Harriet Devine's Blog

As Bad As It Gets

A month or two ago I happened upon Julian Rathbone's Homage, and was sufficiently taken with this intelligent and exciting novel to want to read another in the series, if series it can be called. This is the second novel featuring the Bournemouth private eye Chris Shovelin, but unfortunately it is also the last as Julian Rathbone died last year at the age of 73. This is a sad loss as he was an extraordinarily prolific and wide-ranging writer.
"What comes across in the writing is a dry, cynical, sophisticated mind grappling with a corrupt world." So says his Times Obituary. I'm not sure how well this applies to his fictional detective Chris (or Kit, as he prefers to be called). In Homage Kit found himself in San Francisco, and here he is in Kenya. But though in both novels he is caught up, despite himself, in battling corruption on a grand scale -- here it is an international food conglomerate bent on promoting GM crops at all costs, helped by a corrupt and violent police force -- Kit himself has a sort of innocence, despite his intelligence and his left-wing principles. He has ended up with a few days to spare in Kenya, having completed a fairly simple commission for some English clients, and thinks he might have a relaxing holiday. But a chance meeting on the flight back to Nairobi with the rumpled, friendly, rather melancholy Ludwig Holly ("Conrad would have recognised him and Graham Greene would have bought him a drink") followed by a second apparently chance encounter with the attractive journalist Danielle (Danny) soon catapults Kit into a series of often horrific events. These include several beatings by the police, a terrifying journey on foot through the wild Kenyan outback, and a dreadful experience of the sewers and underground cellars of Jomo Kenyatta Airport. On the way he meets some wonderful and extraordinary characters, including a Masai warrior known as Golly who turns out to be a doctor trained at Guy's Hospital, and Dr Vikaram, the ex-university professor who is writing a monograph on Ulysses while she works as a toilet attendant. Kenya itself comes wonderfully and often scarily to life in all its beauty and, yes, its terrible corruption. Kit, no longer in his first youth, soldiers on through all this, narrowly escaping death on several occasions, and increasingly aware of how much Danny has come to mean to him after her sudden and unexplained disappearance.
I really really enjoyed this novel. I see Rathbone created other, earlier, fictional detectives and will certainly seek them out. But this one will stay with me for a long time, I think.

Woman Reading (thanks to Ruth)

I've never actually met Ruth, of that delightful though sadly rather occasional blog Crafty People, but I feel as if we know each other through our mutual comments and the odd email. A few days ago she sent me some reading women, of this is one. It was painted by one Gustave Caillebotte. Never heard of him? Neither had I, but some quick googling revealed that he lived from 1848-1894 and is generally thought of as an Impressionist. If you want to know more, you can find a great deal out by looking here. He seems to have had a bit of a penchant for bourgeois domestic interiors and this rather charming painting is one such. The composition is interesting -- the woman reading a newspaper right up against the lens, as it were, and the man, reading a book, rather disproportionately tiny in the the background. In fact either it's the biggest sofa in the world or he is a midget.

Transgressions

I read Sarah Dunant's much-admired The Birth of Venus a few years ago and was not overly knocked out with it, though I can't now remember quite why that was. I'd never heard of this earlier novel until I spotted it in a new charity shop down the road for just 50p. I finished it last night. I have to say at once that this is not a book for the faint-hearted, the prudish, the delicate, or the easily shocked. It deals with some really difficult and disturbing issues -- sex and violence, essentially, or often sexual violence. But it is a serious and thought-provoking novel, or it was so for me.
Elizabeth is living alone in her large house in north-west London, working on a translation of a trashy thriller and slowly recovering from the ending of a seven-year relationship. More and more reclusive, she is not unhappy with her solitary life, but when some disturbing things start happening she gets increasingly anxious. First one of her CDs disappears, then she comes home to find an album playing when she knows she had turned off the system. Explicable, perhaps -- but when she comes home one day to find all her CDs in a neatly piled tower on the  kitchen table she knows something worrying is going on. The police are no help, and the lady vicar she visits suggests she may have a poltergeist. Not much of a believer in anything, she is nevertheless tempted to accept this explanation -- but a terrifying event in the night soon afterwards blows that theory out of the water, and she is flung into a series of horrendous events, many of which, I have to say, I found pretty scary.
I think this is a very brave novel. Elizabeth is often angry and even more often afraid, but she is not a victim and refuses to become one. In fact she becomes stronger as events become more threatening. She is forced, in fact, to confront her own attitude to sex, to sexual violence, and to pornography which, in fact, she has enjoyed during her recently-ended relationship. There's lots more I would like to say but I can't, in case you think you might read this. I had a bit of a quibble with the ending, which was certainly ingenious, but I'm not sure I was entirely convinced. The structure is interesting, with passages from Elizabeth's translation interspersed within the narrative and even, as things proceed, having some bearing on what is going on in her life. I found this pretty hard to put down.

