Harriet Devine's Blog

Sunday Morning Coming Down by Nicci French

I've followed Nicci French's Frieda Klein series avidly from the start, but didn't spot this one, out in July, until the other day. I actually listened to it on Audible and it provided me with many happy hours. It's not difficult to work out that it's the seventh in the series, each one with a day of the week in the title. The week has run out now, but I see the blurb describes this as the penultimate novel, so unless they've got their vocabulary in a twist, it looks as if there's going to be one more to look forward to. If not, shame, but this one, despite, or maybe because of, its ambiguously teasing ending, would not be a bad place to draw things to a halt. 

Frieda Klein is a psychotherapist, though in this, as in other novels, her work is interrupted and finally derailed by the events around her. Here, not only is her work put on hold, but she has to leave her home, a private space that is intensely important to her, because she returns after a few days away to discover that a dead body has been buried underneath the floorboards. It belongs to a man she had been paying to do some private investigation for her - she hoped he might help her track down Dean Reeve, the terrifyingly brilliant psychopath who has been on the fringes of her life since day one. Clearly Reeve has been one step ahead of her and, as usual, he's sending her a message. The two of them have a fascinating relationship, with Reeve sometimes in the past committing crimes apparently on Frieda's behalf - not long ago, for example, he burned down the house of a psychological profiler who has it in for Frieda - and I think you can say that though Frieda is powerfully committed to bringing him to justice, they have a grudging respect for each other.

However, if you were hoping for a resolution of the Dean Reeve issue, you'll be disappointed. Instead, another highly unpleasant psychopath steps in - a sort of copycat - and carries out some horrific attacks on Frieda's nearest and dearest. Her much loved niece Chloe is drugged and kidnapped, her friends Ruben and Jack are badly beaten up, and one of her clients is murdered. We know fairly soon who is responsible, as we are privy to the murderer's thoughts and feelings - I can't remember if this is the case in earlier books in the series, but it adds considerably to the tension, especially when Frieda herself works out who is carrying out all these attacks. But can she convince the police to pursue and hopefully catch the criminal before any further damage is done? The final part of the novel is a tense sort of cat and mouse game, with a huge amount at stake.

One of the fascinating things about these novels for me has been the fact that I took a long time to really warm to Frieda. She's a complicated character, intensely private, given to long walks through London, often in the darkest hours of the night. She has few friends but those she does have - Chloe, Josef the Ukranian builder, her colleague and former supervisor Ruben and her ex-pupil Jack - she will protect and defend to the death. She has an uneasy relationship with the police, many of whom mistrust her deeply, but DI Carlson has become a good friend, and she's grown fond of a policewoman, Yvette, who here turns to Frieda when she's going through some troubled soul-searching about her future. Throughout the seven novels we've only seen Frieda get involved in one love affair, one that was always a little problematic owing to her fear of commitment and the loss of her independence, and one which ended spectacularly badly in an earlier novel. So her cautious coolness makes her someone it's not easy to love. Over the years, though, I've found myself really rooting for her, and certainly I'm left now feeling extremely curious as to how things are going to end for her, if indeed there's one more instalment on the way. 

I think I've read all the Nicci French novels - there were a number of stand-alines before this series started - and all have been perceptive, absorbing and intelligent. Highly recommended - and you don't need to have read the others in the series to enjoy this one.

 

 

 

Woman with Book

This painting is by the Belgian artist Alfred Stevens (1823-1906), whose work has appeared on here many times before. In fact I may have posted this one before but it's lovely so who cares.

A Family Reading

Painted in about 1905, this may not be the most beautiful painting I've ever posted on here, but I believe its the first one by a member of the British peerage. Yes, the painter is George Howard, the 9th Earl of Carisle (1843-1911). The subjects are his daughter Lady Cecila Roberts and his granddaughters Winifred and Christina Roberts. Winifred became an artist and married a fellow artist, Ben Nicholson. George Howard's biography tells me, among other things, that he was 'gentle and unassuming'. He also owned Castle Howard, a great Yorkshire stately home which was used for the filming of Brideshead Revisited in 1981. 

