Harriet Devine's Blog

New Linda Gillard on Kindle

You might remember not long ago I wrote about Linda Gillard's House of Silence, which had been newly published on Kindle. I read it and loved it and it has been a huge success. Now there's another of her novels just available on Amazon and I have already downloaded it (all of £1.90 or $2.99) and started it and am already gripped! More on this soon. Meanwhile go and check it out. You don't even have to have a Kindle (I haven't) as you can download the software from Amazon and read it on your computer/laptop/iphone/ipad etc etc etc.

Little Boy Lost

For some inexplicable reason, nearly all the novels I've read and enjoyed in the past month or two were written in or around (and in some way about) the second world war. I certainly didn't set out with this in mind, it just happened, so is it just a coincidence? Or is there something about the period and its literary expression that is chiming with me at the moment?  I think there must be. Whatever the reason, it does seem to me that there was an extraordinary flowering of talent around this time. Just to name a few, all of which I've read recently -- there was The Blank Wall (1946), The Moving Toyshop (also 1946), The Slaves of Solitude (1947), Celia (1937), At Mrs Lippincote's (1945), and now I'm embarking on Henry Green's Loving (1945). Weird or what?

This one, Little Boy Lost, was not published till 1949 but the war and its after effects dominate the plot. It's the third of Laski's novels I've now read, starting with her other wartime drama To Bed with Grand Music (1946) and, more recently, her later (1953) Victorian Chaise Longue. 

I've known about Little Boy Lost for a while as it often gets mentioned on people's blogs, but I had actually been sort of avoiding it because I'd heard it tended to put people through the emotional wringer, and the subject matter sounded so painful I wasn't sure if I could bear it. But not long ago Simon posted an article by Annabel Walker about the novel, and I knew its time had come. 

It was on Christmas day, 1943, that Hilary Wainwright learnt that his little son was lost.

Does that opening line make you want to read it? I'd be surprised if it didn't. Such a simple sentence, suggesting such huge depths of mystery and emotion, and the novel certainly lives up to this promise. Hilary is a poet and an intellectual, outwardly dry and repressed, inwardly grieving desperately for his beautiful French wife, murdered by the Gestapo in Paris a few years earlier. Through the description of that Christmas day we learn of his yearning for the little boy who he has only seen once, just after his birth, but who, he believes, is living with his wife's friend Jeanne. But the evening brings shocking news -- Jeanne has also died and her fiance Pierre arrives to tell Hilary that the child, initially handed over to a local priest, has now disappeared. Two years pass before it is possible for Hilary to visit France, and there he learns that Pierre has found a child in a provincial orphanage who may possibly be little John. Soon he finds himself in the small, unattractive, war-damaged town, staying at an unpleasant and expensive hotel, and making daily visits to the convent where the little boy is living. Allowed to take the child, known as Jean, out for two hours a day, he hopes that after a few days he will know if this is indeed his son. But things are not that simple. 

There are so many things to admire about this wonderful novel. The handling and development of the plot is extraordinarily well done, and the suspense is absolutely killing. Of course I can't tell you what the final outcome is, but the emotional switchback that gets you there is truly intense, and in fact it is not until the final sentence of the novel that the truth is revealed. Even re-reading it just now has brought tears to my eyes and if it doesn't bring them to yours I will be very surprised.

But there's much more here than just the plot. Although we are aching to know if the child is really John, and if Hilary will take him even if he can't decide whether he is or not, this is also the story of Hilary's inner journey, and Hilary is an exceptionally well conceived character. An unhappy childhood, and the loss of Lisa and the boy, have left him emotionally battered and outwardly cold. He's full of prejudices and preconceptions, and quick to make judgments of the people he encounters in France. He rejects  loyal and warm-hearted Pierre when he discovers him to have joined the party of General de Gaulle, and finds it hard to understand how M. Mercatel, once a lecturer at the Sorbonne, can be contented as a mathematics teacher at the orphanage -- he immediately decides that 'Monsieur Mercatel could not be as intelligent as he had supposed, that he must be a man who was good on his subject and negligible outside it'. He soon learns that the hotel where he is staying is shunned by the locals on the grounds of probable wartime collaboration, but he not only tolerates it, he starts to accept the shiftily offered Black Market food, telling himself that he will not be helping the poor if he refuses it. He's a man of strong sexual passions, which have led him to misread certain aspects of his marriage ('Did I give?, he wondered wildly, Did I give? Was I ever capable of giving?') and also have a bearing on the way the story develops.

