Harriet Devine's Blog

The Dud Avocado

The beautiful cover you see here is one of the new Virago VMC hardback designer collection which I was lucky enough to be sent recently. This one is taken from a fabric by the great textile designer Lucienne Day, and if, like me, you love a bit of retro, you may want to own this for the cover alone. But what about the novel?

I seem to have known about The Dud Avocado for my entire life without ever having read it. I suppose the title always seemed very striking to me -- and, when the novel was first published in 1958, avocados were a very new and exotic food for most people -- and also I knew that Elaine Dundy had been married to the famous theatre critic Ken Tynan, whose name was a household word, in my household, at least, when I was a nipper.

This is the story of Sally Jay Gorce, aged nineteen and on her own in Paris. And this is not just any old Paris, this is Paris in the 1950s, awash with aspiring painters, actors, dancers and general hangers on, all generally in varying degrees of inebriation. Most of Sally's life is spent in bars, cafes and night clubs, and sometimes she has no memory of how she ended up back in her hotel bedroom. Financed by a generous uncle, Sally has broken free of her restricted life back in the American mid-West and is living her childhood  dream of staying out as late as she likes and eating whatever she likes at any time she wants to. She's also acquired  a suave middle-aged lover, who takes her out to the Ritz, though she tends to stand out there rather, owing to her unsuitable clothes (evening dress worn all day long) and her pink hair ("dyed a marvellous shade of pale red so popular with Parisian tarts that season"). But as the novel begins she falls violently and painfully in love with the gorgeous Larry Keevil, a would-be theatre director and a devastating charmer. Being an aspiring actress herself, Sally manages to get a part in one of Larry's productions, but somehow she never quite manages to get Larry himself, who always seems to be entrapped by various Contessas, dancers and models, much to Sally's anguish. That doesn't stop her indulging her "mild nymphomania" elsewhere, and even when she settles down with a talented and good-hearted painter who obviously adores her she is unable to resist Larry's invitation to a house party in a villa in Biarritz, an adventure which has pretty disastrous consequences.

And so the story rollicks on, often as apparently disorganised as Sally's own life, though there is a plot and it does make sense and has a fairly satisfying (though possibly a bit too pat) denouement. But what is entertaining here is not just the plot --  it's Paris and above all it's Sally. 1950s Paris is just as you've always imagined it, and you could read this novel just for the social history. But Sally herself is a most fascinating and intriguing character. Outwardly kooky and vivacious, she is a mass of internal contradictions and is frequently confused about herself and her view of the world, and almost always unsure what she is doing and why she is doing it. In fact she is a pretty typical nineteen-year-old, and who's to say some of us might not have ended up behaving in much the same way and being equally confused about it if we had ended up with lots of money on our own in Paris for a year. Dundy has captured her voice and her thought processes perfectly, and the novel is often highly entertaining while at the same time rather nerve-wracking -- what on earth does Sally think she is doing? and doesn't she realise she's heading for disaster? 

So I'm glad I finally got around to reading this -- thanks, Virago! and I look forward to the next beautiful new VMC -- watch this space. 

Trick of the Dark

I'm pretty sure I would not have gone out to buy this novel, which I got as a birthday present quite recently. I've read others by Val McDermid, though not for some years,  and while I can see why she is so popular, her books have never exactly reached up and grabbed me by the throat. She's very prolific and some of her novels are in series, but this one is a stand-alone, though perhaps we'll be seeing Dr Charlie Flint again in the future?

Charlie Flint is a woman, a psychiatrist, and until recently she was a profiler for the police and worked on numerous important cases. But not long before the novel begins she has been suspended from duty following a tragic incident in which a man who she argued was innocent went on to commit four murders. Unhappy and bored with the small amounts of low-key work she is able to pick up, she jumps at the chance of revisiting Oxford, to help out her old college tutor whose daughter's husband has been murdered. It's not just the chance of helping to solve the crime that has Charlie heading for the dreaming spires, though -- she has also recently fallen in love with beautiful Lisa Kent, who lives there -- and this despite having been in a happy long-term relationship for many years with successful dentist Maria. 

Charlie spends a good deal of the novel on the road between Manchester and Oxford, with occasional forays to London, to the north east, and to the isle of Skye. Most of her investigations centre on Jay, an attractive, high-powered ex-journalist and dot com millionairess, whose success seems suspiciously peppered with the dead bodies of her business rivals. Corinna, Charlie's employer and one-time tutor, is convinced that Jay is responsible for her son-in-law's murder, and certainly this does appear to be a reasonable supposition, especially since Jay is now living with Corinna's daughter, the widow of the murdered man. But  Charlie's recent experiences have left her doubly wary of jumping to conclusions, and proof is very hard to come by.

This is a pretty long novel and it did keep me interested throughout. Part of the length is owing to the fact that it is interspersed with Jay's "misery memoirs", which are quite readable and do, in the end, shed light on the developments of the plot, though they also warn us how unreliable such a genre can be. Sadly, though, I guessed the surprise twist long before the end, and that does always spoil my enjoyment of this kind of book. So, though I'm not sorry to have read it, I'm unlikely to be rushing out to buy another V Mc D in the near future -- unless somebody out there convinces me that there's something of hers that I really shouldn't miss. Any fans? Any suggestions?