Woman Reading (but who painted it?)

Actually the woman in this picture is not reading, strictly speaking -- she is looking at pictures in an album.  I don't think they can be photos, can they? -- though the format suggests they are. It looks as though she is wearing a bustle dress, which would date it to the last decades of the nineteenth century. But as you can see, I am guessing here, as I don't know who painted it or when or where. I pick these things up from time to time and file them away on the computer and then pop them on here for you now and again, and I have completely forgotten where this came from. Any ideas or suggestions about the painter?

The Fashion in Shrouds

I've been a bit curmudgeonly about the novels I've read lately, both here and on Cornflower Books. So it is really nice to be able to say that I really loved this book. I've been a fan of Margery Allingham since I was 13, and as I read this one I had a very faint deja vu feeling, so I know I must have read it before, but luckily did not remember very much at all about it. I've been re-reading Allingham from time to time in the past few years, and I can definitely say that this is my favorite so far. Published in 1938 and set in the world of fashion and theatre, it tells a complex story of love, obsession and death. At the centre of all these themes is the beautiful actress Georgia Wells. Lovely, charming, amoral, she seems almost childlike in her inability to really know herself, or to be able to distinguish between acting and real life. Men, as Marlene Dietrich would say, flock around her like moths around a flame, and like those moths they generally get singed, if not burned to death. One of her ex's is found dead at the start of the novel and another dies soon afterwards. Not content with all the ones she already has, she poaches the lover of her best friend Valentine. Val is a top couturier, who happens also to be the sister of the great, quiet, unassuming but brilliant detective Albert Campion. So Albert is involved, and so is his friend Amanda Fitton, a young girl he first met some years earlier. In fact these two announce a pretended engagement, which ends dramatically later in the book. But I will not tell you what happens in the end, obviously, though believe me the plot is extremely convoluted and the identity of the murderer came as a surprise to me.
Allingham is a really fine writer, and a pleasure to read. But I have to say that if you read this book you will have to make some allowances for the period in which it was written. It gives a most astonishing and presumably accurate picture of London society on the brink of World War Two, though this does not get a mention here. But in places it is far from politically correct, so remember that issues of class, race and gender were a good deal less sensitive than they are today. That being said, Allingham has a wonderful ability to see into the hearts of her characters, and writes of human relationships with a great deal of understanding. Lovely. I was sorry to finish it.

Kept

This novel has been sitting on my shelves for at least two years and I have made several short-lived attempts to read it, only to abandon it almost at once. Anyway, now I have. What to say? This is Victorian pastiche with a vengeance, and extremely well done, I must say.  D.J. Taylor is an academic and clearly knows his 19th century literature like the back of his hand. Large chunks of the novel could easily have been written by Dickens -- the characters, the atmosphere, the descriptions are all very authentic. The plot, too, is certainly ingenious in its use of real people and events interwoven with fictional ones -- running throughout as one of several main themes is the first great train robbery, many of the characters who pop up are based on people who really existed, and genuine documents -- diaries, letters etc -- have a place in the fictional narrative. So far so good. But as for the actual story, or stories, that the novel tells, I thought this aspect of it was a bit disappointing. There are two main plots -- the various schemes of the chief villain, which culminate in the theft of a good deal of gold bullion from a train, and the apparent imprisonment of a young woman who has mental problems -- and in the end there proves to be a rather tenuous link between the two. But quite honestly I found both of them to be rather damp squibs, and neither was particularly satisfactorily resolved. There are numerous sub-plots and secondary characters, some of them quite well-drawn, but often their presence seemed to add nothing to the development of the narrative, and indeed to be there only to allow Taylor to show off his expertise in creating Dickensian types. One character, in fact, is given a whole chapter to himself, in which he is shown to be stranded in the snow in a Canadian wilderness, and which proved to be more or less completely irrelevant to anything else that was going on in the novel -- I skipped most of it, I'm afraid.
It's not often that I am so critical of books on here. But I thought it was a bit of a shame that so much skill had been gone into something which didn't really quite succeed. I know that many people really liked this novel, so perhaps you may be one of them -- don't let me put you off. For me, though, it was a triumph of technique over plot.