 

  

The Undergound Railroad by Colson Whitehead

I'm not an avid follower of literary prizes, and don't necessarily agree with the verdicts of the judges of those I do become aware of. But I have had good luck with those of the Fiction category of the Pulitzer Prize that I've read recently, as I really loved All the Light we Cannot See (2015) and The Goldfinch (2014). Though I wouldn't read a book just because it's won the prize, it does add some incentive, or at least curiosity to see what I think. So the fact that it was this year's winner was maybe a slight incentive to get hold of The Underground Railroad, plus some good reviews I'd read - but I probably would have got around to it in the end because I am fascinated by the terrible history of slavery and its aftermath. And I'm really glad I did. 

However, though this novel is hugely informative about the treatment of and attitudes to enslaved people, it's not a straightforward history. In fact, though I may be wrong, I believe that no dates are attached to the story. We might assume that it takes place before the end of the American Civil War (1865), when slavery was abolished, but since this is a work that combines fact with imagination, I'm not even sure about that. Certainly, the primary liberty that Whitehead takes with the facts is that the term Underground Railroad, normally a metaphor applied to a secret network of secret routes and safe houses for those fleeing captivity, here takes on a real tangible existence. A network of tunnels has been carved out of the earth, with stations located underneath houses and barns. Those fugitives who know of its existence can use it to travel from state to state, hopefully ending up somewhere where to live a free life without threat of recapture becomes a living reality. Canada is a popular destination, and indeed history records that of the nearly 4 million people in bondage in 1860, 30,000 managed to escape there. Not a huge proportion, maybe, but considering that escape was an enterprise fraught with danger and the threat of terrible retribution, quite an achievement But then, as we are told in the novel, 'Every slave thinks about it. In the morning and in the afternoon and in the night. Dreaming of it. Every dream a dream of escape even when it didn’t look like it'.

This is the story of Cora. A young girl as the story begins, she has recently lost her mother Mabel, who has somehow managed to escape from the plantation in Georgia where they were both born. Cora is being punished for her mother's disappearance, and the increasing hardships of her life make it easier to agree with an escape plan put to her by her fellow slave Caesar. They find the Railroad and make their way to South Carolina, which has a liberal view of black people (I suspect this is a fiction?). Under assumed names, the fugitives are able to be housed, get work, and take classes. Cora learns to read and write and is happy there until she learns that the medical establishment plans to sterilise black people as an experiment. Finding out that Ridgeway, a notorious slave-catcher, is in pursuit of her and Caesar, the two plan a getaway - but Caesar is killed by Ridgeway and Cora must continue on her own. The Railroad takes her on to North Carolina, which has a dramatically different attitude to slaves - essentially the state wishes to eliminate them altogether, and does so by means of violent and dreadful punishments and murders. The abolitionist who takes Cora in is terrified of repercussions, and hides Cora in an attic for some months. Eventually she is found and recaptured by Ridgeway, and so begins a long journey south as a captive. Will she ever make it to freedom?

Ridgeway is a powerfully vivid character. His determination to capture Cora is amplified by the fact that his attempts to find her mother have ended in one of the few failures of his long career. He exemplifies what he call 'the American spirit':

the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilise. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription – the American imperative.

Unfortunately today we have come to realise forcibly that these attitudes did not die with the abolition of slavery. So this brilliant novel is both vivid reminder of America's shameful past and a message that human beings have a long way to go before freedom from persecution becomes a reality for everyone, regardless of colour or creed.

Woman Reading

This is 'A Quiet Hour' by the American artist John White Alexander (1856-1915). It would be interesting to see what that dress looked like when she was standing up - looks as if it might just slip off her shoulders.

Somebody at the Door by Raymond Postgate

January 1942, was a hard month in London. Friday, January 16th, was one of its bleakest days. Snow had fallen on the Wednesday and Thursday, rain during Thursday night. Enough snow had been left by the rain to form piles of slush in gutters and side roads. Early in the morning it had frozen; the slush had become hard rutted cakes, and a thin film of ice had formed on the roads and sidewalks.

Raymond Postgate, a socialist journalist and historian, wrote only three crime novels, of which this is the second. The first, The Verdict of Twelve, also appeared in the British Library Crime Classics series, but for some reason passed me by. Having read this one, I'm curious to give it a go, as I found Somebody at the Door to be unusual and fascinating.

