Harriet Devine's Blog

Palladian

In his introduction to the Virago edition, the novelist Paul Bailey calls Palladian "this strange little novel". His discomfort with it is evident throughout the introduction -- later on he calls it "flawed", but I suppose that depends what you are looking for in a novel. Certainly it's not a particularly comfortable read -- if you are looking for a book to cosy up with on a cold winter evening (and we are having plenty of those in the UK at the moment), this is not it. But if you are up for a bit of a challenge, something a little unexpected, something to amuse and entertain with its intelligent, knowing nods in the direction of novels and writers you already know and love, then you might really enjoy it.

Elizabeth Taylor, whose second novel this is, was a huge admirer of Jane Austen, and it's Austen who is the primary presence in Palladian. The plot and the characterisation owe most to her, but there's also an obvious pointer to Jane Eyre, as this is the story of a young governess who falls in love with her widowed employer. But when you see that the governess is called Cassandra (JA's sister's name) Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility), it becomes clear that ET was not only thinking about JA but wanted to be sure her readers knew it. I think that makes a big difference to how we read the novel. Plenty of people have written sub-Austen books over the years, but this is not one of them -- ET was much too good a novelist for that. Rather it is an exploration of how to use many of JA's devices in a novel that is firmly set in the mid-20th century.

Cassandra is in many ways a typical Austen heroine. A good, intelligent girl, recently orphaned and missing her beloved father, she is also very innocent, indeed rather naive. She's read a lot of books and when she meets the handsome older man who is the father of her young  pupil Sophy she is immediately sure that she will fall in love with him and that they will eventually marry. And of course she does, and of course the path of that love does not run smooth, so there is a moment when Cassandra, upset and disturbed by a very shocking event, disappears and has to be sought for by her erstwhile employer. And so on. The rest of the characters are wonderfully vivid, too -- and of course, as with Austen, all of them are in various ways selfish and flawed. Even Marion Vanburgh, Cassandra's boss and the object of her affections, is rather weak and effete and suffers terribly from neuralgia. Apart from her employer, the household consists of his cousins, pregnant Margaret, a who is a doctor and thinks herself above the ordinary ailments of her fellow human beings -- her put-upon mother, who is quite unable to stand up to her bossy daughter -- her brother Tom, a talented artist who is deliberately drinking himself to death and is involved in a heartless, manipulative relationship with Mrs Veal who runs the local pub. Then there are the servants, horrid old Nanny, who "feigned eccentricity as Hamlet feigned madness, and for more or less the same reason, so that she could speak her mind, set herself apart from the rest of humanity, and tell the truth", and her sidekick Mrs Adams, who cleans and washes up with a very bad grace and sees life as "Half the world scrubbing on its knees, the other half sitting on its arse". Not an expression you'd find in Jane Austen, and there's quite a bit of sex here which you wouldn't find in her novels either -- but if she'd been writing in 1946 you probably would have done. 

I could go on, but I won't. I wouldn't necessarily suggest this novel as an introduction to Elizabeth Taylor -- Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is a good place to start, or Angel. But if you are up for something to amuse you and make you think, try it.

Woman Reading

I've mentioned to you before that lovely blog called Art Inconnu, a continuous source of pleasure to me for the seemingly endless stream of beautiful paintings that appear on there almost every day. Now and again I can't resist passing one on to you. This one, called simply Marguerite, is by the American Impressionist painter Guy Rose (1867-1925). Take a look at some of his other paintings -- some nice portraits but also a very good line in landscapes and seascapes. 

A Bizarre Reading Experience

In the library the other day I spotted this rather intriguing looking cover and thought I'd better take it home. The title sounded vaguely familiar but I thought if I started it I would remember if I'd read it or not. So I started it, and despite a sort of deja-deja vu effect I had no recollection of it whatsoever. So I pressed on, quite intrigued by the story of the ancient writer, Vida Winter, and her would-be biographer Margaret Lea, their curious relationship, the fact that both were twins, the unfolding gothic strangeness of Vida's story, and really wanting to know how it was all going to turn out. But that title kept nagging away at me and eventually when I was about halfway through, I did a little search back through my old posts and found -- you've obviously seen where this is going -- that I had read and reviewed this novel back in December 2007, almost exactly three years ago. Well. Even with that knowledge I still couldn't remember how it ended, so I had to skim through the rest of the novel to find out. Almost the strangest thing about all this, leaving aside the rather worrying loss of memory, was the fact that I seem to have liked it so much the first time I read it, whereas this time I was intensely irritated by the narrative voice, very critical overall of the faux gothic plot, and very aware of the many nods in the direction of Jane Eyre etc etc, all of which seem to have passed me by entirely the first time round. Am I losing my mind? (Don't answer that or I might get worried). All I can think is that it really is a very forgettable novel. I can, after all, remember all those 70 odd books I listed yesterday. Pretty bizarre, though.

