Harriet Devine's Blog

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

Well! I started out really disliking this book and ended up really loving it. That's not something that happens very often - in fact I can't remember a book I've actually gone on reading when I didn't take to it. In fact, I was listening to it on Audible, and I made use of their returns policy to give it back when I was about a quarter way through, but either I didn't click the right button or they messed up, as it remained in my library. So, having failed to find anything else I fancied listening to, I decided to press on regardless. And I'm so glad I did.

If you pay any attention at all to book news, you'll know that this is Gail Honeyman's debut novel. She entered the first chapters for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, didn't win but got an agent, and the book ended up in a fierce eight-way publishing auction. Although it appeared less than two months ago, a movie is already in development, starring Reese Witherspoon (is this a good idea? Hope so).

So, what's it all about? Eleanor, who narrates the novel herself, is a 30-year-old single woman who works in the same Glasgow office where she started her first job nine years ago. She's highly intelligent and well-educated, but utterly alone in the world. Her colleagues think she's an oddball, and she has no friends outside work. Her weeks are all the same: a simple meal and the Archers in the evening, and at the weekend two bottles of vodka, which she spaces out over the two days 'so I'm neither drunk nor sober'. The only contact she has outside work is a weekly telephone conversation with 'Mummy', a violently unpleasant woman who is clearly incarcerated somewhere though we never discover where, and whose main purpose is to destroy any confidence or self-esteem her daughter may have managed to develop during the week. 

Eleanor never tells us about her past, but as time goes on we are able to discern that it has been one of extreme abuse and deprivation. For one thing, her face is scarred and we know it's the result of a fire in childhood. We learn that from the age of ten she has been raised in foster homes, and that in her twenties she was for two years in a terrifyingly abusive relationship. As a result of all this she has never learned any social skills, has no idea how to interact with people, and often offends others by speaking her mind. Many readers have found Eleanor's social awkwardness, and the crush she develops on a rock star, to be funny, but my problem was that it all seemed too painful to be amusing. Painful, and almost too extreme to be credible, which is basically what put me off in the first instance. 

However, when I got back into it, things took a turn for the better. Eleanor had already encountered Raymond, a young bloke from the IT department who fixed her computer. She didn't think much of him at first - he seemed scruffy and altogether rather a mess. But a chance incident in the street which causes the two of them of work together to help an old man who's had an attack brings them slowly closer, and eventually a genuine friendship develops, with weekly lunches and joint visits to social events. Finally, when Eleanor reaches a dramatic crisis which almost costs her her life, Raymond is there to save her and persuade her to  try counselling, which enables her finally to face and deal with the demons from her past.

So ultimately this is a feel-good novel, tender and heartwarming. Central to the whole thing is how the friendship between Eleanor and Raymond develops - I was rather relieved to find that it didn't burst into a full-blown romance - it's so much more satisfying to witness the slow, steady growth of trust and respect. Raymond is, after all, the first person who has really been able to see the goodness at the heart of this strange, spiky, difficult woman, and who perseveres even when she doesn't seem to appreciate him in return. But of course that changes too over time, and she's able to see beyond the things that irritate her - his bad taste in clothes, his habit of talking with his mouth full - and all this draws her out of the bubble she's built around herself and makes her into an altogether more normal and approachable woman. Whether things will develop further between them is not beyond the realms of possibility, but we are left with a warm feeling of hope, knowing that whatever happens they will remain the best of friends.

So I came to mock and stayed to pray, as the saying goes. There is a twist at the end which I wasn't terribly happy with or convinced by, but I'm willing to let that go for the sake of the extreme pleasure I got from this charming novel. The Audible recording is very well read by Cathleen McCarron and I'm grateful to them for the download, and for messing up my attempt to return the book. Highly recommended.

 

 

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Victorian Girls Take a Selfie

Well, what do you think they're doing? This is by the Swedish artist Knut Ekwall (1843-1912).

Re-reading Josephine Tey...

...and not for the first time. Her thoughtful, intriguing mystery novels have called me back many times over the years. The last one I reviewed on here was The Daughter of Time, which was voted greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writers Association in 1990, but I've also reviewed Brat Farrar and Miss Pym Disposes fairly recently. 

I was in London for a week, staying at my daughter's keeping an eye on my very delightful teenage grandson, and still pursuing my recent move to read books already on the shelves. There was a complete set of Tey's novels to choose from, and the first one I read was A Shilling for Candles. This is a comparatively early novel, published in 1936 and only her second venture into the genre (the first was The Man in the Queue (1929)). Hitchcock made it into a film called Young and Innocent, which I haven't seen and which sounds pretty awful - Hitchcock played havoc with the plot and Tey was evidently annoyed. 