 

Lady Reading

Here we have 'Lady Reading' by the wonderfully talented painter Gwen John (1876-1939). Sister of the famous, even infamous Augustus John (one of whose paintings appears in the banner to this blog) she lived in his shadow for most of her difficult and often sad life, but is now regarded as probably the better painter of the two. Much of her life was spent in France where she was the model and  lover of the sculptor Auguste Rodin before converting to Catholicism. 

Here is a link to lots more of her fine paintings. 

 

Harriet

Well, here's a book I definitely need to read. Can I wait till Persephone publishes it next April? I don't think so -- am off to abebooks to see if I can get it sooner.

Knowledge is Power...

...is the title of this rather charming image, painted by Seymour Joseph Guy (1824-1910). He was an American artist and most famous for his paintings of children. You can see many more of them here. 

Retrospecting/The Death Instinct

Yesterday I was trawling through all the posts I've put up on here since the very beginning, which I discovered to my astonishment was actually 27 September 2006, almost exactly five years ago. I was just reading my old reviews and was interested to see how my reading habits, and my reviewing habits, have changed in that time. I didn't actually start reviewing seriously and frequently until early 2007, and one of the first books I reviewed was The Interpretation of Murder  by Jed Rubenfeld, which I seem to have liked quite a lot -- along, I may add, with almost a million other people in this country alone.

Anyway, though I didn't remember a great deal about this novel, when I spotted Rubenfeld's follow-up in an airport bookstore, I thought it would be a perfect way to pass a nine-hour flight. In actual fact I hardly read any of it on the plane as I spent most of my time either eating or watching X Men movies (the prequel and the first two, in case you are interested) which I'd never seen before and enjoyed enormously. So Jed had to wait till I got home, and then I was frightfully jetlagged and reading became a real strain as I kept falling asleep. This partly explains why, after getting back to the UK almost 6 days ago, I am still only two thirds of the way through this novel. Partly but not completely -- as to tell the truth I am finding it really boring and not at all well written -- it kept reminding me of Dan Brown, not a good thing at all. Certainly it is interesting historically -- like his first novel, this one is based on real events, in this case a (still) unexplained terrorist bomb which exploded in the centre of New York City in 1920. Once again Sigmund Freud appears, as do many other real people, and we meet again Stratham Younger, the charismatic young psychologist, this time in pursuit of a beautiful French radiologist called Colette. So there's lots in here about psychoanalysis and the early use (or misuse) of radium. But I'm just not enthralled and am getting irritated with it all, though of course I do want to find out about the three red-headed women who keep appearing in front of Colette, and I do want to know if Freud is going to be able to cure Colette's little brother of his inability to speak. I think skipping and skimming is called for here.

What struck me forcibly about my earlier reading habits was how much my tastes have changed since 2007. In those early days I was mostly reading recently published novels, and now I hardly ever do. Almost all my reading now is of novels published in the middle years of the twentieth century and I can't seem to get enough of them. As for my reviews, the early ones were much briefer and, to me, not nearly as interesting. So blogging has honed my critical abilities, I think -- and let's hope it goes on doing so.

The Misses Mallett

There are four of them -- the Misses Mallett, that is. Two, Caroline and Sophia, are no longer young, though they enjoy dressing up and still like to think of themselves as the belles of the ball and the toasts of the neighbourhood. Then there's Ruth, their beautiful, much younger half-sister, who is about thirty. And finally there is Henrietta, the young daughter of their recently deceased, impoverished ne'er-do-well brother and his even more recently deceased and embarrassingly working-class wife. Henrietta has been living in real poverty for some time until her three aunts, hearing of the loss of her mother, give her a home and an income. She soon learns how to make the best of her good looks and before long she has fallen in love. Unfortunately it is with a man who is not only married but also happens to be the person Ruth has been in love with for many years. The novel tells the story of the hopes, anxieties, disappointments and triumphs of these two women, superficially very different characters, both of whose happiness seems to depend on their gaining the love of the handsome, charming, unreliable Francis Sales.

 Published in 1922, this was Emily Young's fourth novel, and the first one that Virago thought good enough to republish. The blurb on the back says it is the one of her novels that most resembles Jane Austen, a judgement with which I cannot at all agree.  When I read (and loved) Young's slightly later William about a year ago, I was reminded in some ways of Pride and Prejudice, but here I found nothing remotely like Austen, either in style or in content. Well, I suppose the fact that it's partly about a young girl trying to find her way in an unfamiliar world might be reminiscent of Northanger Abbey, but there are so many differences that they far outweigh any superficial similarities.

I've read quite a few of Emily Young's novels now, and I've always admired the way she depicts family relationships. She's extremely perceptive about human beings and the ways in which they respond to the demands placed on them by the worlds which they inhabit, and to an extent you can see this perceptiveness at work in this novel. I've also always loved her irony and wit, but alas these last two things are pretty much absent from The Misses Mallett. Here, instead, everybody takes themselves rather too seriously -- Ruth, elegant, remote and pure, who has realised too late how much she is in love with Francis Sales -- Henrietta, who thinks she has inherited her father's unreliability and immorality and sees no reason why she shouldn't indulge her passion for a married man -- and Francis himself, married in a fit of pique to a woman who almost immediately has a serious accident which leaves her a pathetic bedridden invalid. 

