Harriet Devine's Blog

Gilbert Adair

I kept hearing about Gilbert Adair's pastiches of classic crime novels and became really curious to read them. Happily I got all three from Faber's and have now read the first two. What did I think of them? To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure. Gilbert Adair is a critic and essayist and, I imagine, has turned to this kind-of spoof genre for a bit of fun. As you can see from the titles, he is parodying -- or paying homage to -- or both -- Agatha Christie. The novels are set in the middle years of the 20th century, the first in 1936 and the second ten years later, in 1946. Both feature a woman crime writer, Evadne Mount ("the Dowager Duchess of Crime"), and her friend the retired detective inspector Trubshawe. Both feature ingenious crimes. In Roger Murgatroyd, which is set in a country house completely cut off from the outside world by a snowstorm, it is a classic "locked room" murder -- the corpse is found in the attic, the door locked on the inside, no other means of entry. There is much discussion in the novel about the ways in which crime writers have used this idea, though Evadne herself does not think much of it. The solution, when it arrives, is rather absurd, but just about believable. I thought the ending rather a sell-out -- of course I can't tell you who did it, but though it was a surprise, it seemed very contrived. And as for the final paragraph -- well, you'll have to read it to see what you think. I'm afraid "silly" sprang to my mind. All in all, though I could see how clever this was in its sly references -- to other writers, other novels and so on -- I was not terribly knocked out with it.
Nothing daunted, though, I embarked on the second one, and enjoyed it rather more. Although I find Evadne rather irritating, as I guess she is intended to be, I have warmed a good deal to Trubshawe -- their relationship is nicely done, and quite touching. This one takes place partly in post-war London and partly at Elstree studios, where the murder takes place. In fact it takes place during the making of a film, and it is Evadne's great friend (and ex-lover) the actress Cora Rutherford who is murdered. This is done in such an ingenious way that there are only five suspects, none of whom appears to have any motive at all. Of course Evadne figures it out in the end, though once again I found the denouement a little disappointing. Along the way, she and Trubshawe learn a good deal about films, and filming, and film style, all this quite entertainingly done.

So what's my final verdict? Perhaps it should wait until I've read the third one. But my thoughts right now are that though these are clever novels, the cleverness is a little too obviously foregrounded for my liking. I read some Amazon reviews and they were sharply divided between people who thought the novels "hysterically funny" and those who didn't get it at all. I suppose I fall somewhere between the two. But I find myself rather looking forward to the third one, so perhaps I am being slowly won over.

Woman Reading (not)

This painting, by JBP Corot, is called 'Interrupted Reading'. Painted in 1870. Is she thinking about the book? Or is she daydreaming about a lover? What do you think?

The Dead Secret

 Having recently been reading what one commentator called cod Victorian, I felt a strong desire for the real thing. As it was Wilkie Collins who seemed to be the main influence behind Michael Cox's novel, I bethought me of this, which I've had on the TBR pile for a while but had never read. It's one of Collins' earlier works, written just before the huge success of The Woman in White, and while it is not as strong as that famous book, it is an enthralling and readable story. Set largely in Cornwall,which Collins had visited and even written a guidebook about, it's a sensation novel with gothic and supernatural overtones. Illegitimacy, the fallen woman, mistaken identity, and physical disability all get an airing in the exciting plot. The novel starts in 1829,when, in remote Porthgenna Tower, Mrs Treverton lies on her deathbed. Strewn around her are play scripts and prompt books, relics of her youth on the stage. But these are not the subject that preoccupies her in her final hours.  Her main concern is to dictate a letter to her husband, to be read by him after her death. The person who is charged with writing the letter is her servant Sarah Leeson, a woman of striking appearance -- despite being only in her twenties, she has completely grey hair which contrasts strangely with the youth of her face. It is clear that the mistress and her servant are linked by some powerful past history, and despite Sarah's vehement protests, this "Secret" is the subject of Mrs Treverton's final letter, which she makes Sarah swear she will not remove from the house after her death. Her intention is that Sarah should hand the letter to Captain Treverton, but death intervenes before the final vow to do this can be taken. Sarah, already a nervous and troubled woman, is thrown into great distress by these commands and decided to fulfill the part of the vow she has taken by hiding the letter in a disused wing of the house where she hopes it will never be found. Then, silently and sorrowfully taking leave of five-year-old Rosamund Treverton and stopping only in the graveyard to shed tears over the grave of a young miner, she disappears from the scene.The action then shifts forward fifteen years, to find Rosamund an attractive and lively young woman, just married to the blind Leonard Frankland. When the young couple inherit Porthgenna Tower they decide to go and live there, and to restore the long unused north wing. But on the way to Cornwall they have a chance meeting with Sarah, whose strange behaviour and dreadful warning -- "do not go into the Myrtle Room" -- puzzles and troubles Rosamund, who sets out to discover what the Secret may be.