However, despite all this, the few short hours he spends every day with the little boy are a tremendous learning experience. He has fantasised about being a father but has never had any real contact with children, and he quickly discovers how delicately he must handle his communication with this deprived, damaged child. As he is telling Jean about a toy lion he had as a child, 

the boy started as if he suddenly remembered something. He laid his red gloves carefully on the table and began fumbling under his overall.

Hilary broke off. 'What is it, Jean', he asked.

'I've got a toy, too', said Jean. 'Would you like to see it?'

'I'd love to', said Hilary, and after frantic searches in a ragged pocket the boy at last pulled out the little bandaged headless swan that Hilary had last seen tumbled among the guilty pile on the grey blanket.

'This is my toy', he said proudly, and his eyes searched Hilary's face.

Hilary's first impulse was to say quickly, I'll get you a better toy than that. Then he realised with surprise that the motive that restrained him was simply politeness. How queer, he thought, that I must let politeness, such as I would offer to another adult, take precedence over my natural wish to give.

He had waited too long. The boy's hand closed over his rejected toy. Hilary watched his lip tremble, and then, with great respect, heard him say, 'I like him, anyway'.

'So do I', said Hilary quickly. 'He's just like the one I used to have in my bath'.

'Is he really?', asked Jean doubtfully. He took his hand off the battered swan and looked at it critically. 'Did yours have his head off too?', he asked.

'Yes he did', lied Hilary, 'but I loved him just as much'.

Jean smiled tenderly. 'I love my swan better than anybody in the world...'

Really I cannot fault this novel. If you have read it, did you love it as much as I did? and if you haven't, I suggest you do -- you certainly won't regret it.

 

 

 

 

Abandoned Books

A nice little meme that I saw on Stuck in a Book, though it seems to have originated at The Literary Stew, a blog I'd never visited and am glad to have discovered. Here it is:

1.) What would cause you to stop reading a book?

Bad writing  -- I'm very intolerant of poor prose, unconvincing dialogue, silly plots.  Boredom -- or at least the book not really grabbing me.  Sometimes it might just be that another book has come and caught my attention, in which case I will hope to get back to it though often that doesn't happen. 

 

2.) Name a book you've abandoned in the past that you ended up loving later on.

Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus! I was given it as a birthday present, read the first page and didn't like it at all. Tried it again after a while and still didn't like it. Then finally read the whole thing and realised it was one of the most stunning novels I'd ever read. 

 

 

3.) Name a book you've abandoned in the past that you hope to finish one day.

One of the most recent books I've abandoned was Cold Comfort Farm. I had been meaning to read it for most of my life as my mother used to tell me about it, with tears of laughter. So I was really thrilled when I won it in a giveaway from Gaskella. But when I started it, I just didn't seem to be in the mood. It's sitting by the bed and I'm really hoping I'll get back to it soon, but other things keep coming along and intervening. 

 

 

What have you abandoned, and why?

Woman with Book

Not just any old woman -- this is Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, better known as Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764), the mistress of Louis XV of France. This lovely portrait was done in about 1757  by Francois Boucher, who had painted her a year or so earlier in a green dress with a book. You can see that painting here -- but I prefer this one, which is more informal.

Celia

I've been urging everyone to read EH Young since I discovered her wonderful novels at the beginning of last year. And I will continue to urge -- but I suspect that if you are coming to her books for the first time, this may not be the one to start with. That is not to say that this is a bad novel -- far from it. As you'd expect from Emily Young, it is exceptionally subtle, perceptive, intelligent and thought-provoking. But it is definitely on the sombre side, more so than the others I have read so far. Of course her wit is still in evidence, but this story of unhappy marriages and lost love might not be everyone's cup of tea. It took me a little while to get drawn in, but when I was I really appreciated the immense skill of the writing and the tremendous, sometimes almost shockingly astute, analysis of the human heart and mind. 