The novel, published in 1943, concerns the murder of an unpleasant man, Councillor Henry Grayling. He has boarded the 6.12 from Euston, on his way home, carrying £120 in cash. Shortly after he gets home, he dies, and it becomes clear that he has been murdered. The method is most unusual, and could only have been employed in wartime - he has been poisoned with mustard gas. And the money is gone.

When Inspector Holly starts to look into the backgrounds of the passengers who travelled in Grayling's carriage, he discovers that several of them had very good reasons for wishing the Councillor dead.  Following the initial setting of the scene, the main body of the novel is divided into sections, each of which focuses on a different suspect, explaining the circumstances that might have led to his murder. 

We start with Charlie Evetts, an attractive but cynical and amoral young chemist who works at Grayling's firm. He's been sleeping with a girl he doesn't really like all that much, Ann Darling, and she has now announced that she's pregnant. 'What are you going to do about it?' she snivels. He has no idea. He hasn't much money and lives in a rented room, so marriage is out of the question even if he loved the girl, which he doesn't. The only option he sees open to him is to procure a drug from work that will induce an abortion, and he makes a plan for doing so which ought to let him off the hook even when the theft is discovered. This involves co-opting a second conspirator who, unfortunately, decided to blackmail Charlie, who can't think how he's going to pay him the £100 he demands for keeping his mouth shut. 

Then there's Corporal George Ransom, a hot-tempered member of the Home Guard. Trained as a cobbler, he's had numerous ups and downs in his life  but has recently managed to open a shop in London and is just about getting by - till, that is, he comes back to his street one day to find his shop has ben completely destroyed in the bombing. Now he's waiting, like many others, for compensation that never seems to come - he'd need £80-90 to set himself up again.

And what about the German refugee, who goes under the name of Albert Mannheim? In the climate of 1942 war-torn London, he's a natural suspect. Is he a spy? a Nazi? a double agent? He was living a quiet life in England, but came to the attention of Councillor Grayling, who denounced him to the authorities. Could that be a motive?

As for young Hugo Rolandson, he turned out to be the lover of Grayling's wife. Surely that would make him wish the councillor dead?

All these life histories are told, in what amounts to a series of condensed short stories, their relationship to Grayling, their motives, and their probable or possible access to the deadly mustard gas examined in detail. But who really did it?

This is an intelligent and absorbing mystery, and I was very taken with the unusual structure. It also presents a wonderfully vivid picture of England in the grip of war, not written as a fictional account after the events but right from the front line. Highly recommended.

Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen (1968 Club)

Elizabeth Bowen wrote ten novels, of which until recently I had read four. I loved them all - they were The Death of the Heart,  which I actually re-read for the 1938 Club, The Heat of the Day , The Last September and, probably my favourite,  To the North, which I first read in 2011 and re-read earlier this year. So when I started browsing for Simon and Kaggsy's 1968 Club, I was delighted to find I had a chance to read Bowen's final novel, Eva Trout. I knew next to nothing about it, but had high hopes. I was sure I'd love it - I wanted so much to love it - but I can't wholeheartedly say that I did. What I didn't know when I embarked on it - not that it would have put me off - was that the novel has had a very mixed reception. Greeted with respectful admiration when it first appeared, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, it has subsequently been criticised for lack of coherence and uncertainty of tone among other things. To be honest, I was quite relieved to discover this as I kept thinking there was something wrong with me - that I wasn't quite getting it.

We first meet the eponymous Eva Trout as a young woman of twenty-four, not strictly beautiful but tall and imposing. She's living as a paying guest with a Mr and Mrs Arble, Eric and Iseult (who was her teacher during a short period when she actually attended school). But she spends most of her time with the family from the local vicarage, and indeed she first appears taking Mrs Dancey and the children on a jaunt in her Jaguar. Her living arrangements have been made with the approval of her guardian Constantine, though in just a few months this will no longer be necessary, as Eva is a 'big heiress': her deceased father, who was probably Constantine's lover, has left her his millions to inherit on her twenty-fifth birthday. She's looking forward to her independence, but when it comes she scarcely knows what to do with it. Her first move is to rent Cathays, a house in Kent. Her extreme ignorance of the world and its ways - she has spent most of her life trailing around with her father - makes it hard for her to know how to cope with day to day life, but she just about gets by. She's visited there, first by Eric, who seems to have a crush on her, and later by Iseult, who is already full of doubt about Eric and Eva's relationship:

"You have no notion how Eric misses you. For instance—couldn't you possibly come to us for Christmas? Like you once used to do; I think very happily. And even Christmas seems very far ahead, far too ahead for Eric. Why, if you do come then, it will have been seven—no, eight, nine?—months since he's seen you. A long time."
"Nine," said Eva, looking up at the evergreen.
"Then at least, Christmas?"
"Christmas is in December?"
"It is usually.—Why? Is there anything else you think of doing?"
"In December I shall be having a little child."