I understand some readers were bothered by the fact that they guessed the secret well ahead of Rosamund, and certainly it is clear what it is before the characters arrive at the discovery of the letter. But that is not really the point. Sarah is a fascinating character, an extraordinary study in nervous affliction, and her story, when it is finally revealed, is a bold one for its time. But really it is Rosamund who drives the novel. Strong, intelligent, honest and generous, she is the "eyes" of her gentle blind husband, who she often shocks by her familiarity with servants and her determination to forge ahead with her daring plans. Great stuff. 

Chap Reading

It's been a while since we had one of these. This is by Leon Bakst, and it's a portrait of Alexandre Benois, painted in 1898. If you've heard of Leon Bakst you may, like me associate him with Diaghilev, for whose Ballets Russes he did some amazing costume designs -- think Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose, or his amazing designs for The Firebird, for example. But here he is in his other mode, as a fine portrait painter. As for the subject, Alexandre Benois was a fellow artist, art historian and critic, and he also designed for the Ballets Russes. I like his face, and the concentration and evident pleasure with which he is reading. Some of Bakst costumes below.

The Glass of Time

I was at the library the other day returning some books when this caught my eye. I'd never heard of the book but I liked the cover, the title sounded intriguing, and Michael Cox's name was familiar. Turns out that this was because he not only wrote a biography of the great Victorian ghost story writer M R James (which I have not read) but also edited, or co-edited, two anthologies of Victorian ghost stories, which I have made use of in the past. So I grabbed The Glass of Time and read it rather fast, despite the fact that it is, as Dan Brown would put it, a weighty tome -- 544 pp. in hardback. Goodness me, it is a story full of mysteries, twists and turns. The product description gives a taster:

1876.   Nineteen-year-old orphan Esperanza Gorst arrives at a great country house of Evenwood to be interviewed for the position of lady's-maid. But Esperanza is no ordinary servant.  She has been sent by her guardian, the mysterious Madame de l'Orme, to uncover the dark and dangerous secrets that her new mistress has sought to conceal, and to set right a past injustice in which Esperanza's own closest interests are bound up. Gradually those secrets are revealed, and with them the truth of who Esperanza really is, enmeshing her in a complicated web of intrigue, deceit, and murder that culminates in betrayal by those she trusted most.

An intriguing plot, then. But something like this really stands or falls -- for me, at least -- on the success or otherwise of the Victorian pastiche, for that in essence is what it is. There's a lot of it about these days (I wonder why?) and some of it is not all that great. But Michael Cox has done it pretty well. There are several references to Esperanza's reading, which is almost always Wilkie Collins, and it is undoubtedly his wonderful novels which are the primary influence on this story. Mistaken identities, uncertain parentage, injustices, secrets, murders -- here they all are in almost bewildering profusion. In fact I did get a bit bewildered at times as it all seemed to be coming at me thick and fast and I had trouble remembering who was who and what past twists of the plot had affected the doings of the present -- though the fact that I was reading it in the small hours when I really should have been asleep might have had something to do with that. There were a few of those twists I felt slightly dubious about, and others that I anticipated quite early on, well ahead of Esperanza, for all her brilliant powers of deduction. But it was overall a rather good read. I only realised after I'd finished it that it is actually a sequel to Cox's first book, The Meaning of Night, so I'll obviously have to read that. I just hope that having read the second one won't spoil my enjoyment of the first.