Celia is in her forties, married to Gerald, a rather mediocre architect, and the mother of two almost grown-up children, Catherine and Jimmy. The family live in a flat in Upper Radstowe (aka Clifton, in Bristol), and though they are not on the poverty line they are far from wealthy. In this they differ considerably from the rest of Celia's family -- her sister May, married to a lawyer, and her brother John who runs the successful family drapery business. 

One of EHL's greatest skills is depicting relationships within families and this novel is no exception. Celia's children love and trust her, and often laugh at her, much to the envy of her stolid, rather dull sister May. May's intelligent, cultured husband Stephen has a secret, which he confides to Celia and then regrets. Celia's sister-in-law, pretty, foolish  Julia, destroys her own long friendship with May by her heavy-handed interference in May's troubled marriage. Jimmy is in love with his cousin Susan, but it is far from certain how Susan feels about him. And so on. But Celia is the centre of the novel, and Celia's own marriage is far from happy. Many years earlier, already married and with a small baby, she fell in love with the brother of her best friend but resisted the powerful temptation to run away with him. Nearly twenty years have passed but she has been unable to forget and still yearns for the life they could have had together.  As for her relationship with Gerald, on the surface it is calm and pleasant, a normal, unexciting union between two middle-aged people. But -- and this is a huge but -- Celia not only rather despises the 'hideous little villas' that Gerald designs, but also cannot bear his sexual advances. 

She blamed herself for a lack of generosity, for a narrowness of the spirit which ought to have been so big that the merely physical incidents were negligible pin-points, but for her the spirit and the body were not separable and one could not enclose the other. 

Because of this long standing physical revulsion, her second child Catherine had been conceived in 'horrified reluctance', and yet, as Celia often reminds herself, she has become 'a precious possession,  a treasure she would have refused if she could have had her way'. 

I don't think I've ever read a novel in which such a situation was so delicately but entirely credibly depicted, and the fact that this one was written in 1937 makes it all the more remarkable. And while the reader might long for a happy solution to Celia's problems, I'm not giving too much away when I tell you that this is not really going to be the case. Celia has a great deal of learning to do, not least about herself, and the last section of the novel shows her having to face a series of extremely uncomfortable revelations which will force her to reassess her marriage and her enduring longing for her forbidden lover. But though the novel does not end with a happy resolution, it doesn't end in tragedy, either. Celia has always tried to be realistic, and though she has realised that she has not always succeeded, she is forced to accept that

experience was not something peculiar to each separate person, but a possession held in common, a mass of good and evil, failures and triumphs to which she had given her share and in which she need not scruple to rummage for what served her best.

I would say that this is a novel to be read with care and attention, and certainly not one you will want to whizz through. If you're prepared to give it those things, it is immensely rewarding, and yet another triumph for one of the twentieth century's most important, and unjustly forgotten novelists.

 

 

Girl Reading

This girl was painted by Alfred Stevens (1823-1906) who, despite his very English sounding name, was in fact from Belgium. It's actually called Jeune Femme Lisant (young woman reading) and was painted in 1856. I like her little foot on the brown velvet cushion, and the fact that she has dropped her knitting wool and left her knitting in a tangle on the table -- the book has taken her over completely. Nice. 

The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress

I had never read anything by Beryl Bainbridge until this arrived recently. I'm not sure how shameful an admission that is -- I've always known she was a greatly admired writer but somehow she never swam into my ken. But now she has, I'm going to read some more. 

So -- knowing nothing of her previous novels (this being her last, and published posthumously, as she was working on it literally until she died last year) I was unable to judge how typical it was of her writing. But I rather gather that she was noted for what's been called her elliptical style -- "of, relating to, or marked by extreme economy of speech or writing". Yes indeed. 

This is the story of Rose, from Kentish Town, who has travelled to America to look for Dr Wheeler, who she knew when she was growing up. The year is 1968. At the airport she is met by Washington Harold, a man she met briefly in England, who has a daffodil yellow beard and has promised to help her to find Wheeler. Harold has his own reasons for wanting to find Wheeler but he doesn't reveal them to Rose. He has got a camper van and in it the two of them set off on a bizarre and seemingly (to them) endless journey across the United States, East to West, with Wheeler always a step ahead of them. At last they arrive in Los Angeles, where the elusive doctor apparently is, since he is travelling in the entourage of Robert (Bobby) Kennedy.

