Harriet Devine's Blog

The Village

I was going to say that I'd now read all four of Marghanita Laski's novels, but I find there's a fifth, her first, called Love on the Supertax, though it's out of print and expensive to get hold of.  Anyway, the ones I have read are The Victorian Chaise Longue, slightly bizzarre but enjoyable, the amazing To Bed With Grand Music, so shocking she had to publish it under a pseudonym, and the totally wonderful Little Boy Lost, which has to be on the list of my best books ever. Would The Village measure up?

I wish I could say yes. Not that I didn't enjoy the novel, because I did -- it was really interesting and it certainly kept me reading happily to the end. But to be honest I didn't think it was quite as good as any of the others. 

The story starts the day the war ends. Wendy Trevor, from the houses up at the top of the hill where the gentry lived, and Edith Wilson, from Station Road, the other side of the tracks in every sense, are meeting for the last time for their nightime duties at the Red Cross Post. The two women spend a relaxed and comfortable few hours, drinking tea and discussing their respective offspring. Then dawn breaks and they set off for their homes. Goodbye, Edith, says Mrs Trevor, 

and Edith said "Goodbye, Mrs Trevor," and gravely, almost sacramentally, for the first and last time in their lives, the two women embraced and kissed each other.

This moment, of interest in itself because it sets the overarching theme of the novel -- the class divide and the way it has been affected by the war -- will also come to have immense significance as the story continues. For Mrs Trevor's daughter Margaret, a pleasant and capable girl but not a particularly bright or beautiful one, will soon fall in love with her childhood friend Roy, Mrs Wilson's son. A simple and ordinary enough thing, you might think, especially as Roy falls equally in love with her. But of course, as both of them are fully aware, they are  playing with fire. They manage for a while to keep their relationship secret, with long walks during their lunchtime breaks from work and occasional stolen days in the country, but eventually they are spotted embracing in a park, and soon the whole village knows and almost everyone, whether gentry or working class, is scandalised. The lovers are determined to follow their dream and marry, but will the Trevors ever agree to let Margaret marry so far beneath her?

It's notoriously difficult to explain the British class system to anyone who hasn't grown up with it. If, like many non-natives, you think it has something to do with money -- the more you have the higher your class -- this is the novel to put you right. For the Trevors, high up the social scale, are as poor as church mice while Roy Wilson, who is working as a printer, is earning so much money that his prospective in-laws almost faint when he tells them his yearly salary. But of course this makes no difference to their attitude. Roy is working class and Margaret must not lower herself.

Wendy found herself pleading with this new, stern Margaret who stood there judging them. "It's your happiness we want", she said, "you must believe that. Daddy and I know that Roy can give you more in the way of material things than we can. If he was only our class, I give you my word we wouldn't hesitate for a minute".

"Class", said Margaret with a new contempt. "What's class? What's class ever done for you or me or any of us? Roy and I are people, I tell you, and a thing called class isn't going to stand between us. If class is something that says that one kind of people can fall in love and another kind can't, then its a wicked thing".

Stirring stuff. But in a way this encapsulates the reason why this novel, for all it's charm and interest, didn't quite make it for me. Laski clearly has an agenda here and I found at times it was a bit too obviously hammered home. It was really interesting to have read it immediately after the last one I reviewed here, The New House, which, though written a decade or so earlier and so before rather than after World War Two, deals with social class in a subtler and for me more successful way. 

But please don't let me put you off! I'm sure there will be many people who have read this and adored it, and if you haven't read it yet, you certainly won't regret picking it up. I read it in a lovely old hardback (first edition, second impression, January 1952) but of course you can get a spanking new one from Persephone. 

 

Girl Begging

 

That's a first time for this title -- or, strictly speaking, Persian Girl Begging, painted in around 1880 by the great John Singer Sargent. Beautiful (though I suppose we must deplore the fact that she needs to beg at all).

The New House

I'm ashamed to say I had never heard of Lettice Cooper until I saw this up for sale on Simon's Stuck in a Book. I do love an orange Penguin, and a bit of quick googling convinced me I should make it one of the three I bought. It's been quite a slow read, but that is not because I wasn't enjoying it -- far from it. It just seemed to be the kind of novel you need to savour. 