Sunday Salon: Food for the Brain

I do have a brain of sorts, and there was a time when I used to feed it a pretty good and stimulating diet. Nowadays, though still well fed, it tends to get a rather less varied range of fodder -- not junk food, exactly, but (how far can I stretch this metaphor?) stuff that tastes good, is easily digested, but does not really challenge its taste buds. So I was very pleased to receive a complimentary copy of Liverpool University's delightful magazine The Reader, which is stimulating without being indigestible, occasionally challenging but never overwhelmingly so.
The magazine is eleven years old, but was recently taken over by a new editor, Philip Davis, who wants to keep it true to its original aim:

to encourage readers to extend their horizons. The Reader is not academic, it is not arty, it is not preachy, it is not exclusive. It is a magazine concerned with the direct effect of books on readers, with the human content and purpose of literature.

The issue I have in front of me, no. 33, certainly seems set fair to do all that. It's a most attractive mixture of all kinds of things -- poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and comments from readers, among others. At only 128 pages you might think not much could be fitted in, but you'd be wrong. You can read the work of eight poets, four short pieces of fiction, four short essays, three reviews, and lots more. A veritable feast.There's a wonderful piece by Ian McMillan about the difficulty of writing dialect successfully which includes a conversation he overheard on a bus in Barnsley:
Man 1: Or8? Man 2: R. R Yore? Man 1: Did tha gu? Man 2: R. Crap. Man 1: Reyt. Man 2: Reyt. Man 1: Reyt then. Man 2: Reyt then.
McMillan's translation of this is very funny, but you'll have to get the magazine to read that. I very much enjoyed Professor Jonathan Bate's essay 'Reading Shakespeare's Mind', which prefaces an extract from his recent and much-praised book The Soul of the Age, and Shakespeare gets another crack of the whip in three poems by David Constantine on themes from King Lear and in his essay on Antony and Cleopatra. The great American critic Camilla Paglia writes fascinatingly about the selection process of poems to include in her book of poetry criticism Break, Blow, Burn. There's an inspiring account by Jane David, entitled 'Silver Threads Among the Dross', of Liverpool's Get Into Reading project, which starts in Primark and makes its way, by way of Paradise Lost, to Terry Pratchett. There are readers' letters and recommendations, even a crossword. In fact wherever you put in your thumb you are certain to pull out a very tasty plum. And you can get all this for £6.95, or four issues a year for £24, if you live in the UK -- just a little more if you don't. Highly recommended.

Innocent in Death

Call me ignorant, if you like, but I had never heard of Nora Roberts nor indeed of her alter ego JD Robb. Clearly I am in a minority here as I see she has published "over 150 New York Times bestselling novels". Anyway, I happened upon this recently in a garden centre of all places -- well, I say that, but in fact garden centres in the UK are now full of all kinds of things which have nothing to do with gardening. This one, not my usual stamping ground, had a large book department, in which all the paperbacks were selling for 3 for a fiver (that's £5 to you foreign lot). Cheaper, in fact, than many charity shops these days. The trouble was that there were few books I actually wanted to read. Nothing daunted, I decided it was too good an offer to miss, so I trawled around trying to decide what might conceivably interest me. As I am such a sucker for crime, it was on the cards that I'd go for something along those lines, and this once certainly is. It is a fairly recent (2007?) addition to a series of at least 24 novels, all featuring the female detective Eve Dallas and her impossibly rich, gorgeous, brilliant husband Roarke. What I had not noticed until I started reading it was that this series' USP is that the novels are set in New York City in 2060. If I had noticed this it might have put me off, as science fiction is not my cup of tea. In fact it is so lightly done here that it is hardly noticeable -- it just takes the form of slightly more sophisticated technology, really, and I have to admit it's quite clever. The plot, too, is certainly well done, and I found it quite a page turner. The novel starts with a young, newly married teacher being found dead from poison in his classroom. The expensive private school where he teaches is highly respectable on the surface, but when Eve starts to investigate she finds all kinds of sexual shenanigans have been going on on the quiet. There seems to be an obvious suspect, but when they too are found murdered Eve has to rethink her conclusions. This is all made much more difficult because an old flame of her husband's, the beautiful blonde Magdalena, has turned up and seems determined to get Roarke back. Eve's gradual realisation of the identity of the killer, and the methods she has to pursue to entrap them, are well done indeed. I was less enamoured of Eve herself -- hard boiled, unsentimental, but deeply in love with her billionaire spouse -- and found said billionaire spouse a bit too good to be true. There's lots of passionate sex between them, if you like that sort of thing. Still, it's quite a well written book -- no Baldacci or Dan Brown infelicities here -- and you never know, I might just pick up another one sometime if the price is right.