Best Intentions

I can't honestly remember how I acquired this novel, though I expect it came as a review request. It has been lying around for a while, and it beckoned to me a few of days ago when I was feeling in need of something relatively undemanding. I'd never heard of Emily Listfield, though I gather this is her seventh novel. She's a New York author, an ex-magazine editor, and writes of the world of which she knows. All this sounds a bit patronising, perhaps, but it's not meant to. Within its genre this is a readable book and I rather raced through it because I was enjoying it.

The novel centres on the lives of a group of friends who have known each other since college. All are much of an age, and therefore looking forty rather apprehensively in the face. Lisa, who narrates the novel, works in PR, while her husband Sam is a successful investigative journalist. Money is never very freely available in their household, but they have managed to put both their daughters, aged 11 and 13, into an expensive private school. Lisa's best friend, Deirdre, has never married, though she has had numerous affairs and is now involved with Ben, a well-known fashion photographer. But she has never forgotten her old lover from college, Jack, who is even now about to reappear on the scene, causing her, and indeed Lisa, to feel distinctly nervous. But Lisa has bigger problems in her own life. She and Sam seem to be drifting apart, and several suspicious occurrences seem to suggest very strongly that he is having an affair. And to make matters worse, her firm is taken over and her job, which has always seemed very secure, suddenly seems to be under threat. However all this pales into insignificance when a terrible and sudden death puts everyone under suspicion.

So is this a murder mystery? Actually no, not really. The murder does not happen until about three-quarters of the way through the novel, and the focus is much more on its effect on the other characters than on the solution of the crime, though of course that does get solved in the end. But the real strength of this book is in what it has to say about relationships -- about trust, and about the fact that although we may think we know our nearest and dearest friends and family, secrets and concealments can emerge at any time and throw all our certainties out of the window. All this is really rather well done. So if this sounds like your kind of book, do give it a go.

Housekeeping

Some months ago I read Marilynne Robinson's second novel, Gilead, and really loved it. I knew that it had been eighteen years since she published this one, her first, and I acquired it some time ago, but the time never seemed right to read it. Now I have, though it has taken me quite a long time to get through it. Not, I hasten to say, because I didn't like it. On the contrary, it is a truly remarkable novel, but one that you can't rush. In fact I found a few pages a day were enough. I've been thinking for a few days now about how to write about in on here and am still not sure. I can tell you the story, but that will not begin to give you a sense of what is so extraordinarily impressive about it.
Anyway, Housekeeping is the story of a family, told by a young girl, Ruth. Set in a remote town called Fingerbone, it begins with past generations -- the grandfather, who died when his train was derailed and sank to the bottom of the nearby lake -- the grandmother, who brought up her three daughters alone -- the mother, one of those daughters, who married and moved away to Seattle, only to return years later with Ruth and her sister Lucille, and then, leaving them with her mother, drove to the lake a drowned herself. The two girls, brought up first by their grandmother and then by two great aunts, end up in the care of their aunt Sylvie. Now their lives, always unusual, become increasingly stranger and stranger, as Sylvie has a complete disregard for conventions and rules. Lucille, unhappy with the disorder and confusion, moves out, and Ruth is left behind, increasingly influenced by her eccentric foster mother.
So what is so great about this novel? The language is wonderful, the images are beautiful, and the atmosphere created by these things is extraordinarily seductive. In fact I found the experience of reading it was more like reading a poem than a novel, though the narrative itself is also fascinating and I became increasingly anxious to know what would become of Ruth, Lucille and Sylvie. I suppose you could describe it as sad, but I'm not sure that I found it so. I'm not at all surprised that the Observer put it on the list of the best 100 novels of all time -- I would probably put it among the best ten I've ever read. Amazing.