I've talked on here from time to time about what qualities of a novel I (and others) like. Basically we are talking about plot, character, and good writing. When I indulge, as I often do, in a crime novel, plot has obviously got to be primary, though I can't read them if they aren't well written. Good writing is incredibly important to me, which I why I can't stand Dan Brown, for example. But character -- yes, that matters too. Sometimes you read a novel in which you just are not quite convinced by the people -- in fact I think this was a slight problem for me in the last novel I reviewed here, The World My Wilderness -- another of my buys from Simon. 

So what do we have in The New House? Well let me say straight away that if you are someone who wants an exciting and action-filled plot, please do not even pick this up. Because what happens here, on the surface at least, is almost nothing. The novel takes place over the space of a day, during which a family moves house. That's it, really. Sounds as if it might be boring, doesn't it. But oh no, it is so not. The novel is beautifully written though in quite an unobtrusive way -- no obvious purple passages to quote here, But it is the characters who make it so wonderfully, though subtly, stunning. 

At the centre of the novel is Rhoda Powell. In her early thirties, intelligent and sensitive, she has never married and feels old, tired and on the shelf. She has lived all her life with her now widowed mother Natalie, though it was her father who she was closest to. It is these two women who are moving house -- from the grand Victorian family home, now not affordable, to a much smaller house where they can manage with just one maid. For this is 1936, and for Natalie, at least, the loss first of five other servants and now of the cook too is almost too much to bear. Helping with the move is Rhoda's younger sister, the lively, strong-minded Delia, who lives in London, works as a lab assistant, and is engaged to Jim. Living nearby is their brother Maurice, his wife Evelyn, and their three-year-old daughter Tatty. Then there's Natalie's unmarried sister Ellen, whose life has been spent helping others. 

The skill with which Lettice Cooper takes us into the inner lives of these people is really amazing. We see them interact with each other and then we find out what is really going on under the surface. And essentially it becomes clear very quickly that nobody has the least idea of what anyone else is really thinking and feeling, because what people say and do hardly ever reflects their actual thoughts and desires. People behave badly, rudely, inconsiderately -- but then Cooper reveals their back story, or what's really going on under the surface, and even the least likeable becomes a sympathetic character.

Natalie, for instance, is unbelievably self-centred and demanding, expecting her daughters to drop everything and cater to her smallest whims and complaining bitterly if they do not.

The discontent grew in Natalie's mind. All day she had been left to herself outside that close alliance of Rhoda and Delia. She had seen their eyes meet, laughing at something which had not amused her. She had always resented any combination in her family apart from her; she had hated it when Tom and the children talked about things that did not interest her, or when Maurice and Rhoda, playing in the garden, obviously wanted to get away from the grown-up people.

She is very hard to like, but as we learn more about her childhood as the little petted beauty of the family, about the life-long adoration of a plain older sister and the uncritical admiration of her husband, it becomes easier to understand how her native intelligence has been thwarted and her ability to love and empathise never developed. And indeed, right at the end, she does make an unselfish gesture.

As for Evelyn, whose marriage to Maurice has deteriorated badly, it becomes clear that she is out of her depth in the family she has married into, so different in every way from the suburban set in which she was brought up. For the Powells are undoubtedly of a higher social class -- and here's the really interesting subtext of the novel, which quietly lays bare the ugly truths about class consciousness in mid-century middle England. The Powells are not upper class, but they are probably what might be called upper-middle, and "She's not our sort"  is a condemnation quite sufficient to indicate that a neighbour will never be accepted into the higher echelons. So Evelyn, whose social status was a rung or two lower before she married Maurice, views the world in a very different way from her husband's family. And at the root of the increasing unhappiness of this couple is the hope each of them silently nurtures that little Tatty will imbibe their values rather than those of their partner. This becomes clear when Delia, looking at some photos, remarks on how Tatty resembles Rhoda.

Evelyn put them back into their envelope again without answering. All at once she hated the photographs, and nearly hated Tatty. Tatty was the Powell's child. She had loved Maurice, had been sick and frightened and ugly, had spent a night of confused pain, had grown thin and tired nursing her baby, and given up her time to her, all to rear another Powell, an alien creature.... Like Rhoda! Evelyn's mood swung over, she clasped the photographs in a tight grip. No, she's not! They shan't make her one of them; they shan't have her! She's my little girl! She had not been able to make Maurice to her pattern, but she was determined to make Tatty to it, to set her stamp on the soft, new wax.