The Dogs of Riga

I think this is the third Wallander novel I've read in as many weeks. I see on Amazon that people are quibbling a bit -- "this one is not as good as that one" sort of thing. But frankly I am not going to bother with making comparisons. Mankell is a fine writer and an interesting and an intelligent one, and I look forward to reading more of these. Clearly he is not a wildly prolific writer, though, as there are only a handful of Wallander novels and this, the second one, appeared in 1992. It starts with a couple of frozen corpses in a life raft being washed up on a Swedish beach. After some investigation it turns out that they have come from the Baltic state of Latvia, and a Latvian detective comes over to help with the investigation. Shortly after his return home -- having discovered very little -- he is found murdered on a lonely quayside, and Kurt Wallander is asked to go over to Riga to give the police some assistance. But he quickly finds himself in an extraordinarily dark and frightening situation -- Riga is a political and social mess, and it is increasingly hard for Wallander to decide who, if anyone, is to be trusted. Finding himself increasingly drawn to the dead man's widow, he flings himself into this unfamiliar world, struggling against all the odds to solve the mystery of the murder and to find the documentary evidence that will reveal the truth about the corruption within the police force. Very dark, all this, but very enthralling. 

Frost in May

This -- though with a different cover -- is the second of the Virago books I brought home from a charity shop trawl the other day -- the first being Olivia Manning's Doves of Venus, about which I wrote recently.  I had heard of Frost in May but never read it or even known exactly what it was about. I finished it last night and I must say it is a book that will stay with me for a very long time. I suspect it will have quite varied effects on readers depending on their particular viewpoint, but it is hard to imagine anyone not being profoundly moved and stirred up by it.
First published in 1933, this is the story of a young girl, Nanda Grey, who is sent to the Convent of the Five Wounds at Lippington at the age of nine. Unlike the rest of the pupils, many of whom are much more aristocratic than the middle-class Greys, Nanda is a new Catholic, she and her classics master father having converted a year earlier. Nanda never ceases to feel the difference between her own newly acquired -- though deeply held -- beliefs and those of her fellow pupils, whose families have been Catholic for generations. Indeed the nuns do not let her forget the difference either, and bring it up when she does something not quite within the rules of the convent.  Nanda is, in fact, deeply religious, and throws herself with great intensity into the life of the school, with its many observances, prayers, fasts, routines and rituals. But she is also highly intelligent, and as she grows older the nuns see in her a tendency to think too much of herself, a spirit which, she is told, must be broken. They also disapprove of her friendship with some attractive and charismatic older girls and attempt to break it up, though, for Nanda, this has become the most important aspect of school life. Confined with her friends in the infirmary after a measles epidemic, she starts to write a novel, one which will show how a cast of wicked characters undergo  sudden religious conversion, but the novel is never completed, as the events leading up to the novel's rather shocking ending intervene and Nanda has to leave the school.