Have You Read...?

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Mine are below. I've put in bold those books I've read in their entirety, and  italicized the ones I started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. I was tagged for this by Rob Spence on Facebook, but Facebook is not working this morning so I've out it in here instead. If you want to do it, consider yourself tagged. 

 1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

19 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo- Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Blogger's Block

I've got a problem. I've read several good books lately and normally I'd be enthusiastically telling you all about them and urging you to read them. But every time I sit down and make a start, I seem to run out of steam and can't think how to make them sound interesting enough. I'm not sure if that's a function of the books or of my current state of mind -- perhaps it's a combination of the two. I had an annoying virus for a week which drained my energy and then got very busy and tired for a few days so let's hope I'll soon be back on form again. Anyway you can see the pictures of a couple of them and I will try to muster a few words.

I read The Good Earth a couple of weeks ago for my reading group and then discovered I couldn't go, so I missed what was apparently a really lively and positive discussion. I'm not surprised, as this truly is a remarkable novel. There was an excellent review of it on a couple of days ago by Simon T on  stuck-in-a-book, which says it all rather better than I could, so I urge you to read that. It's a simple enough story, published in 1930, and covering the life of a Chinese farmer, Wang Lung, his descent into poverty and rise into wealth, his marriage, his fatherhood, his passion for a courtesan and more. Simple maybe but it is absolutely riveting. I particularly loved the language of the novel -- I've seen it described a biblical, which in a sense it is, though apparently someone in my group thought it could have been translated from Chinese. I think that combination probably sums it up -- Pearl Buck was brought up in China by missionary parents so the Bible and the Chinese language were deeply embedded in her psyche. She won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, and a few years later the Nobel Prize for Literature, and sounds like an altogether remarkable woman, politically committed and caring -- among many other things she founded several orphanages for placing Asian and mixed race children, something previously unheard of in the 1940s. Hillary Spurling has published a biography this year and I want to read it. An amazing woman and a great novel.

I've also just read The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. I happened upon it in the library the other day -- I was actually looking for something by Annie Proulx which they didn't have so came away with this instead. I've read a few of PF's novels but this was a new one for me. Once again, a simple enough story -- it's 1959, and Florence Green decides to open a bookshop in a quite Suffolk village. She buys an ancient, damp and crumbling house, orders stock, and settles down to see what will happen. Slowly the villagers start to take an interest, much increased when she orders in multiple copies of Lolita, but she is up against a terrifyingly bullying local bigwig who is determined to close her down. Often very funny (I loved Florence's attempts to train her 10-year-old assistant)  but also often sad, this is a quiet but deeply thoughtful novel. Florence faces her struggles bravely and without self pity, and is altogether an admirable heroine. And how she does love books -- not the modern paperbacks which she has to order, which "crowd the shelves in well-disciplined ranks", but the older books like the Everyman editions, which "in their shabby dignity, seemed to confront them with a look of reproach." Lovely.

 

 

Girl Reading

Here's a painting by Vanessa Bell. If it looks familiar, that's probably because it was shown recently on Simon's blog, stuck-in-a-book, with a note that he'd seen it on The Captive Reader. More of Vanessa's paintings can be seen here. This one is actually called "Interior with Artist's Daughter" -- and that, of course, is the wonderful Angelica Garnett.  Born in 1918, Angelica was actually the result of Vanessa's love affair with Duncan Grant, though she did not discover this until she was 17 because her mother's husband Clive Bell allowed her to believe she was his daughter. Angelica married David Garnett, her father's lover -- he had been present at her birth and had expressed his intention of marrying her soon afterwards. Well, this was Bloomsbury, after all. You can read all about it in Angelica's absolutely delightful autobiography, Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, and she has recently published The Unspoken Truth, at the age of ninety-one. 