In the end, though, this is Rhoda's story, and Rhoda has a huge decision to make. Will she accept her sister's suggestion that she should move to London and take a job? Everything seems against it, including Rhoda's own tentative and easily swayed character. Well, you'll have to read the novel if you want to find out.

Woman Reading

This painting, by the Spanish artist Julio Romero de Torres (1874-1930), is called Mujer en oración  -- which means Woman in prayer . OK, so that's a prayer book -- but she doesn't look terribly devout to me. It's a bit like a snapshot, as if she'd just looked up and noticed the artist capturing her image, though she doesn't seem too displeased about it...

 

The World my Wilderness

Rose Macaulay is one of those authors whose name seems always to have been familiar to me but who I had never read until yesterday, when I started and finished it more or less in a sitting (a long day travelling, a delayed flight...). I enjoyed it quite a lot, and thought it interestingly and well written, but I'm not exactly raving about it. 

Published in 1950 but set in 1945-6, this is the story of seventeen-year-old Barbary, who, at the beginning of the novel, is uprooted from her beloved home in the South of France and sent to live in London with her barrister father and his new young wife. She remembers him hardly at all, having left with her mother ten years before, and is most unwilling to go. Fortunately for her, her step-brother Raoul, aged fifteen, is sent to London at the same time, to live with an uncle. The two children have run wild in the war, joining the junior branch of the guerilla maquis, and spending most of their days running from the Gestapo in the countryside or by the sea. When they get to London, they are both appalled by the restrictions and expectations of their respective new households, and set themselves up with an alternative lifestyle in the bombed out flats, offices and churches of the war-torn city, going home only to sleep. Barbary, a talented artist, makes a little money selling hand-painted postcards of bombsites to tourists, and they are befriended by a group of highly dodgy deserters, who live by stealing ration books and shoplifting. Barbary herself eventually ventures into shoplifting, but everything goes badly wrong and... well you'll have to read it yourself if you want to know how it all turns out.

I read a comment somewhere saying that post-war London is really the main character in this novel. While I don't actually agree, as it's full of fascinating people, I must say that in my opinion you will never find another novel that depicts so brilliantly not only the deserted, ravaged city but also the effect the war has had on the minds and hearts of those who inhabit it. Macaulay seems peculiarly capable of creating characters whose views may differ from her own (though I have no idea what those might have been) without in any way judging or condemning them. So the deserters -- Horace, who reads Aristotle, and Jock, who kisses Barbary, and their friend Mavis, who's out of a job because her firm was bombed out -- have carved out a reasonable life for themselves, though they live in fear of getting caught, and all have their sad, limited, unfulfillable dreams:

Horace looked wistful; but for that blasted army, he too might have been a rescue man, hurrying to incidents, working away in dungarees with great deep pockets. When he had escaped from the army, incidents had been over, but for a few V2s, and anyhow, to join Civil Defence would have been to make himself much too noticeable. Life was bitterly unfair.

But it's not just these outlaws who have been changed by the war. Barbary's older brother Richie, who fought in France, is now in his final year at Cambridge. He has become 'one of those returned warriors whose hang-over was not toughness, but an ardent and delighted reaction towards the exquisite niceities of civilisation'.  He has become a Tory, wants to join the Foreign Office, is attracted to Catholicism, but admits to his mother that he has no problems with the sort of stealing, smuggling and other illegal practices he acquired during the war. As for beautiful Helen, Richie and Barbary's mother, it seems at first that neither the war nor anything else could have any effect on her lazy, sybaritic way of life. A talented painter, she prefers to loll around in her delightful French house, playing chess, translating a little Greek poetry, chatting with the neighbouring abbe. Though apparently devastated by the death of her second husband Maurice, she soon takes up with his married cousin, and seems terrifyingly unmoved by her daughter's distress at being sent away to England. But there's a mystery surrouding Maurice's death by drowning, and the resolution of it makes a great deal of sense of her troubled relationship with Barbary as well as of her apparent inability to start painting again. Then of course there's Barbary herself, whose inner life is so secret from even those she loves the most. Scruffy, dirty, badly dressed, rebellious, she shocks her  father and hostile stepmother by her refusal to conform to their highly conventional way of life. A trip to Scotland to meet her cousins is a disaster from which she runs away, stealing money from her aunt in order to do so. For Barbary has fully absorbed the ethos of the maquis, and living outside the law seems wholly right and desirable to her. The British police are, for her, the equivalent of the Gestapo, with whom she had a very unpleasant encounter that has certainly left her with scars, though she has never told anyone about it. 

