about child abuse, all the while acting like they are so shocked about it.  But anyway this is not the main point of the story.  The narrator is.  She is hilarious and insightful.  Here she is on Sheba’s breasts:

She had a dancer’s bosom.  Two firm little patties riding the raft of her ribs.  Bill’s eyes widened.  Antonia’s narrowed.

And on an awkward colleague

Even his most minor conversational sallies have an agonized, over-meditated quality . . . .  Talking to him is rather like attempting to converse with a school play. 

She is also so lonely it has poisoned her.  Let me just quote at self-indulgent length:

‘Purpose – that’s closer to it,’ Sheba said.  ‘Children do give you a purpose.  In the sense of keeping you busy, in the sense of something to get out of bed and do every morning.  But that’s not the same as meaning.’

I laughed rather bitterly, I’m afraid.  What I thought was: That is the sort of fine distinction that a married woman with children can afford to make.

But she was right.  Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world . . . You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths.  You make out To Do lists – reorganize linen cupboard, learn two sonnets.  You dole out little treats to yourself – slices of ice cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall.  And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this any more.  I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

She becomes obsessed with Sheba, and is the architect of her downfall, ensuring that she is eventually totally dependent on her.  Here she is talking about others:

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness – seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle-class lives.  They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized . . .

She is of course also talking about herself. I am not sure what I found so compelling about book.  I think it is because of the lockdown.  I am feeling much closer to craziness myself.

TO CALAIS, IN ORDINARY TIME by James Meek

I started reading this book in the glorious pre-pandemic days of one week ago when COVID was some Chinese problem.  It begins as a medieval quest, with an ill-assorted group of characters heading off to France.How jolly!  There’s a pig herder and a kinky sex scene with King Edward’s mother.

You hear a couple of things about the ‘qualm’ in France, but it is mostly dismissed as an invention of priests looking to get rich.  Then villages start to be empty, pits start to be found, and the first of the merry band die, and you realize that in fact this novel is not a story of a fun roadtrip but in fact an evocation of what is was like to see the Black Death take down England.  In almost exactly parallel time in real life COVID came to Italy and the UK went into lockdown. 

 I considered stopping reading but decided to keep going to see what lessons could be learnt.  What I mostly learnt was THANK GOD FOR THE GERM THEORY OF DISEASE. These poor people are just busy fooling around with bunches of flowers and amulets.  

In a ballsy move this author decided to write his medieavel novel in medieval language.  Incredibly, it works.  And more than works, it is almost half the appeal.  The characters are from varied backgrounds and all speak different kinds of language.  Here’s a wealthy lady about her servant:  

“It’s Cotswold,” she tells Pogge. “It’s Outen Green. As if no French never touched their tongues. I ne know myself sometimes what they mean. They say steven in place of voice, and shrift and housel for confession and absolution, and bead for prayer.”

These little snippets give a sense

 Ness’s deaf eldmother, Gert, who when she was young had seen the king ride by at a hunt like a giant, on a white horse, with gold stars on the harness, sat and span by the backdoor.

 And

 He told me truelove things, and made me laugh, and I would kiss him; but to kiss him were wrong.  And it was like to when I was a little girl.  Mum made an apricot pie, and left me with it, and forbade me eat even one deal of it. But I ate one deal, because it needed me a sweet thing, and after I’d eaten one deal, I was already damned, and might as well eat the whole pie. 

The characters are very varied. One is a priest, who is busy shrifting and houseling like there is no tomorrow as people die.  They don’t know too much about hygiene but they are very big on confession.

 I said that in the circumstances I would confine myself to mortal sins.  He need only confess to sacrilege, homicide, adultery, fornication, false testimony, rapine, theft, pride, envy and avarice.                  

There was silence.  Hornstrake inquired if I had finished, as he had expected there to be at least one sin he had not committed.

I gestured to the furnace. . . I did not opt, I said, to compel a confession by reminding him of the alternative, but eternity was of a very long duration. 

People often praise historical novels for being topical.  I can’t fault this one for that: it was super topical.  Topic being, pandemic.  However I think it was the non-pandemic, apricot pie parts I liked the best

 

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE by W. Somerset Maugham

I love Maugham’s book OF HUMAN BONDAGE, so I was excited to find this in my cousin’s bookcase.

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE is very loosely inspired by the life of the nineteenth century painter Paul Gauguin. It tells the story of one Charles Strickland, an English stockbroker who leaves his wife and children and runs away to Paris. Everyone assumes he is in love with another woman, but in fact he is in love with oil painting. This is met with general boggling by all his acquaintance.