Now, my grasp of American history in the 1960s being slender, to say the least, I was not aware that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles in June 1968, still less that after the shooting, witnesses reported seeing a girl in a polka dot dress running from the hotel calling out "We shot him!". I'm actually glad I didn't know this until the end of the novel and I suppose telling you about it constitutes a spoiler, though a couple of reviews I've read mention it, so maybe it's common knowledge. In any case it will not spoil anything, as the ending is as elliptical and ambiguous as any ending could possibly be. It has been said that this is owing to Bainbridge's death before the novel was finished, though it has been edited by her close friend Brendan King, who knew her intentions but who has not added any material. So I have no idea what, if anything, might have happened after the existing ending, but I was perfectly happy with it as it was as it seemed totally in keeping with the rest of this fascinating, sometimes puzzling, but always entrancing novel. 

There are many things to love about The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress. The novel gives a wonderfully vivid picture of that hot American summer, the country reeling from the recent assassination of Martin Luther King, the seedy motels and dreadful campsites, the endless roads through endless landscapes of varying beauty and ugliness. Then there are the extraordinary and often eccentric people encountered on the journey, Harold's friends, generally rather peculiar and politically minded intellectuals, who mostly bemuse, or are bemused by, Rose. And there's Harold, of course, stressed, angry, secretive, hypochondriac, and completely unable to understand Rose. 

But this is essentially Rose's story, and Rose is a character you will never forget. Harold, whose brief meeting with her in London has left him with the impression that she is "a hell of a friendly girl, if somewhat hysterical", soon starts describing her to himself as a "retard". This is mainly because she has an aversion to washing, lives in the past and the future and rarely if ever connects with the present, and is frequently confused by the people she meets and the things she sees. Now and again, though, she will surprise him with some astonishingly apt and profound insight into human life, and she is far more perceptive about people and their psychology than Harold will ever be. But though we do from time to time see Rose through Harold's eyes, the main perspective of the the novel belongs to Rose. Her life story, which only gets revealed slowly and, yes, elliptically, is of a painful childhood with warring and abusive parents, the birth of a child as a result of "true love" (Rose), or "a dirty union between underage fornicators" (Mother), and its enforced adoption when she was fifteen, and frequent and generally unpleasant sexual encounters, usually with total strangers. But through all this, Rose has been sustained by the wonderfully good, generous, kind-hearted and philosophical Dr Wheeler, who appeared in her life when she was still a child and whose wise words have remained as her mainstay through the ensuing difficult years. But is Dr Wheeler all she believes him to be?

This is a novel of less than 200 pages, and every page a gem. Has anybody out there read any other of Bainbridge's novels? and if so, what should I be looking for next?

 

 

 

The Slaves of Solitude

Seen here with its evocative Constable edition cover, as opposed to the rather flashier NYRB edition I was so kindly lent by Simon, here is my book of the year for 2011 so far. And here's the way this stunning novel begins:

London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.

If you are saying, Hmmm, a bit Dickensian, you wouldn't be far wrong -- Patrick Hamilton does have a way of personifying things and events in a way that might remind you of the great CD. Elsewhere you might be thinking about Jane Austen -- the brilliant, sharp, satirical observation of characters in an English provincial setting perhaps owes something to her. But if you are now thinking, Oh I see, it's derivative, you couldn't be further from the truth. Hamilton is a brilliant prose stylist and a terrific observer of human beings, their quirks and their foibles and their pains and pleasures and this is a wonderfully written and completely original novel.