Iseult, not surprisingly, assumes this is Eric's child, and their marriage ends as a result, though we don't learn this till later. So ends Part One of the novel.

In Part Two, eight years have passed and we find Eva living in America. She has a child, Jeremy, who is 'deaf and dumb', and it's clear that he's adopted, though the circumstances are not spelled out. Soon she returns to England and reacquaints herself with Henry, one of the Dancey children from the vicarage, who is now twenty and at Cambridge University. Despite the difference in their ages, Eva falls in love with Henry, and they spend time together though Henry is unsure of his feelings for Eva. She's devoted to Jeremy, with whom she has a sort of telepathic communication, though she's never explored any possibilities of helping him to communicate with others. She's nervous of the world, feels threatened by other people, constantly moves house and even to different countries to avoid perceived threats. Eventually she settles Jeremy with a French couple who promise to further his means of communication, and she plans a faked elopement with Henry - a plan which goes spectacularly wrong and ends in tragedy.

So what's this novel really about? That's what I was asking myself throughout and I never really decided on the answer. At times it seems like a sort of comedy of manners, but there are so many dark elements that it was hard to sustain this as an interpretation. Failures in parenting and/or education are important -- here's Eva talking about her feelings of being let down by Iseult:

"She desisted from teaching me. She abandoned my mind. She betrayed my hopes, having led them on. She pretended love, to make me show myself to her—then, thinking she saw all, turned away. She--"
"—Wait a minute; what were your hopes?"
"To learn," said Eva. A long-ago tremble shook her. " To be to become—I had never been," she added "I was beginning to be."
He remarked, with enthusiasm, "A gifted teacher."
"Yes. Then she sent me back."
"Sent you away?"
"No; sent me back again—to be nothing."

 It seems that Eva is trying to make up for her own lack of good parenting to be a perfect mother to Jeremy, but though they do have an extraordinarily close relationship for most of his life, she makes a decision which he clearly perceives as abandonment and which will have fatal consequences. If he could speak, he might say, as Eva does, 'she betrayed my hopes, having led them on'.

There's so much that's good in this novel. Bowen's prose continues to be beautiful even in its complexity, and a great deal to mull over and think about. But it's hard to warm to Eva (not that this is necessarily a bad thing) or to understand her motivations, as we generally see her from the outside rather than being privy to her thoughts. Perhaps I'd find it more satisfying on a second reading, though not yet. Meanwhile, I'm not at all sorry to have read it - I'm hoping other people will write about it for the Club, and I'd welcome any comments on here telling me how wrong I am.

 

Woman and Book

This cosy scene is called 'In the Light of the Fire', and it's by the British artist Thomas Cantrell Dugdale (1880-1952). He was a well known portrait painter, but also a celebrated war artist in both World Wars. You can see more of his paintings here.

Broken Bodies by Sally Emerson

This is the last of Sally Emerson's six novels. It was originally published in 2001, more than twenty years after her debut with Second Sight. It's also the final one to appear in Quartet Books series of reprints. I've read four of them, and it's been interesting to see her development in terms of plot and style from start to finish. The first two (her second was Listeners, reviewed on here yesterday) have quite a lot in common, hardly surprising as they concern the same protagonist and deal partly with her exploration of psychic phenomena. She's obviously always been fascinated by relationships and their dynamics, though, and Separation, my favourite of the four, deals sensitively with not only love between the sexes but also with that between parents and children. 

