Tag: UK

MARIANA BY Monica Dickens

First of all let’s try to come to terms with the fact that Dickens was only twenty-four when she wrote this novel. And it wasn’t even her first, but her second, the first having been a BESTSELLER.

I can’t comfort you with the reflection that it is not good, because it is really rather good. It’s a coming-of-age story that mostly mirrors Dickens’ own. The section on her childhood is particularly impressive. I love this:

Mary climbed into the neat little cattle-pen and pretended she was a horse, which meant standing quite still and feeling like a horse inside, without any outward pantomime

Her early adulthood is interesting too, especially her unsuccessful stint at drama school. I suspect many can relate to her bleak summary of what happened to those who did not give up on that particular dream early enough:

(They) battered out their youth against the doors of agents, did crowd work for films or sacrificed their so-called innocence for a walking-on part or chance in Cabaret.

There is a particularly wrenching scene where she realizes the boy she has had a crush on for years is not seriously interesting in her, but has just been enjoying her devotion. The quality of the book takes an abrupt nosedive when, in her early twenties, she meets the man she will marry, Sam. Dickens has these two characters ludicrously simpatico. Allegedly even when apart they wake at the same time, eat the same food at the same time, speak the same words and even hear the same songs (?). Clearly this is drivel. Also imagine anyone you know getting a new boyfriend and having this view about a night out with friends:

Mary was longing to get away with Sam and discuss them all. That was the only point now for her, of going to any party.

I can only assume that the first part of the book was based on her actual experience, and this last part is what she hoped real love would be like. I googled it and indeed she did not get married till her late thirties. I can only imagine her views evolved. On my side I observe people in love can often hardly agree on the same way to load the dishwasher, never mind have the same sleeping/eating/ghostly song (?) hearing schedule.

FALSE COLOURS by Georgette Heyer

I’m starting to wonder if I’ve read all the good ones of these, because the last few have been pretty rope-y. In this one, a twin substitutes himself for his brother and ends up falling in love with his fiance. It feels like it’s going to be classic Heyer, everyone has grey eyes, the hero wears tight white breeches and etc. But it kind of gets derailed into strange ‘mystery’ plot twists. However it put me to sleep in many an overly air-conditioned motel room, which is what I asked of it.

THE PURSUIT OF LOVE by Nancy Mitford

The blog leads me to believe this is my sixth re-read, but I think it is more than that. I turn to this novel when I need something soothing, so it is often read late at night. I don’t very often recommend it to other people, though I love it, because I struggle to articulate what it is that I love about it so much. I think it’s partly that I find it funny; it’s partly that I can’t yet quite understand what it is about it that I find funny, so it’s mysterious; it’s partly a kind of robust pragmatism in the authorial voice that I find reassuring and that bucks me in when I feel like whining.

I did not especially like the recent TV version. I thought they softened it till it wasn’t funny any more, which was strange: a book from the 1940s is apparently too edge for the 2020s.

Let’s enjoy the first para together:

There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs. Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph, hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children. In the photograph Aunt Sadie’s face, always beautiful, appears strangely round, her hair strangely fluffy, and her clothes strangely dowdy, but it is unmistakably she who sits there with Robin, in oceans of lace, lolling on her knee. She seems uncertain what to do with his head, and the presence of Nanny waiting to take him away is felt though not seen. The other children, ….. all of them gazing at the camera with large eyes opened wide by the flash… There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment – click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.

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’ (?).

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.

SHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas Stuart

About ten pages into this book, I felt like I was getting into a hot bath. I just got ready to seriously relax. It’s exactly the sort of book I like: one that gives you a break from your own life, by deeply involving you in someone else’s.

It tells the story of a little boy being raised on some quite rough council estates by his alcoholic mother. I would bet heavy money that this book, while marketed as fiction, is based on the author’s own childhood. There is a certain subset of books in which the detail of daily life is so vividly captured that it can only come from a child’s eye, and ideally a child with a ton of trauma. It’s Glasgow in the 1980s, a place and a time I’ve never given a second thought to, and now I feel like I have a real experience of it. It joins such bizarrely disparate periods as Trinidad in the 1950s (courtesy, A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS) and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s (courtesy, FEAST OF THE GOAT read on a particularly hallucinatory 12 hour bus ride to Acupulco).