Girl with Book

Are you familiar with a very lovely blog called Art Inconnu -- Little Known or Under-Appreciated Art? You can find it at http://artinconnu.blogspot.com/ and it is a great resource for artists who, needless to say, you probably haven't heard of. One such is the painter of this portrait, at least as far as I am concerned. His name was Bartholomeus Van der Helst (1613-1670) and he was a Dutch painter. You can read about him on Wikipedia and see a load of his paintings here. 

The Shuttle

I've loved Frances Hodgson Burnett ever since I was a very little 'un, though of course at that age I was reading The Secret Garden, which I have continued to read at intervals ever since. About a year ago I read and reviewed her adult novel, The Making of a Marchioness, and now I've just finished this one -- though sadly not in this very nice first edition but instead on my iphone, not nearly so much fun. 

I seem to have enjoyed The Making of a Marchioness, but I must confess it has faded almost entirely from my memory. I don't think this will happen with The Shuttle. I'm not sure if this means it is a better book, but I can definitely say it is a more thought-provoking one. 

The Shuttle tells the story of a pair of sisters, Rosalie and Bettina Vanderpoel, the daughters of an American multi-millionaire. At the start of the novel, Rosie, the elder but by far the most gentle and timid, marries an impoverished English aristocrat. Needless to say he turns out to be a thoroughly bad lot, dissolute and amoral, and quickly manages to get hold of her money, which he spends lavishly on foreign trips with dodgy women, leaving her and her disabled son in near poverty in their crumbling manor house. Luckily Betty is made of sterner stuff, and when she grows up she decides to save her sister. When she turns up at the house, finding the husband is absent, she starts spending money as freely as any multi-millionairess can, improving the house, the garden, and her sister's spirits in equal measure. She also meets a neighbour, a fine upstanding Englishman with his own crumbling manor and massive money problems but too much pride to marry for money. 

The outcome is fairly predictable, but there's a lot of excitement and fun along the way. Betty is a tremendous character, strong, clear-minded, with a great business head on her shoulders, and she is well able to stand up for herself, even when her revolting brother-in-law reappears and develops an unhealthy passion for her. But there's more to this book than just the plot. Really it's partly at least a novel about Englishness and American-ness, and how the good qualities of each can feed into and support each other. I have to say it gets a tad preachy at times but FHB is having a go at some interesting issues. And lovers of the Secret Garden will be overjoyed to find there is more gardening going on here, with some delightful episodes involving Betty and the ancient but talented gardener. Glorious stuff. Highly recommended.

Woman Reading

This exceptionally beautiful image is by the early Dutch painter Rogier Van der Weyden  and is a corner of a panel from his Seven Sacraments Altarpiece.  You can see the whole glorious painting here. Michel from Belgium, the source of several paintings posted here recently, sent this photo, for which once again many thanks.

Postcards

If I tell you that this is a novel that begins with a death, ends with a death, and has plenty of disasters and tragedies in between, you'll probably think it sounds pretty depressing. But it's not. Desperately sad, certainly, but wonderfully evocative, rich, humane, and that old cliche, thought-provoking. 

The novel tells the story of Loyal Blood, who, in terror and remorse, leaves his family farm after concealing the body of his girlfriend Billy who has died accidentally during their lovemaking. It is 1944. For the next forty and more years, Loyal is on the road, working as a gold miner, an assistant astronomer, a fossil hunter, a trapper, a farmer. An intelligent and able man, he could have done many successful things with his life, but  he is pursued by bad luck, forced to keep moving, unable to touch another woman, and his only contact with his family is through the yearly postcards he sends, never with a return address. So it is that he never finds out what happens to his family after he leaves -- the financial disasters on the farm, his father's suicide in prison following a faked insurance claim, his brother's move to Florida to become a successful real-estate agent, his sister's marriage to a man she meets through a newspaper ad, and much much more.

So this is Loyal's story, and his family's story, but it is also the story of America. America intensely imagined, beautifully described, as Loyal makes his often weary way from Vermont through endless landscapes of endless different states, eating in cheap cafes, sleeping wherever he needs to end up, meeting varied, eccentric, difficult, and wholly believable characters. As the years go by the nation changes -- the old ways of farming and trapping are gradually eroded, wealth increases in some areas, society in the cities becomes increasingly rough and dangerous.

I've seen this described as the new great American novel and I think this sounds right. Whatever you may think about this, I would urge you to read it if you  haven't done so. It's unforgettably moving and you will be thinking about it for a long time afterwards.