THE TRIALS OF RUMPOLE by John Mortimer

Here is a jolly and old-fashioned comic novel about a London barrister. It’s set in the early twentieth century, and we find not much has changed since then. An inter-city train is back then, as today, “a journey about as costly as a trip across the Atlantic,” while the summer sales on Oxford street are “a scene of carnage and rapine in which no amount of gold would have persuaded Rumpole to participate.”

The book covers a number of his cases, but it is not really the legal drama that is of interest, so much as the fun narrative voice. Here he is, for example, on his boarding school:

a wind-blasted penal colony on the Norfolk coast, where thirteen-year-olds fought for the radiators and tried to hide the lumpy porridge in letters from home

Perfect holiday reading. Do yourself a favour and google John Mortimer so you can enjoy his picture on Wikipedia. You can just smell the cigarette smoke coming off the screen. Impressively, he wrote all his novels while also having a long career at the bar. (Same for Trollope, and I often think of his comment: “All the success of my life I owe to the disciple of early hours”). In interesting trivia he married twice, both times to women named Penelope, and his father went blind after ‘hitting his head on the door frame of a London taxi’ (?).

THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH by Raymond Radiguet

This guy has an affair with a married woman when he is 15; writes a book about it at 17; and is dead by 20. Now this is what I call living. That said, I am grateful for the vaccination against Typhoid.

This lightly fictionalized story caused a scandal on publication because the husband being cheated on is away from home because he is serving in the frontlines of the First World War.

The woman is 19, and she and the author have an affair of high passion and higher risk. He goes to visit her to talk about literature (a gossamer thin excuse). Here we are:

She liked going to sleep in front of the fire with her hair unpinned. Or rather I thought she was asleep. In fact, her sleep was only an excuse to put her arms around my neck.

They end up making out, and eventually, after she gives him a bit of help, having a lot of sex. However, they know their love is doomed. Not because she is married, but because she is apparently too old for him:

In fifteen years life would still be just beginning for me, and women of the age that Marthe was now would be in love with me. . . . I was too well aware of the attractions of youth not to realize that I would leave Marthe when her youth was beginning to desert her and mine was still at its height

Truly, we have no idea how long an uphill battle feminism has had to fight in the twentieth century. Meanwhile he has some other interests. Try this on for an extra taste, when he is alone with a friend of hers :

I did not assume from her silence that my kisses had given her any pleasure; but she was incapable of indignation and could think of no polite way of rejecting me in French. I nibbled at her cheeks, fully expecting a sweet juice to squirt out, as from a peach. . . . Her only gesture of refusal was to move her head feebly from left to right, and from right to left. I did not delude myself, but my mouth took this t be the response it desired . . . I was naive enough to imagine that things would continue in the same fashion and that I would succeed in raping her without difficulty

I don’t even know what to comment on this.

In an unrealistic and abrupt turn of events the woman he is having an affair with dies. In real life, she lived, and her husband spent the next fifty years trying to prove to everyone the book was fiction. He was eventually buried with his wife’s letters and a book that celebrated the heroism of the soldiers of WWI. I feel bad for him, but then on the other hand he did get that extra fifty years to protest his wife’s virtue, while the author got fifty years of being dead.

LOVE LETTERS by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

This book, a collection of letters, gave me a lot of sympathy for people who fall in love with great writers. Poor Vita Sackville-West was an author herself, and her admiration for Virginia Woolf knows no bounds. Virginia, on the other hand, thinks Vita is kind of cute. Ouch.

Both these ladies were married, and both husbands were aware of this affair. I would like to say what I got from these letters was insights on art (there were these) or history of Tehran (there was that) but mostly I was interested by the gossip on how these intricate relationships worked. The love letters to each other are highly passionate, and then intercut with letters to their husbands. Here is one from Vita to her husband:

But darling Virginia is not the sort of person one thinks of in that way (of being in love). There is something incongruous and almost indecent in the idea. I have gone to bed with her (twice), but that’s all. Now you know all about it, and I hope I haven’t shocked you. . . Please make a comment of all this, and say you understand. But don’t say you understand unless you really do. My darling, you are the one and only person for me in the world; do take that in once and for all, you little dunderhead.

