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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.

COMING UP FOR AIR by George Orwell

This is a book about a man who does not succeed in blowing up his life. He is an insurance salesman, married with two children, and labouring under a mortgage. (In a sign that things were better back then, the mortgage is only for sixteen years. WTF is up with London housing)

One day he conceives a desire to go fishing, as he was an avid fisherman as a boy. He has not however fished since he was sixteen. Here’s why:

In this life we lead – I don’t mean human life in general, I mean life in this particular age and this particular country – we don’t do the things we want to do. It isn’t because we’re always working. . . . It’s because there’s some devil in us that drives us to and fro on everlasting idiocies. There’s time for everything except the things worth doing. Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you’ve actually spent doing it. And then calculate the time you’ve spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railways junctions, swapping dirty stories and reading the newspapers.

He bunks off from his family to go and spend a week in the village in which he grew up, which he has not seen in twenty years. In his mind ‘as permanent as they pyramids,’ he arrives to find it now just an outer suburb of London, and not an especially nice one at that. He buys a fishing rod and does not use it. He sees an old girlfriend, and is horrified and how old she looks. Fat and with false teeth himself, he assures us that men never go so far downhill as women do. Sometimes the patriarchy is really adorably deluded.

He ends up going home, concluding there is no escape from his life. The year however is 1938, and the book has hanging over it very explicitly the coming war. You feel he will almost welcome it.

Side point. Orwell published a bunch of books you’ve never heard of, including this, and then in 1945, Animal Farm; and in 1949, the novel 1984. Then in 1950 he was dead, at 47. Imagine: he managed to squeeze in two seminal classics just before the end. Imagine what would have come next. Imagine how close to the wire he cut it.

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.

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR by Daniel Defoe

I thought this would be pandemic appropriate reading. Apparently this thought of mine has already been predicted at scale, because someone has emergency published a edition and put it on Amazon. Truly, if people are looking to seventeenth century literature for their margin, then nothing is safe. I’m going to go ahead and call it: this truly is late capitalism. I don’t know what comes after this, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be good.

Perhaps this is dramatic. The past is not usually so very different from the future. I learn from this book is that the last pandemic to hit London (the bubonic plague in 1664) is not so very different from this one. Try this:

We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since. But such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now.

I see then as now they were shocked by how quickly things went viral.

The story is about a man who, unlike most wealthy people, decides to try and ride out the plague in town, rather than rushing to the country. While Defoe did not actually live through the plague, his uncle did, and most people believe this is pretty fair evocation of what it was like. Just like today, it was hardest for the poorest:

The truth is, the case of poor servants was very dismal, as I shall have occasion to mention again by-and-by, for it was apparent a prodigious number of them would be turned away, and it was so. And of them abundance perished, and particularly of those that these false prophets had flattered with hopes that they should be continued in their services . . .

The rich meanwhile fled easily, carrying the plague with them all over the country. Those left behind as today found ways to work through it. Shops made you put your money in a bowl of vinegar before your touched it.

Other things were not like today. While this vinegar thing does not sound like a bad idea, they had some much worse ones. Lots of people thought writing ABRACADBRA on a piece of paper and tying it around your neck would do the trick. Perhaps I just need to clarify, for those people who believe that e.g., 5G causes corona, but that is does not in fact work. Indeed they had ‘dead carts’ circling around eery night, and they would holler, “Bring out your dead,” so they could take them to the pits. Let’s end on this long piece about the pits.

I went all the first part of the time freely about the streets, though not so freely as to run myself into apparent danger, except when they dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish of Aldgate. A terrible pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it. As near as I may judge, it was about forty feet in length, and about fifteen or sixteen feet broad, and at the time I first looked at it, about nine feet deep; but it was said they dug it near twenty feet deep afterwards in one part of it, till they could go no deeper for the water; for they had, it seems, dug several large pits before this. For though the plague was long a-coming to our parish, yet, when it did come, there was no parish in or about London where it raged with such violence as in the two parishes of Aldgate and Whitechapel.

I say they had dug several pits in another ground, when the distemper began to spread in our parish, and especially when the dead-carts began to go about, which was not, in our parish, till the beginning of August. Into these pits they had put perhaps fifty or sixty bodies each; then they made larger holes wherein they buried all that the cart brought in a week, which, by the middle to the end of August, came to from 200 to 400 a week; and they could not well dig them larger, because of the order of the magistrates confining them to leave no bodies within six feet of the surface; and the water coming on at about seventeen or eighteen feet, they could not well, I say, put more in one pit. But now, at the beginning of September, the plague raging in a dreadful manner, and the number of burials in our parish increasing to more than was ever buried in any parish about London of no larger extent, they ordered this dreadful gulf to be dug—for such it was, rather than a pit.

They had supposed this pit would have supplied them for a month or more when they dug it, and some blamed the churchwardens for suffering such a frightful thing, telling them they were making preparations to bury the whole parish, and the like; but time made it appear the churchwardens knew the condition of the parish better than they did: for, the pit being finished the 4th of September, I think, they began to bury in it the 6th, and by the 20th, which was just two weeks, they had thrown into it 1114 bodies when they were obliged to fill it up, the bodies being then come to lie within six feet of the surface. I doubt not but there may be some ancient persons alive in the parish who can justify the fact of this, and are able to show even in what place of the churchyard the pit lay better than I can. The mark of it also was many years to be seen in the churchyard on the surface, lying in length parallel with the passage which goes by the west wall of the churchyard out of Houndsditch, and turns east again into Whitechappel, coming out near the Three Nuns’ Inn.

Okay, these pandemics are not that similar. I am so grateful for modern science. These anti-vaxxers, 5G-ers, climat change deniers: to the pits with them.

THE SECOND SLEEP by Robert Harris

I rarely read thrillers, but this came up on a lot of ‘best of 2019’ lists so I gave it a try. It was fun. The cover screams ‘book for boys,’ complete with stupid gold font for the author’s name, while the name itself sounds like it could have been created by some kind of generic best-selling-man-name generator.

It begins with a priest going to bury another priest, who was a noted antiquarian. You think at first it is set in the medieval period, SPOILER ALERT, but then when he gets to the dead priest’s house, he examines his collection of antiquities and you find it is lots of bits of plastic and glass, and one smooth and shiny box, with “on the back the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy – an apple with a bite taken out of it.”

BOOM! That’s right, it’s not the far past, it’s the far future, and my particular favourite far future, which is the post-apocalypse. Side point, it’s interesting how no one ever calls the present day the pre-apocalypse, even though that’s clearly what it is.

This setting is so fun that it triumphantly carries us through the book. These future people are so mystified by our leavings – the concrete pillars that supported motorways; an item which:

opened like a book. A pane of glass on one side; on the other, squares of black plastic, each inlaid with a letter of the alphabet.

It makes you see the modern world in a whole new way.

That said, I can’t say the book exactly went anywhere. There was a lot of plot, but not to very much effect, and the author at the end clearly recognized his difficulties and without shame SPOILER ALERT randomly killed off everyone in a mudslide. That’s what I call efficiency in novel writing.