In common with six of her eight crime novels, A Shilling for Candles features Tey's detective Alan Grant. Intelligent and cultured, with a love of theatre - his best friend is the glamorous actress Marta Hallard - Grant is in many ways a very ordinary chap. As Tey writes in this novel,

By the time coffee had arrived he was no nearer a solution. He wished he was one of these marvelous creatures of super-instinct and infallible judgment who adorned the pages of detective stories, and not just a hard-working, well-meaning, ordinarily intelligent Detective Inspector. 

The crime he is setting out to solve here is the death of Christine Clay, a beautiful young film actress, found drowned near the seaside cottage she's rented as an escape from people and publicity. A penniless young man who has been staying with her is the immediately obvious suspect, especially as it turns out she has just changed her will in his favour. Grant is pretty convinced he is the perpetrator, and is furious with himself when the man manages to evade arrest and simply disappear, apparently into thin air. But evidence turns up which makes his guilt seem less likely, and other suspects start to emerge, including Christine's estranged brother, a very dodgy character who is posing as a monk in the hope of gaining a large fortune. 

Questions of identity loom here - Christine herself, with all her wealth and Hollywood success, turns out to have risen from very humble origins as a lacemaker in Nottingham, and her brother has taken on various identities in his criminal career. If you're familiar with Tey's novels you'll recognise a theme which seems to have fascinated her: how do we really know who people are? Of course this is actually central to The Daughter of Time, where a portrait of Richard III causes Grant to question whether the notorious king was in fact as bad as he was painted. In Brat Farrar, a young man poses as the lost heir to a fortune, pretending to be a long lost twin. In The Franchise Affair, two women, mother and daughter, find their lives and motivations coming under a relentless spotlight. And the second novel I picked up this week, To Love and Be Wise, raises fascinating issues of gender as well as identity.

Briefly, To Love and Be Wise is set in a country village - one that has been invaded by a disparate crowd of London celebrities who have bought up all the attractive old houses. One of these is the popular novelist Lavinia Fitch, a friend of Alan Grant. At a book launch in London, Lavinia has been introduced to Leslie Searle, a young American photographer of extreme beauty, and has immediately fallen under his spell, inviting him to come and stay for an indefinite period at her country house. Her young niece Liz, engaged to Walter Whitmore, a rather stodgy and conventional journalist, is similarly drawn to Leslie, but Liz's stepmother takes an apparently illogical dislike to him and the local vicar is put in mind of other worldly demons when he meets him at dinner. Walter and Leslie are planning to do a book together, but they have a row in the local pub, and Leslie wanders off and is never seen again. Murder is naturally suspected, and Walter is one of the suspects. But the truth proves to be much more complicated than anyone could have foreseen.

I believe this to have been only my second of read of what is, I think, one of Tey's most remarkable novels. There's a tremendous twist towards the end which I certainly didn't see coming the first time around, and it was fascinating to see how Tey drops subtle hints into the earlier part of the text which could be seen as preparing the way for the reveal, though I doubt if many first-time readers would have picked them up. 

Tey herself was a woman of some mystery, as is often remarked. Her given name was Elizabeth MacIntosh, but she also wrote plays, some immensely successful, under the name Gordon Daviot. But she was an intensely private person, and apparently did not have any relationships, though her would-be biographer Nicola Upson, who ended up writing an excellent series of crime novels featuring Tey instead of the planned biog, suggests that she may have had a relationship with the actress Marda Vanne, on whom the character Marta Hallard is based. I assume we'll never know - the recent biography by Jennifer Morag Henderson doesn't reveal much at all. 

Chronologically speaking Tey fits into the category of Golden Age crime novelists, but her books stand out from the crowd by dealing with issues that would undoubtedly have influenced novelists who followed, such a Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. It's sad that she died in her fifties, leaving such a relatively small output behind her. Thankfully, though, her novels really repay re-reading - I'm planning to get back to The Franchise Affair before too much time has passed. Watch this space.

Girl Reading

This painting, 'The Quiet Hour',  is by the British artist Dod Proctor (1890-1972). Born Doris Shaw, she married a fellow artist Ernest Proctor, and they often worked together until his death in 1935. 

Fludd by Hilary Mantel

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I seem to be well and truly fixed in my exploration of so-called modern classics. This one was an audiobook, first published in 1989, and one of the few novels by Hilary Mantel I had not yet read. 

