Tag: UK

Athill’s writing is just so completely clean and unpretentious it feels like a near-miracle. I am close to having read all her books, and am going slow, because I don’t want them to be over. Her memoir INSTEAD OF A LETTER was a searing story of getting dumped, while SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END is an only slight more searing story of what it is like to get old. This is not memoir, but fiction, and I did not like it quite as much.

It tells the story of a young woman who gets to move to London after the second world war. The freedom that I, fifty years later, take for granted, is for her and her friends completely unexpected and thrilling. She gets a job (!), has sex (!!), and meets immigrants (!!!). She is also a pretty cold-hearted tease. She’s a very pretty woman, and is not too bothered about making it clear when she is not interested. I don’t want to be too judgmental, but I found it really pretty mean.

Let’s close with a lovely snippet, about her arguing with her mother as a child: “If I sulked and cried I could usually make my mother cry too – during our rows we would sob rage and frustration at each other – but she always won because an adult’s tears are more frightening than a child’s . . “

It’s incredible how any time a book is really weird you can tell it is written from life. This one is really loopy, being a thinly fictionalized account of the author’s great-grandmother and grandmother. The great-gran is pretty intense, being a rigid and lonely old woman who spoke to no one but her one-eyed servant for months at a time. Eerily she spends most of all day in a hard-backed chair, in total idleness, not even reading a book. Her grandmother meanwhile appears to have had some kind of post-partum psychosis, believing in fairies and elves and trying to kill her son who she thought was a changeling. A lot of the action of the book takes place in a crumbling Irish stately home, which her grandfather does not have the money to keep up. I find it strange how many books there are about how difficult it is to have an inheritance. I’d like to give it a try.

This book apparently was denied the Booker because Philip Larkin, chair of the committee, thought it could not be classified as fiction. I have no evidence but you just know he thought women talking about their own lives was low value. It’s a good thing I love AN ARUNDEL TOMB so much or I would have a lot more to say on this.

Here is a highly season appropriate novel, about escaping the English winter. Four middle-class English ladies, all strangers, decide to spend a month in Italy together. The beginning is really fun, as the first of the ladies decides, in the depths of February, to blow her entire nest egg on the escape. Only those who have attempted to survive a London February can understand the urge to get CRAZY.

The plot doesn’t precisely work out, but who cares, it is such a fun novel of getting your life changed. One thing I did find weird, is I was thinking these ladies were old, based on the extraordinary dullness of their lives, but then it emerges they are only in their thirties! It’s amazing how many novels, even quite recent ones (this one is 1922), have this as the key takeaway: if I have to be born female THANK GOD it’s now and not earlier.

This book tells about a teenage girl who becomes a writer. I have read an awful lot of books that could be described as being that, as obviously: writers write what they know. This though is something different. The girl is a horrifying, self-absorbed anti-hero, or, in summary, #goals. Here she is on getting married: ” . . . she had thought of love with bleak distaste. She wanted to dominate the world, not one person.”

We follow her through a life of bestsellers and terrifying selfishness. It’s eerie and frightening. Elizabeth Taylor is just a fantastic writer. Her MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT was one of my favourite novels of last year, and while I did not like this one as much it is still objectively better than most things I read this year. Let me end by giving you this flavour, of her on a car ride:

She would have liked to drive on for ever, peacefully, jolting along in the warm air until it grew dark. The great brass lamps would be lit, drawing pale moths out of the blackness, bringing one tree forward after another, shining on closed flowers, on owls sitting on posts and cats’ eyes among the tall grasses.

Here is a book about becoming a bag lady.  Required reading, because we are all always at risk of bag ladydom.  The story begins with a young shopgirl marrying a wealthy widower in the early 1900s.  Today we’d call his behaviour coercive control.  Back then I suspect they just called it marriage.  For example, he is extraordinarily unwilling to give her any money. She doesn’t get anything for new clothes for twenty years, and has to steal it from the housekeeping allowance. 

She starts off reasonably normal, but over time gets stranger, starting to hoarde, and feeling that ordinary neighbours are somehow intrusive.  Then the husband dies, and I thought this was going to become an uplifting worm-turns type story, where she save herself. But it turns out to be a much more realistic kind of story, in which the worm keeps going the same way it always was. 

Once on her own, she finds she cannot bring herself to spend the money she now has, and is increasingly paranoid.  It’s so totally told from her point of view that you do not quite realize how bad it has got until right near the end. In an impressive piece of writing, the author introduces a brief interaction with a policeman, where you abruptly realize that she now seems to others to be a crazy old bag lady.  It is almost a jump scare. 

This book comes from a press that re-publishes forgotten books.  I often find that if someone has bothered to republish a book by a woman, it often a very good book.  Many more books by women have been forgotten than books by men, so the likelihood is higher I guess.  This writer, Gertrude Trevelyan, was famous even as a student at Oxford for her writing, and spent all her twenties dedicatedly writing, not travelling, not nothing, before dying in the London Blitz.  Seems sad she should be forgotten. 

I started this book at 10pm, in bed, and next thing I knew it was past midnight. I hadn’t even looked up.  It’s a long time since I got absorbed in a book so easily.  It reminded me of childhood, when I used to often read for hours.  I finished the whole thing the next day, despite being kind of busy.  I chose long bus routes on purpose so I would have time to read, and it’s a long time since I enjoyed a London bus so much. 

The story starts in a boys’  boarding school in England.  The one boy, Gaunt, is in love with the other boy, Ellwood. It’s hard enough at the best of times to tell if someone likes you back, but it’s especially hard for Gaunt, because its 1913, and despite all the boys sleeping with each other in this place (?) it’s also profoundly homophobic.  And that’s the other part: it’s 1913.  Gaunt enlists when the war starts, and we go to the trenches.  Ellwood follows him out there. 

The book is inspired by the IN MEMORIAM section of boarding school newspapers, that used to carry reports of deaths of old boys.  Before the war, this section was short, but after 1914 it became lengthy, there as large numbers of teenagers from the fanciest schools started dying.  It’s sad to think, for the younger boys, waiting to turn 18, how they went from the it’ll-be-over-by-Christmas enthusiasm of 1913 to just-waiting-for-my-turn-to-die in 1917, 1918. 

Reading this book gave me some hope that my phone has not permanently damaged my attention span.  What I need to be doing is spending more time on finding books I might actually like, because when I do, it’s like I am nine again, the internet’s not been invented, and my mind is still my own.