He paints furiously while in Paris, and almost dies of starvation there. He eventually takes a passage working on a ship going east. When he finds Tahiti, he feels himself at last at home, moves in with a local woman, and continues to paint furiously till he dies of leprosy.

This book is quite interesting in terms of considering what qualifies as a worthwhile goal for your life, and in terms of what it means if your goal is not one that anyone else understands:

Each one of us is alone in the world….We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener’s aunt is in the house

.

So interesting, but, I thought, a little trite. The above is sort of like OF HUMAN BONDAGE, but on a bad day.

It also all seems to be written by W Somerset Misogynist. It’s only 217 pages, but manages all sorts of unexpected and distasteful discussions of his early twentieth century views on gender:

When a woman loves you she’s not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she’s weak she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her. She has a small mind, and she resents the abstract which she is unable to grasp. She is occupied with material things, and she is jealous of the ideal. The soul of man wanders through the uppermost regions of the universe, and she seeks to imprison it in the circle of her account – book.

Now, I never knew I could use my trusty account-book for encircling unwary souls! My small mind shall get right on that.

I am not surprised this has all come out in a book on Gauguin. I never liked those pictures of women he made, who all just stare out at you, half-naked, as if they had a secret and mysterious message, that message being BOOBS.

THE BRIEF AND WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO by Junot Diaz

“Of what import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galactus?”
(Fantastic Four, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Vol 1, No 49, April 1966)

And so begins this wonderful novel. Followed by, bizarrely, an entire poem by Derek Walcott, an important Caribbean poet.

This gives you a kind of sense of what a seriously loopy book this is, verging wildly from the highly literary, to pop culture, from English to Spanish, from Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic to contemporary New Jersey.

Oscar Wao is a fat guy who loves sci-fi to an unhealthy degree, and is permanently in hope of finding love with a lady. His story is intercut with that of his sister, who flees the US for their ancestral homeland of Dominican Republic, and with the stories of his grandfather and mother, and of what made them flee the DR (as he calls it) for America.

Oscar’s grandfather was tortured and murdered by the Trujillo regime, because he refused to offer his oldest daughter up freely to Trujillo to be raped. Oscar’s mother, the youngest daughter, was thus left an orphan. She grew up and was eventually forced to flee the DR after getting entangled in a stupid relationship with the husband of Trujillo’s sister. Oscar’s own story eventually leads him back to the DR, where he finally finds love (with an elderly prostitute) and is eventually murdered by her boyfriend’s heavies.

Actually as I write it out it sounds like rather a miserable and melodramatic tale. But so sparkling and irreverent is the voice of the novelist, so sure the comedy, so accurate the observation – especially of the world of fat dorks – that in fact the book is a non-stop delight.

I was particularly struck by how Diaz managed to mix together the many aspects of his life – first and third world, pop and literary culture – into one coherent identity. This is something I certainly can’t seem to achieve.

The poem that begins the novel, after talking about Derek Walcott’s varied backgrounds, ends:

“I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation”

PS. Zimbabwean? Want to feel a certain someone’s not that bad? Check out Trujillo’s dictatorship here. He eventually died in an assassination, but I must point out he had serious prostate problems too. . . Holding thumbs!

JULIET, NAKED by Nick Hornby

This little book begins in a toilet.

Duncan has dragged his girlfriend Annie to America on holiday to see the toilet because he is obsessed with the musician Tucker Crowe, who has not recorded any music in twenty years, retiring soon after a mysterious incident in this same toilet.

Duncan and Annie have been together for fifteen years. Annie is beginning to feel that, just as she initially drifted into the relationship, she ought now to drift out of it.

A new album of old Tucker Crowe material is released, and, primarily to irritate Duncan, Annie comments on it in an online forum of which he is an obsessive member. This impels Duncan to cheat on her and then sort of half-heartedly leave her. It also impels Tucker Crowe, astonishingly, to contact her, and say how much he appreciated her review.

Not very believably, she begins a correspondence with Crowe, who eventually visits her in England.

You may find that my plot summary there ends rather oddly, and the reason for that would be that the book itself ends oddly. It just sort of stutters to a close. I was left slightly confused as to what I was supposed to understand about the characters. Perhaps I just need to understand that Mr Hornby suddenly realized he had to get to the cleaners before they closed?

I enjoyed the presentation of the dangers of an easy relationship, and of finding yourself settling without ever making the decision to do so. I also really enjoyed the character of Duncan, who is a wonderfully believable 40-something music dork.

The whole book however was a bit like eating unsalted popcorn. It went down easy and was kind of fun, but didn’t leave much of a mark.