This brilliant, satirical black comedy of a novel takes place in the fictional town of Fetherhaughton, a cotton-mill town in the north of England, probably pretty similar to the one where Mantel herself grew up. Its narrow, dull, but not wholly unsympathetic inhabitants are mostly Roman Catholic, and their church is presided over by one Father Angwin. A gentle thoughtful man, Angwin does his best for his parishioners despite (or because of?) the fact that he lost his faith some twenty years earlier. As the novel begins, he receives an unwelcome visit from the Bishop ('a modern man', as Angwin calls him), who brings up the idea, horrifying to the priest, that the Mass could be spoken in the vernacular ('You mean they could actually understand what we are saying?'). Worse still is that the bishop instructs him to take down almost all the many statues of obscure saints with which the church is filled - the parishioners love them, and what, after all, is he supposed to do with them? 'His Corpulence',  as the priest privately refers to him, threatens to send Angwin a forward-looking curate to bring his practices up to date.

Shortly afterwards, there's a knock at the front door. Angwin's housekeeper, Agnes Dempsey, opens it, to find a young man on the doorstep: 'My name is Fludd', he says, 'I've come to stay'. Of course this must be the new curate, thinks Agnes, but at the same time she experiences a strange sensation:

Deep within her, behind her cardigan and her blouse and her petticoat trimmed with scratchy nylon lace, behind her interlock vest and freckled skin, Miss Dempsey sensed a slow movement, a tiny spiral shift of matter, as if, at the very moment the curate spoke, a change had occurred: a change so minute as to baffle description, but rippling out, in its effect, to infinity.

This is only the beginning of Fludd's strange, powerful influence on the community. He seems to be able to see into peoples' hearts and minds, and to root out hypocrisy. Angwin rapidly confesses his lack of faith to the young man and is deeply comforted that he's at last been able to speak of it. Mother Perpetua, the monstrous, cruel Mother Superior of the local convent, hopes he will be her ally against her arch-enemy Angwin, but Fludd is having nothing of it. Most of all, though, Fludd has a beneficent influence on a young Irish nun, Sister Philomena. Forced into a convent by her overbearing mother, Philomena has been banished to England because her mother and the local priest falsely claimed that her dermatitis was a stigmata. A sweet-natured, nervous girl, relentlessly bullied by the rest of the nuns and by Perpetua, Philomena worries endlessly about the 'moral questions' raised by her Catholic faith: can a foreigner who speaks no English take an interpreter to confession? can a medical student's unwanted protestant bones be buried in a Catholic graveyard? Fluid takes the girl under his wing, and his influence brings about what is, apparently, the only happy ending in any of Mantel's novels.

Despite Mantel's disclaimer at the beginning that 'The church in this story bears some but not much resemblance to the Roman Catholic Church in the real world, c. 1956', it's clear that she's getting off her chest a good deal of animus against the religion she was born and raised in. But there's so much more here than just an anti-Catholic rant. Central, obviously, is the mysterious figure of Fludd. Some people think he represents the devil, though clearly everything he brings about works wholly for good. But he certainly has special powers. Nobody can remember what he looks like when he's not present; he's never seen to eat or drink, though food somehow just disappears from his plate; Angwin's whiskey bottle remains full even after an evening of drinking. It soon becomes clear to the reader that he's not a priest, though the only person to recognise this is Philomena. Actually we only have to read Mantel's own note to the novel to see what she had in mind: she explains that Fludd is based on his own namesake, Robert Fludd, a 16th-century astrologer, occult philosopher and alchemist. As she says, In these days,'he no longer worked in metal, but practiced on human nature; an art less predictable, more gratifying, more dangerous'. Thus, as the fictional Fludd himself declares,

My coming here has changed things for good. Falseness can longer be endured, truth must out. There must be new combinations within the heart, passions, new notions never before formed.

I really loved this novel and recommend it highly - if you're into audio books, it was very well read on Audible - if not, it would obviously be a great read. 

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Woman Reading to Another Woman

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The only title I've seen for this painting, by Henri Fantis Latour (1836-1904), is 'A Leitura', which Google tells me means 'A Letter' in Portuguese. But she's obviously reading a book, not a letter, so I'm stumped. Any ideas?

According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge

I usually have three books on the go at any one time. One will be an audiobook, one something I am reading for review in Shiny New Books - often a non-fiction title, read in fairly small chunks in the afternoon - and the third will be something read for pure pleasure, which generally ends up being reviewed on here. Recently that's included a wonderfully enjoyable foray into Rumer Godden, and a couple of novels by the very great Beryl Bainbridge. Both of these turned out to be re-reads, though scarily I had no recollection of reading this one - the first, the amazing Titanic novel Every Man for Himself, I did recognise and had written a review of way back then. I really loved it the second time around, but thought my original review didn't really need updating.