This would an impressively open relationship for the 2020s, and these letters were from the 1920s. Meanwhile Vita is also having side affairs with all sorts of others. No wonder she had no time for improving her writing. Meanwhile Virginia is continually writing, in part because unlike the wealthy Vita she needs the money (we learn that she spent much of the money from MRS DALLOWAY on a new toilet).

I stopped before the end, because I know Virginia killed herself, and I just didn’t want to go there. Letters carry the real life of someone, and it was just too sad to see it unravel.

THE DRIVER’S SEAT by Muriel Spark

Here is good writing put to little effect. It tells the story of a woman called Lise who goes on a mini-break, hoping to meet ‘the one.’ The author tells us from the beginning that Lise will end up murdered. The ‘one’ she is looking for is the one who will kill her, as she wants to die. Eventually, she lucks out and meets a man recently released from an asylum. Here they are shortly after meeting:

“Sex is normal,” he says. “I’m cured. Sex is all right.”

“It’s all right at the time and it’s all right before,” says Lise, “but the problem is afterwards. This is, if you aren’t just an animal. Most of the times, afterwards is pretty sad.”

Yes, it’s red flags galore.

She tells him she just wants to be murdered, not raped; he can do that ‘after.’ However, once they are alone in the dark park, he does his raping first. As to why, there I can’t help you. Men will need to be explaining their issues on that one.

Anyway, I found it kind of lame, despite objectively being unable to deny it was wonderfully written. Partly, not to be all woke about it, but all of this begging to die seemed a bit victim blame-y. You can die on your holidays without going looking for it. I think though my issues were less socio-political than artistic. The whole book was written at a sort of bizarre kind of remove. I think the introduction has it:

. . .the great flaw in post-modernism, however, has always been that the writer’s freedom to expose the fictionality of fiction tends to be precisely paralleled by the reader’s freedom not to care what happens in the book.

I mean, yup.

ALL MY CATS by Brohumil Hrabal

I can’t think I’ve ever read a book before about our love for cats. Or pets in general. This is strange, because there are books about love for people, for money, for landscapes, for cities, and etc; and I think domestic animals are as much beloved as any of those things, and perhaps more.

I suspect this reticence all comes down to our guilt about meat, but that’s a post for another time. In any case, on this book, which I think is non-fiction, the author truly loves his cats. His problem is, where the line should be. In summary, he goes deep.

He starts off with just a few cats. His favourite is Blackie:

I never tired of looking at her and she was so fond of me she’d practically swoon whenever I picked her up and held her to my forehead and whispered sweet words in her ear . . Whenever I’d look at her, she’d go all soft and I’d have to pick her up and for a moment I’d feel her go limp from the surge of feeling that flowed from me to her and back again, and I would groan with pleasure

The problem comes when these cats start having kittens, who have kittens themselves. The house is overrun. Eventually he decides he has to kill them. He does it himself, and buries them, covered in geraniums. And then the meltdown starts. He killed them by bashing them to death inside a mailbag, and he develops a real mania about this mailbag. It sounds like of laughable written down but it is gruesome and sad to read. His problem is that he can’t decide at what level it is appropriate to love animals. He wants to love them how he loves them, which is a lot, but the world is not set up that way.

He is having some kind of breakdown when he gets into a car accident, which he accepts as some kind of cosmic justice from the mailbag. It’s hard to explain but it makes him feel better. Then he chances upon a swan, stuck in a rapidly freezing river, and is unable to save it. It’s a tribute to this strange book that again, it’s hard to explain, but you somehow feel that this is a truly appalling event, and a fitting finale, to whatever it is that this book is about.