Broken Bodies is in some ways the most ambitious. It's about a couple of young historians, British Anne Fitzgerald and American Patrick Browning. They meet for the first time in the British Museum, in front of the display of the Elgin Marbles - ancient Greek sculptures stolen in the early 1800s from the Parthenon in Athens by Lord Elgin. Anne and Patrick are both there because, as they discover to their disquiet, both of them are planning to write books on Elgin's wife Mary. Mary had a fascinating and ultimately tragic life, having deserted her husband after falling in love with another man, and losing custody of her children as a result. Both historians are seeking Mary's diaries in the hope of uncovering the true facts of her story. But their search uncovers much more than they were expecting: there's a secret hidden in the diaries which will have far-reaching consequences.

So this is partly a novel about detective work, both historical and criminal. But it's much more than that. Obviously the broken bodies of the title refers partly to the marbles themselves which, as you can see in the cover photo, are damaged and incomplete. But it also seems to allude to the young couple themselves, both of whom are involved in unsatisfactory relationships with older, controlling partners. They are obviously drawn to each other but the rivalry between their working lives drives them apart. The location swings between London, Scotland and, eventually, Athens, and the novel is highly readable. A reviewer when the novel first appeared described it as 'a clever mixture of thriller and passionate love story which holds the reader spellbound' and that sounds about right. 

You can read a fascinating Q&A with Sally here, and here is an author piece written by her. 

Listeners by Sally Emerson

Last July I reviewed a new reprint of Sally Emerson's debut 1980 novel, Second Sight. Now, just published, we have her sequel to that book, Listeners, first published in 1983. To be honest I didn't actually realise it was a sequel until quite a long way into the novel - it's not billed as such in the blurb, and anybody who reads it will not be missing out if they haven't read the first one, as it can perfectly well stand on its own merits, though naturally it adds a certain amount of interest if you have.

In that book we met fifteen-year-old Jennifer Hamilton, her studious father Edward, and her flashy, serially adulterous mother Sarah. The main plot of the novel concerned Jennifer's growing awareness of her own sexuality, and the uncomfortable triangle that developed when she got in involved with her mother's much younger lover Paul. In Listeners Jennifer is twenty-five, and has recently parted from her husband Martin, who has left her for another woman. She's being pursued by grey-haired, gloomy Richard, who she is attracted to, but whose moodiness she finds difficult to tolerate. He's a widower, recovering from the suicide of his beautiful, neurotic young wife, and Jennifer can't decide whether she likes him, whether he likes her, or whether she really wants a relationship at all. She's understandably confused by her continuing grief over her broken marriage, and on top of everything else discovers that her mother is seriously ill, and about to go into hospital for a cancer operation. She spends time with her (relatively) happily single friend Estelle, whose advice she continually seeks but doesn't necessarily take. She's prey to violent mood swings, and altogether very unhappy and confused.

As we learned in the previous novel, Jennifer has always been drawn to spiritualism. Now, desperate for comfort and solutions, she turns to Mrs Maugham, a cosy-seeming middle-aged medium with a small group of dedicated followers and a penchant for chocolate. She's both attracted and repelled by Mrs Maugham's entourage - Mike, the creepy male nurse (who, she is appalled to discover, is assigned to her mother in hospital), strange young chemist's assistant Lily, herself gifted with psychic powers, and, worst of all, Mrs Maugham's brother Stephen, hideous to the sight but apparently irresistibly attractive to women - he's had three wives, all of whom have died. Though Jennifer's rational side tells her to keep well away from the Maugham household, she can't help going back. But it seems that Mrs Maugham has a plan in mind for Jennifer - will she be strong enough to resist?

There was a psychic in Emerson's first novel , and we saw then that Jennifer was strongly drawn to this mysterious side of existence. There, as I said in my review, I felt this theme was a bit imperfectly assimilated into the overall plot. Here, however, the theme is crucial  and, whatever your own views on psychic phenomena, it's very much a central plot issue, and as we see Jennifer's early doubts and confusion develop into a clear idea of what is being asked of her and what she should do about it, things move towards what looks as if it might be a happy ending.

Emerson is a most unusual and interesting writer. My favourite of her novels so far has been Separation, which I reviewed in Shiny New Books a few months ago. But I found this one extremely readable, and whizzed through it very quickly - it manages to combine powerful and sometimes disturbing psychological realism with black comedy in an attractive way.

I have yet another one of Emerson's scheduled for review tomorrow, so look out for that!