Catholicism has a special fascination for me, as I've probably said before. Many people will be appalled by the way these children are treated by the nuns, who often seem deliberately sadistic -- and no doubt the rigidity of the rituals will seem very shocking. It is interesting to me to realise that all these archaic seeming practices and beliefs had their basis in genuine faith and desire for spiritual development, though seemingly corrupted through time. The novel is pretty much autobiographical, and Antonia White, interestingly, abandoned her faith and then went back to it later in life. This novel is beautifully written and I found it unputdownable, though some people might disagree! It was the first ever Virago, by the way, so worth a look for that if nothing else.

However, an alternative view, entitled 'A Modern Classic? I'm not so sure', can be found here.

A Child's Journey Out Of Autism

A couple of months ago I mentioned that I had read and enjoyed this book, but the publishers wanted the full review to wait until it was in the shops. Great news -- it is, now, so you can go and buy it yourselves. When I was offered the book to review, I hardly hesitated, even though it is not really the sort of book I normally read. Although I have been blessed with healthy children, and although I don't know anyone personally who has an autistic child, I knew enough about this tragic disability to realise that this would be a fascinating and exceptional story. What I did not realise until I started reading was that in the last fifty or so years, the numbers of children developing autism has risen to one in 150 -- epidemic proportions, in other words -- in the US, at least, a child is diagnosed with autism every twenty minutes. Leeann Whiffen did not know this either, and when her second son Clay began to show increasingly disturbing behaviour patterns -- withdrawal, obsessive behaviour, anger, inability to connect with family members -- she was unwilling to admit that he might be autistic. Finally, after a long, deeply unhappy, and unbelievably stressful period, she and her husband were able to confront the reality of the situation. But the reality seemed to include the fact that a cure for Clay's condition was out of the question. However Leeann was, and is, an exceptional young woman and she was absolutely determined to find something that might offer some hope. After many nights scouring the internet, she found a treatment programme that sounded as if it might be the answer. Yes, it involved huge financial costs -- several helpers and qualified supervisors had to be employed to work with Clay for many hours every day -- and the Whiffen's finances were already stretched. But the couple did not hesitate. By means of remortgaging, filling credit cards to the hilt, and sacrificing many of their leisure activities they managed to pay for Clay's treatment. Although progress seemed slow at first, there were enough rewarding signs to keep them going. Finally, nearly two years after Clay's initial diagnosis, their son was reassessed and shown to be completely free from autistic symptoms. Today he continues to be a happy, healthy, normal child.
This in itself is a most inspiring story. It is also fascinating to read of Leeann's intensive research into the possible causes of autism. It seems clear that there is an important physiological component, and Leeann comes to believe that early childhood inoculations and numerous courses of antibiotics made a significant contribution to her son's development of this illness. Indeed, Clay's condition improved greatly when he was put on a wheat- and milk-free diet.
Clay's road  back to health and happiness is wonderful to read about. But this book is about more than that. It also depict's Leeann's own journey from an ordinary young wife and mother to a campaigner and recognised expert in her field. And finally, it is a book about love within families and what that can achieve. Here's a moment towards the end of this long journey:

Clay doesn’t want me to leave to run errands, so I crouch down close to him. I place my arms on each of his shoulders. His big blue eyes look deep into mine, his full cheeks reminding me he is still a small boy.
“Clay, you are my star.” I feel my throat close off. He continues looking me in the eyes.
“Mom, you are my triangle.”
I put my hand up to my mouth, trying to contain the laugh. He smiles his crooked smile and tilts his head until it touches his shoulder. His smile morphs into a giggle. Then, simultaneously, we laugh out loud—a deep, feel good laugh right from the belly, and I cry, because I am so full of joy. A joy that is so deep it can only be felt when one has finally emerged from the depths of desperation and discouragement.

I can only say that, whether or not you or anyone you know has been affected by this tragic disorder, you will not regret reading this extraordinary, inspiring and moving book. You can read more about Leeann, see pictures of her beautiful children, read about her campaigns to pass 'Clay's Law' through the US Senate, and follow her blog, here.