BATH TANGLE by Georgette Heyer

This blog tells me this is my 18th Heyer. It was exactly what I was looking for, a meringue of a book. It’s a Regency romance, of course, but an unusual one, as involved people cheating on each other, which I can’t think I’ve ever seen from her before.

Though the picture shows the coffee shop at the Wallace Collection, I mostly listened to it on audio book while doing DIY: ripping up carpets and sanding my Victorian floorboards. It is strange to think my flat is so old that the floorboards are almost the same time period as the story.

A BURNT-OUT CASE by Graham Greene

Here is an architect who decides that the best place to handle his existential crisis is a leper colony in the DRC.

I love Graham Greene. Going backwards through my blog, I realize this is my ninth book of his. And I’m sorry to say my least favourite. He is all about lost men racked with guilt (which usually, for some reason, I apparently love) but this one was really a bridge too far.

First of all, I’m not going to say the DRC is like an ideal holiday location, but he comes it a bit strong here, calling it ‘a continent of misery and heat.’ Second of all, it is a bit hard to sympathise with you about losing your faith when you are going on about it among lepers who have lost their hands and feet.

STRANGER IN THE SHOGUN’S CITY by Amy Stanley

Here is a touching tribute to an ordinary life.  It’s a carefully researched, incredibly detailed account of the life of a real woman in 19th century Japan.  She didn’t do anything very impressive. She got fired a lot, from various jobs as a domestic worker, and  went through husbands at an incredible rate.  And yet this author has gone into her life in such detail that we know where she lived in her first two weeks in Edo (now Tokyo); who her neighbours were; and how much she ended up owing her landlord.

In addition to learning a lot about this woman’s, private life, at least as far as she described it in her letters, there is much that is super interesting about Japan in the early 1800s.  She grew up in the countryside, and had an unusually large number of siblings.  Her parents were religious, and thus they “believed that infanticide – fairly common among other peasants – was a sin.”   (I love how casually she chucks in that families were small because babies were being murdered.)

Apparently not just baby’s lives were a luxury, so too were clothes.  Many families had fewer clothes than people.

The shogunate even commended virtuous daughters for going without clothes in the dead of winter so that their parents could wear robes. 

Manual labourers were apparently always pretty much naked, and compensated by covering their bodies in tattoos.  Some made clothes out of paper (preserved with persimmon juice, as you do).  Often the paper had already been used for its normal function, so you could still read letters on it, and for a while among wealthy people clothing with writing on it became a sort of ironic craze. 

The woman moves to Edo to work for a wealthy family, and we learn about the rigours of attending the shogun.  She is disappointed to find out that the ‘Edo hair’ everyone talked about in the countryside is worn by no one at all in Edo.  Everyone had to look the same, so bald men had to glue false topknots on; and they had to wear so much clothing they could not easily take it off, meaning they carried around brass tubes to pee into.

Okay I have a LOT of other interesting factoids.  But I’ll stop.  

MOTHERHOOD by Deborah Orr

I spent this entire memoir waiting for the other shoe to drop.  It’s written with the strong implication that the author has been profoundly traumatized by her childhood, so I kept waiting for the trauma to happen.  There are many times when she tells us she doesn’t want us to think too harshly of her parents, and indeed she succeeded, because as far as I can tell they were pretty good. 

Here is a comment from her mother, that she regards as scarring:

“When I was having you, Deborah, your dad said to me, ‘As far as I am concerned, the chicken comes before the egg.’  Wasn’t that a lovely thing to say?”

I really don’t see it.  What husband wouldn’t prioritize his wife over a fetus? 

She finds out her parents don’t have much sex.  This is not any of her business, in my view.  But it in her view:  “It’s the shocking secret at the heart of my existence.” 

I can only say: ? 

Perhaps the problem is this is my second memoir of a de-industrializing Scotland in the seventies in under a month, and the first was the magically good SHUGGIE BAIN.  They are really not in the same league.  Let me give you a sample of some insight from this one:

People.  We are so tough and so fragile, both at once, we humans

OKAY.  I don’t want to be mean.  But it really wasn’t my favourite.