Published in 1947 and set in 1943, this is a story firmly fixed in wartime Britain. As the opening paragraph may suggest, it takes place not in London but in a small town named Thames Lockden (based, rather closely, on Henley on Thames). Here, in a rather seedy boarding house oddly named the Rosamund Tea Rooms, is living Miss Roach. Miss Roach? Yes indeed. She does have a first name, Enid, but she hates it, and hates even more "Eeny",  the abbreviation tried out by "her" American, the drunken, warm-hearted, over-emotional GI who kisses her on a bench in the blackout and proposes -- sadly, not just to Miss Roach but, as she discovers rather late in the day, to half the young women in Oxfordshire. Miss Roach makes up part of London's "vital oxygen", for she travels there every day to her work there for a publisher, having been bombed out of her room in Kensington a year earlier. Now her home is an upstairs room lit by a feeble ceiling light, with a pink artificial silk bedspread "which shone and slithered and fell off", red check curtains which refuse to meet in the middle, a mirror "held precariously at a suitable angle by a squashed matchbox", and no bedside light. 

Miss Roach is thirty-nine and neither attractive nor unattractive, but she has long ago given up "hope" (as she puts it to herself in inverted commas), so the advent into her life of Lieutenant (or rather Lootenant) Pike is both confusing and cheering. And cheering is something she is desperately in need of. For her life in the Rosamund Tea Rooms is made intensely miserable by the presence of Mr Thwaites, surely one of the most memorable characters in the whole of English literature. In his sixties but unusually healthy and virile,

in his lethargic yet watchful brown eyes, in his way of walking and his way of talking, there could be discerned the steady, self-absorbed, dreamy, almost somnambulistic quality of the lifelong trampler on the emotions of others, of what Miss Roach would call the 'bully'. That steady look with which as a child he would have torn off a butterfly's wing, with which as a boy he would have twisted another boy's wrist, with which as a man he would have humiliated a servant or inferior, was upon him as he now looked at Miss Roach; it never entirely left him.

Mr Thwaites, "who had further narrowed his mind by a considerable amount of travel abroad", has picked on Miss Roach for his own peculiar form of torture. Actually, though secretly, pro-Hitler, he chooses to associate her with the Russians ("your friends"), who he hates even though they are Britain's allies. Mr Thwaites' speech patterns are wonderfully, horrifically observed. He is fond of substituting the third person verb for the first ("I Keeps my Counsel -- like the Wise Old Bird"), is partial to hideous cod dialect ("I Hay ma Doots, as the Scotchman said"), and falls into dreadful and protracted archaisms ("She goeth, perchance, unto the coffee house...there to partake of the noxious brown fluid with her continental friends?"). Miss Roach's only continental friend -- in fact Miss Roach's only friend -- is the German born, English raised Vicki Kugelman, who is around the same age but a good deal more canny and sophisticated. Apparently friendly and congenial at first, she rapidly becomes first untrustworthy and later downright treacherous, siding with Thwaites -- who is soon grotesquely and obsessively in love with her -- to torment Miss Roach with her own brand of dreadfully faux-idiomatic English: "You must learn to be sporty, Miss Prude".

Told mainly through the perspective of Miss Roach, the novel wonderfully conveys the agonies of her delicate and well-brought-up psyche as she wrestles with the pain and hatred engendered by these two vicious and duplicitous bullies. And if that wasn't enough, I have never read a novel that so brilliantly depicts the realities of life in wartime Britain. Miss Roach scarcely knows what is happening on the war's various fronts, just skimming the headlines from time to time to see who seems to be winning. But the war is no less real to her for that:

the war was slowly, cleverly, month by month, week by week, emptying the shelves of the shops -- sneaking cigarettes from the tobacconists, sweets from the confectioners, paper, pens and envelopes from the stationers, fittings from the hardware stores, beer from the public houses, and so on endlessly -- while at the same time gradually removing crockery from the refreshment bars, railings from familar places, means of transport from the streets, accommodation from the hotels, and sitting or even standing room on the trains.

At first it seems shocking how much everyone smokes and drinks, until you realise that the River Sun, "perhaps Thames Lockden's most popular and fashionable public-house", where "the cheerul word 'OPEN' gleams dimly through transparent violet inserted in the blackout material" offers a welcome escape from the desolation of those lonely rooms and dark streets, where the only permitted dim lights gleam "like moonlight gone bad".

I could go on. But instead I must urge you to read this remarkable novel as soon as possible. I'm already onto an earlier one of Hamilton's, Craven House, and have on order a couple more. He is, or rather was, a truly exceptional writer and I can't believe he is not better known.