As you may know if you love Bainbridge (and if you don't, it can only be because you haven't read her yet), she turned to historical fiction in the latter part of her writing life. And, while the Titanic novel is indeed mostly fiction, with a few real people popping in to the narrative, According to Queeney is entirely populated by people who really existed and about whom a great deal is already known. The beautiful Reynolds painting on the front cover features two of them, Hester Thrale and her fifteen-year-old daughter, also called Hester but known by her nickname, Queeney. The nickname was given to her by the family's most famous friend, Dr Samuel Johnson. I think you can tell quite a lot about Queeney by the way she is regarding her mother with an obviously sceptical eye.

Briefly, the historical facts are these. Hester Thrale's husband Henry was a wealthy brewer, with a London house and a grand country home in Streatham (sadly no longer countryside). The couple enjoyed patronising the arts, and were introduced to the great writer Johnson, who quickly came to be more or less part of the family. Rooms were kept for him at both the houses, and he travelled with them on various trips including a memorable one to France. The story of all this is known in some detail because Hester Thrale wrote about it after Johnson's death, and of course there are many existing letters and diaries.

According to Queeney covers this fascinating period, which lasted about fifteen years, and much, though by no means all, of it is told from the point of view of Queeney, who is a small child when the novel begins. A highly intelligent, thoughtful child, she is a great favourite of Johnson. The oldest of the Thrales' twelve children, many of whom died in infancy, she has a difficult relationship with her mother, who she thinks of, with some justification, as heartless and not a lover of children. Indeed, Hester is absorbed most of the time with Johnson, whose every whim she tries to cater to. It has been suggested that she was his mistress, but this is a road Bainbridge does not go down. 

There's so much that's amazing about this novel. It provides an extraordinarily vivid picture of late-18th-century life among the wealthy and privileged, in which eating and heavy drinking played a large part; Henry Thrale, indeed, ended by literally eating and drinking himself to death. Although most of the novel takes place at the Thrales', there are also wonderful glimpses of Johnson's own household - his blind housekeeper Mrs Williams, and his companion Mrs Desmoulins, who is deeply in love with him and remembers a time when she was allowed into his bed, though always sent off to her own once he had aroused her but failed to follow through.

Above all, indeed, this is a novel of personalities, all of whom come vividly to life. Hester, unhappy in her marriage and pregnant almost every year, harsh with her clever, scornful eldest daughter, is gentle and adoring with her difficult, strange house guest. Johnson has in fact been brought into the household initially to help him through a period of severe depression, what he calls his 'black dog', which is never far from view. He has a great fear of madness, and keeps a chain and padlock to hand in case Hester feels the need to restrain him if he loses his mind. Immensely moody, he is frequently haunted by guilt over his own sexual urges,which he fights to ignore. He's guilty, too, about his long-dead wife, who he knows he neglected badly when she was alive. He's terrifyingly self-absorbed at times - there's an amazing scene where the household is on a journey in two carriages, one of which is involved in a potentially fatal accident. While other members of the party rush to the aid of the injured passengers, Johnson sits quietly at the edge of the road, deep in philosophical musings and entirely unaware of the drama being played out nearby. Despite all this, he inspires great admiration for his brilliance, and much love in those who are close to him.

And then of course there's Queeney herself, watching the antics of the adults with a puzzled, often judgmental eye. She doesn't always interpret what she sees quite correctly, as Bainbridge a few times allows us to see by playing out the same scene twice from different points of view. There's also another perspective added by some (invented) letters supposedly written by the middle-aged Queeney to her contemporary Laetitia Hawkins, who is working on a book about Johnson, in which Queeney contradicts some of the misapprehensions about the man who she knew so well as a child. The end of the novel takes us up to the end of johnson's life, a sad ending as he had by this time broken off relations with Hester, who, after her husband's death outraged her family and friends by marrying her daughter's Italian music teacher. 

This is a novel of tremendous skill and subtlety. Bainbridge has used a great deal of contemporary material, and many of Johnson's words are taken verbatim from their sources. But the whole thing is woven together into a wonderfully evocative and moving document of the lives of these fascinating people.Bainbridge needs to be read with care and attention - she has a habit of slipping in important information in what seems a casual throwaway manner. I've read an interview in which she said her books needed to be read three times to get the full meaning and I think that's almost certainly true. 

I'm now reading my third Bainbridge in a row, Master Georgy - which I'm almost certain I haven't read before!

Woman with Books

This lovely painting is by the great Welsh artist Gwen John (1876-1939) (sister of the better known but not necessarily more talented Augustus). I've seen it mislabelled as a self-portrait but it isn't - it actually shows Dorothy (Dorelia) McNeill (1881- 1969), her brother's common-law wife, who modelled for both the artists. There's a good article about her here. The painting is actually titled 'The Student', I believe. 

Thanks to Ruth who kindly sent me the link to this.