But yes, war damaged London does figure in the most evocative way here too. Not only the ruined buildings, now overgrown with brambles and weeds, but also the ghosts of the old inhabitants whose presence lingers unseen in the places where they once lived and worked:

Still the glosts of the centuries-oldmerchant cunning crept and murmured among weeds and broken stones, flitted like bats about dust-heaped, gaping rooms. But their companion ghosts, ghosts of an ancient probity, honourable and mercantile and proud and tough, that had lived side by side with cunning in the stone ways, and in the great blocks of warehouses and offices and halls, had deserted and fled without trace, leaving their broken dwellings to the creeping jungle and the crafty shades.

Barbary is particularly drawn to the ruined churches -- though she doesn't believe in religion, she believes in hell, and one of her projects is a mural of the Last Judgment which she is painting on a still-standing wall. There's a wonderful short scene where a distressed vicar, his mind disturbed by terrible experiences in the blitz, bursts in one day and flings himself on the ground crying out incoherent prayers until he is rescued by a kindly younger priest who takes him home to be comforted.

Well -- I said at the beginning that I wasn't exactly raving about this novel but now I have talked myself into thinking that it actually is a rather remarkable piece of work. My copy came from Simon of Stuck-in-a-Book, whose review of it you can read here.  I don't think I have read the last of Rose Macaulay.

Woman in Black

No, not that one -- this is a 1900 painting by one Ludwig Hartmann Mayer, about whom I know nothing at all. I just like it because it is so very atmospheric. 

Young Woman Reading

This is a portrait of the distinguished English painter Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970), painted by her husband Harold Knight (1874-1961) long before she became a Dame. An exhibition of her work is on at the moment at Penlee House, Penzance, Cornwall, and you can read more about it on dovegreyreader's blog.

People of the Book

I was urged to read this recently by a friend who was raving about it, and I was only too happy to as I loved Geraldine Brooks' two earlier novels, Year of Wonders and March. It sounded intriguing and I was looking forward to it very much. Unfortunately, though it's by no means a bad novel, it didn't really make it for me. Why not?

People of the Book is basically the story of Hanna, from Australia, who is a restorer of rare books. As the novel begins -- in 1996 -- she is called to Sarajevo to work on a rare medieval work, an ancient Jewish text known as a haggadah. A tiny book, it is illustrated with the most staggeringly beautiful paintings, which seem to owe more to Christian iconography than to its Jewish origins. As she painstakingly examines this extraordinary and wonderful artefact, she discovers within it tiny clues to its past history: a fragment of butterfly wing, a crystal of sea salt, a tiny white hair.  And, with each discovery, the novel flashes back to the past, uncovering to the reader the source of each of these and thus gradually building up a picture of the book's history until at last the identity of the unknown illustrator is revealed.

This is obviously a clever device, but I was slightly dissatisfied by the fact that Hanna herself would never know these stories -- of course there's no way she could, so I realise I was asking too much -- though she does eventually make a discovery (rather pat, I thought) about the identity of the original illustrator. More than this, I was just not that enthralled by the historical episodes. Yes, they were well researched, but to be honest I found them a bit boring. Also I have, for some reason, a prejudice against novels that flash back and forth between the past and the present -- Kate Mosse's Labyrinth is one example, and I never managed to finish that. I don't mind a well written novel set wholly in the past, as Brooks' two earlier novels are, so why I don't like this bobbing about is not clear to me. It's a shame, really, as there was much to appreciate about this novel. I did very much like Hanna's own story -- her problems with her appalling mother, her disovery of the identity of her father and its effect on her own sense of identity, her relationships with the people she worked with and her experiences in war-torn Bosnia. And also, though I didn't find this out till I read the afterword, it is fascinating to realise that the haggadah described in the novel does actually exist, and that much of the story told by Brooks is based on known fact. I wish I'd known this at the beginning as maybe my reading experience would have changed.

So all in all I'm sorry not to have loved this novel more. It's been a huge success, so my quibbles won't mean a lot anyway, and perhaps it was just a case of the wrong time. Or perhaps it's been over-hyped. What an indecisive review this is!