I don't think Emily Young could write a really bad novel, and there's much of interest here, but I have to agree with Simon (who liked it even less than I did) that if this was your first inroduction to Young you might never read another one. As he also says, though, the novel is almost redeemed by the wonderful character of Charles Batty, the young musician who is sure of nothing but his unswerving, though unrequited, love for Henrietta. 

So -- I can't really urge you to read this, unless you love Young as much as I do in which case you'll be wanting to read everything she ever wrote. But if you do, bear in mind that here she hasn't really found her mature voice. You can still enjoy what is, after all, a quite conventional but pleasantly satisfying story with some interesting and unexpected twists and turns and an ending which, though perhaps predictable, at least leaves everyone getting what they wanted, even if they hadn't quite realised they did.

This is called Lady Reading in an Interior, and was painted at the end of the 18th century by the French Romantic artist Marguerite Gerard (1761-1837). I think rather than reading she is actually looking at a book of prints -- art seems to be important to her as you can see from the ones that are propped up on her desk. The satin of her dress has been beautifully captured.

The Heat of the Day

Well, I think I can say with absolute honesty that this is one of the best novels I have ever read. I've had a bit of a mixed response to Elizabeth Bowen in the past. I read one some time ago, possibly Death of the Heart, and enjoyed it very much, but then tried another and couldn't get on with it. I was a bit afraid that this was going to happen with The Heat of the Day but my goodness, how glad I am that I persevered.

Yes, Bowen's prose is not the kind of writing you can fling yourself into and dash through in a hurry. Even after I got the hang of the way she writes I still found myself having to stop sometimes and re-read, and think about, some sentence, to make sure I knew exactly what she meant. But how wonderfully rewarding that process -- based, I suppose, on the wonderful subtlety and perceptiveness of the way she thinks about people, situations and relationships -- turns out to be. At the beginning I was singling out passages and thinking, Oh, I'll quote that in my review, but then I wanted to quote the next paragraph and the next and really all I want to do now is to say just get this book and read it NOW.

The Heat of the Day is set in 1942, right in the middle of the second world war. Beautiful widowed Stella has stayed in London, one of a small group of people defying the bombing raids. She is living in a rented flat, worrying about her son Roderick who is about to be sent to the front, and taking deep pleasure from her love affair with charming, handsome, slightly mysterious Robert. As the novel begins, though, Stella is approached by a man who calls himself Harrison and who tells her that Robert is a traitor, selling secrets to the enemy. The rest of the novel is the working out of that news, its effect on Stella, on her relationship with Robert and on her relationship with Harrison who makes no secret of the fact that he wants Stella for himself.

Sounds quite plotty, doesn't it. And yes on one level it is a spy story of sorts, but it is so much more than that that I really don't want to put that, or any other kind of label, on it. The trouble is, I really don't know how to convey to you what a great novel it is and what makes it that way. So instead of sitting here is this sticky Indian internet cafe agonising over it I will refer you to Rachel's excellent review on booksnob, which was what got me wanting to read the book in the first place.

And I will leave you with a quote which will give you an idea of the kind of thing you will be treated to when you rush out and buy this book which of course you must do forthwith. Here is wartime London:

Most of all the dead, from mortuaries, from under cataracts of rubble, made their anonymous presence -- not as today's dead but as yesterday's living -- felt through London. Uncounted, they continued to move through the city day, pervading everything to be seen or heard or felt with their torn-off senses, drawing on this tomorrow they had expected -- for death cannot be so sudden as all that. Absent from the routine that had been life, they stamped upon that routine their absence -- not knowing who the dead were, you could not know which might be the staircase somebody for the first time was not mounting that morning, or at which street the newsvendor missed a face, or which trains or buses in the homegoing rush were this evening lighter by a single passenger. The wall between the living and the dead thinned. In that September transparency people became transparent, only to be located by the just darker flicker of thir hearts.

 

The First Wives Club: Vera and Rebecca

A young woman,  more or less alone in the world, meets an attractive and wealthy middle-aged man and before long they are married. After a honeymoon on the continent he takes her back to his family home, a large and imposing country mansion, which she finds, rather upsettingly, to be dominated by a large portrait of his first wife, who died in mysterious circumstances. As time goes on she, and we, start to wonder how much responsibility her husband must take for her death.

Rebecca (1938)? Yes -- and also Vera (1921). Interestingly enough DduM was accused of plagiarism   - but not in relation this this novel of Elizabeth von Arnim -- according to Wikipedia,

Shortly after Rebecca was published in Brazil, critic Álvaro Lins and other readers pointed out many resemblances between du Maurier's book and the work of Brazilian writer Carolina Nabuco.

Actually Vera and Rebecca are quite different in many ways -- but I'm grateful to Adele Geras for pointing out the similarities.