The Little Stranger

I was away in France all last week and I thought I deserved a treat -- I'm in the throes of moving house and every day seems to bring an avalanche of to-dos -- no sooner do I get rid of one list than another springs up in its place, longer and more scary than the first. And I haven't even started emptying the cupboards yet. Anyway, I found this in the airport and snatched it up to take with me. I am a huge fan of Sarah Waters and indeed her last novel, The Night Watch, is possibly the only book I have re-read the minute I finished the first reading -- for reasons to do with the structure and its impact on the story, which you will understand if you have read it yourself. So I was longing for this one and I wasn't disappointed. Yes, it is a book that moves slowly through its over five hundred pages, but I was quite happy with that and in fact took several days to read the last hundred because I really didn't want to finish it. As most people will know by now, this is billed as a ghost story, and so indeed it is, of a particularly unsettling kind. But it is a number of other things as well. Set in 1947, in rural Warwickshire, it tells of the decline of a house, and of a family. The Ayres have lived for generations in their beautiful eighteenth-century mansion, Hundreds Hall, but money is now short, the family is reduced to one servant, fourteen-year-old Betty, and the house is literally falling apart, damaged by rain, damp, and the simple inability to keep it repaired. The widowed Mrs Ayres, a fading beauty, and her two adult children Roderick and Caroline, struggle to keep up appearances but things are getting pretty grim.

As the novel begins, the local doctor, Dr Faraday, is called up to the house to see Betty, who is confined to bed with very bad stomach pains. This is his first visit since he was a boy, at which time his mother was one of Mrs Ayres nursery maids. He is keenly conscious of the class differences between his own family and the one he has been called to attend -- only, of course, because their own doctor is away. But slowly a sort of friendship begins to develop, and even more slowly he comes to realise that he is attracted to, perhaps in love with, the plain and sensible Caroline. Meanwhile the family is becoming increasingly reliant on him, and when Roderick, already physically damaged by the war, starts to deteriorate mentally, Faraday is on hand to help to get him committed to a private asylum. But Roderick's decline is, so he claims, connected with a series of strange and disturbing happenings in the house -- he believes there is a malignant force at work there, and indeed there seems to be some evidence of this, strange markings appearing on walls, fires breaking out unexpectedly, a gentle dog turning savage. The rest of the family slowly come to think this may be true, but Faraday remains determinedly rational and dismissive. But as things go from bad to worse, more tragedies ensue...

Dr Faraday is the narrator of this novel. I have seen a few reviews which describe him as boring, and so, in some ways, he is. His concerns are limited, though none the less important to him -- his lack of money, of social graces, his anxieties about what the new National Health Service will do to his career. His relationship with Caroline brings him some temporary happiness, and he is gratified by Mrs Ayres increasing dependence on him. His absolute refusal to admit the possibility of any kind of supernatural agency becomes increasingly infuriating, or it did so to me. But wait till you get to the end, and then think about the novel in retrospect, at which point it may -- should -- appear in a rather different light.

It's maddening not to be able to say more! I long to be able to talk about this at length with someone else who has read it. And I am seriously tempted to repeat my Night Watch experience and re-read the whole thing. This is a hugely clever, subtle, thought-provoking book which has stayed with me for several days since I finished it, with more "oh yes"s popping up from time to time. See if the same thing happens to you. Highly highly recommended.

By the way, if you know that great novel of Josephine Tey, The Franchise Affair, you may discern some echoes in The Little Stranger. Sarah Waters admits this was an important source for her. You can read an interesting interview with her, in which she talks about the writing of the novel,  here.