I won’t go on about everything I thought was wonderful about this book, but let me just leave you with this:

The other taxi drivers had taken on that familiar shape of men past their prime, the hours spent sedentary behind the wheel causing the collapse of their bodies, the full Scottish breakfasts and the snack bar suppers settling like cooled porridge around their waists. Eventually the taxi hunched them over till their shoulders rounded into a soft hump and their heads jutted forward on jowled necks. The ones who had been at the night shift a long time had turned ghostly pale, their only colour was the faint rosacea from the years of drink. These were the men who decorated their fingers with gold sovereign rings, taking vain pleasure from watching them sit high and shiny on the steering wheel

And that’s just taxi drivers! Imagine everything else that’s in there

THE ENDS OF THE EARTH by Abbie Greaves

Here is a book where everyone involved urgently NEEDS TO GO TO THERAPY.

It begins with a journalist discovering a woman who has been sitting at Ealing station every night for seven years, with a sign reading ‘Come home Jim.’ Clearly, this woman is the first person who needs to go the therapy. The journalist gets unhealthily involved in the story, and you better believe she also really needs to go to therapy.

The lady on the bench is called Mary and we learn about her first meeting with Jim, who was her boyfriend for six years before he left. Here is how he talks to her on one of their first meetings:

“You,” he continued. “There’s something . . . enigmatic about you. Quiet but fierce. Yes, maybe that’s it. Beautiful too, which helps, but that’s not it. I want to figure you out. I missed you these last few hours.”

This for me just drips with red flags. Who talks to anyone like that, and especially someone they only just met. Could it be all is not well? And indeed all is not well. I won’t give away any more than that, so as not to spoil it. While I didn’t quite buy the entire premise of THE ENDS OF THE EARTH, it’s a good engaging mystery, and I found myself sort of rolling my eyes but also turning the pages at a great rate.

Though let me say again: let’s all go to therapy sooner rather than later, and that goes double for men and triple for husbands.

SOME TAME GAZELLE by Barbara Pym

This book is about a pair of middle-aged spinsters living in an English village. It’s a sad, wise novel about the kind of small fantasies we need to keep ourselves going, especially when life has not turned out as we hoped.

Bizarrely, it turns out the author was just twenty-one when she wrote it. Apparently it progress forward her, and her sister, thirty years in the future. Their various university boyfriends also appear, older, fatter, and having rejected them.

The title is based on a poem by Thomas Haynes Bayly:

Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:

Something to love, oh, something to love!

One sister is still mooning over the local ArchDeacon, who decided to marry someone else decades ago; the other is always developing crushes on much younger curates, who are continually disappointing her by leaving to evangelize the Africans. Here are the kind of concerns, on knitting for the ArchDeacon:

When we grow older we lack the fine courage of youth, and even an ordinary task like making a pullover for somebody we love or used to love seems too dangerous to be undertaken. Then (the wife) might get to hear of it; that was something else to be considered. Her long, thin fingers might pick at it critically and detect a mistake in the ribbing at the Vee neck; there was often some difficultly there. . . . And then the pullover might be too small, or the neck opening too tight, so that he wouldn’t be able to get his heard through it. Belinda went hot and cold, imagining her humiliation.

Curiously though, both women do receive proposals over the course of the book, and both turn them down; there is an unacknowledged but clear view that in fact, if they could but see it, they are happy as they are, with their gardens and their puddings and their choice of corsetry.

It’s a very delicate little book, almost entirely about women, and domestic matters. I’m amazed, patriarchy being what it is, that it ever got published, because on the surface the concerns it embraces could not be smaller. The point being I guess that life is made up, mostly, of small concerns. And you have to find a way to live it anyway.

On the picture, by the way: it’s my first audio book!

MR SALARY by Sally Rooney

I didn’t know what the aftershave was called but I knew what the bottle looked like.  I saw it in drugstores sometimes and if I was having a bad day I let myself screw the cap off.

Truly I am becoming a superfan.  This is just vintage Sally Rooney and I am super into it. This is a single short story, sold in paperback, and apparently I bought it. Due to be a huge superfan. 

It is often a mistake to read more of an author when you really like any single book of theirs, for the reason that you begin to see through their tricks (e.g., don’t read BLOOD MERIDIAN after THE ROAD. You find out McCarthy just has a thing for men in transit).  But somehow this isn’t happening for me with Rooney, despite the fact that this tiny 33 page story, MR SALARY is straight from her playbook (i.e., tortured love affair, emotional distance, clever conversation).

Here a young woman who is pining for her much older housemate:

My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all

While being a super hard core millennial. 

My suitcase was ugly and I was trying to carry it with a degree of irony

Honestly I am not sure any other generation has ever been so afraid of sincerity.  Eventually she becomes brave enough to suggest they get together.  This is triggered by, bizarrely, her seeing a sleeping bag in a river. Along with everyone else on the bridge, she thinks it is a body.  When it is clear it is not, she realizes:

. . .I had stood there waiting to see the body in the river, ignoring the real living bodies all around me, as if death was more of a miracle than life was.

Write faster Sally Rooney!  I need MORE!