Category: romance

TWILIGHT by Stephenie Meyer

For the benefit of those of you who have been being held by Columbian rebels for the last few years, I will summarise the TWILIGHT plot. A central character, unashamedly named Bella Swann, moves to a new high school. There she meets Edward Cullen, who is strangely beautiful. They fall in love. She discovers he is a vampire. He is a kind of vampire who has learnt not to eat people. A people-eating kind of vampire tries to kill Bella, and Edward saves her.

At first, I really enjoyed this book. It has real-page turning power. It’s very compelling, the will-they-won’t-they and the suppressed sexual tension, and I was just thinking: I see why this is a hit! I am so in touch with the zeitgeist! With the mind of the common man! Let’s watch the movies!

When, sadly, it all just got too stupid for anything. I tried, god knows, I tried. If I could like it, I know I could be a different type of person: Fun! Happy-go-lucky! Down-to-earth! Etc!

But, I mean, god:

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him – and I didn’t know how potent that part might be – that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

Here‘s an interesting article about the author, who is an Arizona based Mormon mother-of-three who has never even seen an R-rated movie. This starts to make it clearer as to why while the book is very sexy, nothing sexual actually happens. It also helps to explain some of Edward’s clothing choices:

He was removing a light beige leather jacket now; underneath he wore an ivory turtleneck sweater. It fit him snugly, emphasizing how muscular his chest was.

I was reading this book at the same time as RABBIT, RUN, which is a novel that makes a serious attempt to understand how relationships work. It made for a lurid comparison with TWILIGHT, where the main hurdle – falling in love – is handled in the first couple of chapters. Thereafter, all major threats are external; whereas, at least in my unhappy experience, most major threats are entirely internal.

Geez. I will never be Fun! and Down-to-earth! at this rate.

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE by Dodie Smith


This is such a wonderful book, I don’t even know what to do with myself. I began it on the train home from Bath in the evening, and suffice to say I finished it all before bed time. You know how it is when you look at the clock and it’s 00:05, and then, ten minutes later it’s 01:20? At that point, you’re sleep schedules all fucked anyway, so you may as well just keep reading! Hurray! It was a total binge.
Though now, as with all the best binges, I’m sorry for it. Because now I have no more I CAPTURE THE CASTLE to read. The cover says: “I know of few novels – except Pride and Prejudice – that inspire as much fierce lifelong affection in their readers as I Capture the Castle.” (Joanna Trollope) And I believe it. The first person I told about having read it practically chewed my arm off in delight, as she loves it too, and she told me it was recommended to her initially in an equally crazed fashion. I looked it up on Amazon, and it has a vast majority of 5 stars. Though three morons who need to smoke less crack gave it 1 star.

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE is written in journal format; and that that is successful is a major feat I think. It’s a hard thing to do. That ghost story I read a few books ago was in that format, and it was sadly creaky: the hardy young explorer was bizarrely literary, and kept saying “I write this journal because xyz” in a not very believable way. I CAPTURE THE CASTLE is very successful in this respect. It’s allegedly written by a seventeen year old girl, and not only is the voice itself charming, but, amazingly, it remains believable as she changes and grows over the course of the journal.

The girl, called Cassie, lives in a delipidated old castle with her sister and brother, her stepmother, and her father, who is struggling with his second decade of writers’ block. As their father is not writing, they have almost no income, and while very middle class, are so poor as often to be underfed. The owner of the nearby manor home dies, and his estate passes into the hands of his American nephew Simon. Simon and his cousin Neil arrive, and the former falls wildly in love with Cassie’s sister Rose. Rose is swept up in preparations for the wedding, and only slowly discovers that she does not in fact love her new fiance. In a quite unexpected twist, Cassie falls in love with him too, and this causes much upset. The book captures very well the sort of achingly painful love that is so common in adolesence and, thank god, not so very common afterwards.

There is much that is beautiful in the writing of this book: there’s one bit, about a nightime swim in a moat, that is just gorgeous. There’s a lovely capturing of English countryside too, and a real love of a certain English way of life. It makes me sad blogging about it because I’ve already read it, and there’s no more left.

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.

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.