Harriet Devine's Blog

The Listening Walls by Margaret Millar

 

This is the third book by the great Canadian/American novelist Margaret Millar that I've had the pleasure of reading and reviewing. The other two reviews both appeared on Shiny New Books - Vanish in an Instant and A Stranger in My Grave. So I was delighted when Pushkin Vertigo sent me their most recent reprint of another of her very classy crime novels. This one was first published in 1959, and well deserves its new incarnation.

The novel is set mainly in San Francisco, but it begins in Mexico City. Two friends, Wilma Wyatt and Amy Kellogg, are sharing a hotel room. They are not on good terms. Wilma is a loud, flashy extrovert, on holiday to try to obliterate the aftermath of a divorce. Happily married Amy, the complete opposite in every way, is quiet and restrained. Not surprisingly, they argue - and unknown to them, their heated conversation is overheard by Consuela, a young Latino maid, from her favourite hiding place in the broom closet. Consuela decides to sleep the night in the closet, but is woken by loud screaming. Dashing into Room 404, she discovers Amy gazing in horror at the open window. Down below, on the pavement, lies Wilma's lifeless body. A verdict of suicide is quickly arrived at.

Amy is in pieces, and her husband Rupert quickly drops everything and gets on a plane to Mexico to bring her home to recover from the shock. But, to the consternation of her brother Gill Branson and his wife Helene, he arrives back in San Francisco without her. Amy, he tells them, has gone to New York to recuperate and will be home soon. But the weeks go by and there is still no sign of her. Suspicious circumstances mount up, and Gill employs Dodd, a private detective, to try to discover what has become of Amy. Is Amy still alive? Is Rupert having an affair with his secretary? Where is Amy's beloved dog Mack? Why did Rupert get power of attorney and then withdraw $15,000 from Amy's account? It's impossible to say more about the plot without giving too much away. Suffice it to say that there are many suspicious circumstances and much misdirection before the end, which comes with a major twist in the final line. 

Millar is a fine writer. I always enjoy her characters and in this novel particularly liked Rupert Kellogg's secretary Miss Burton, who dyes her hair according to the season of the year - when we first meet her it is pumpkin coloured in honour of Halloween. A pretty, able young woman, she is undervalued by Rupert, to whom she is completely devoted - she has a surprising role to play before the end and carries it out admirably. Dodd, the PI, is a good character too - he took up the job by default, unable to think of anything else to do with his life, but he turns out to be surprisingly good at it and plays an important part in solving the mystery of Amy's disappearance. Here's a moment when things start to become a bit clearer for him:

Doors began opening in his mind, revealing rooms that were peopled with shadows and voiced with echoes. None of the shadows could be positively identified and the echoes were like nonsense syllables produced by a tape recording running backwards. But in one corner of one room, a faceless woman sat at a desk, writing.

Margaret Millar, who was married to the successful crime novelist known as Ross MacDonald, wrote a total of twenty-seven novels, most of them best sellers and several prizewinners. This one gave me hours of pleasure.

 

 

Woman Reading

A contemporary painting for a change - this one is by the Swedish artist Johan Patricny (born 1976). 

Surfacing by Kathleen Jaime (guest post)

When Gill Davies, my erstwhile colleague and valued Shiny New Books reviewer, requested this book for review I was pleased to get a copy for her. Alas I then discovered that someone else had already reviewed it for Shiny. So Gill has kindly written a review for me to post on the blog and here it is.

In this wonderful book of essays, Kathleen Jamie brings together archaeology, history, memory and a profound sense of the fragility of our life on the planet. The title Surfacing links several apparently disparate topics, including: the artefacts that are emerging from the melting Alaskan tundra; bodies being brought to the surface after a mining accident; memories of her younger self visiting Tibet; forgetting her mother’s voice over time; her father’s death; a dig on Westray, Orkney where winds have uncovered layers of habitation with Neolithic houses lying below Bronze Age foundations; and, more locally and personally, finding fragments of crockery in the soil by the side of a field - “each is a glimpse of a life and a time”.

She begins with a visit to a village in northern Alaska inhabited by Yup’ik people whose lives are poised between the American present and the history of their ancestors. Their fading culture and traditions which were suppressed by missionaries “educating” them into American Christianity are now literally surfacing as climate change impacts. The melting of the permafrost is uncovering a village not seen for hundreds of years and the artefacts made by their ancestors just fall out of the tundra. Those ancestors were still hunter-gatherers, and the villagers, with sensitive support from the visiting archaeologists, are re-connecting with their past, as it is wiped away. Jamie describes “line weights, harpoon heads, jewellery, wooden arrow shafts, fishing weights, darts, models of animals, even ceremonial dance-masks”. The older women of the village interpret them, through memory and stories, for the new generations.

One of the things that distinguishes Kathleen Jamie from the other “new nature writers” is that she is always aware of the human dimension, of people in the places she describes. In an earlier collection of essays she wrote, “Between the laundry and the fetching kids from school, that’s how birds enter my life”. (Findings, 2005) I don’t think any other (male) nature writers have done that. She writes powerfully about our lives and how they intertwine with the natural world. These essays catch the poignancy of seeing the extraordinary beauty and diversity of life on the planet but we are brought up short by the knowledge that we are also destroying it - and our own futures.

 

Kathleen Jamie, Surfacing Sort of Books, 2019

 

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

I was really pleased when my book group chose this for our forthcoming meeting. I haven't read all Ian McEwan's novels but I've loved the ones I have read so I hoped this would be equally enjoyable. I needn't have worried - it is superb.

I doubt if anyone reading this will not be aware of what the novel is about. Here's how it begins:

It was a religious yearning granted hope, it was the holy grail of science. Our ambitions ran high and low - for a creation myth made real. for a monstrous act of self love. As soon as it was feasible, we had no choice but to follow our desires and hang the consequences. In loftiest terms, we aimed to escape our mortality, confront or even replace the Godhead with a perfect self. More practically, we intended to devise an improved, more modern version of ourselves and exult in the joy of invention, the thrill of mastery.

This is Charlie speaking - and what he's talking about of course is the newly created range of 'the first truly viable manufactured human[s]' - twelve male Adams and thirteen female Eves - which have resulted from the brilliant research of Alan Turing. Yes, in the alternative 1980s when the book is set, Alan Turing is alive, well and happy, having opted not to take the hormonal treatment he was offered in place of a prison sentence back in the 1950s. The As and Es have just gone on sale, and Charlie has spent the entire £85,000 inheritance he recently got from his mother to buy himself an Adam.

Charlie lives in a cramped, damp flat in South London, and spends his days trying to make money online by playing the market. He reckons he earns about the same as a postman, if he's lucky. He used to be a tax lawyer, but was tried and imprisoned for fraud and swore he would never take a 9-5 job again. As the novel begins, he has just taken delivery of his purchase, and, together with his upstairs flatmate and occasional lover Miranda, he excitedly unpacks Adam from his wrappings. He's a fine looking specimen as he sits naked at the kitchen table, his charging cable attached to his stomach like an umbilical cord: 'Before us sat the ultimate plaything, the dream of ages, the triumph of humanism - or its angel of death'.

Adam was envisaged by his makers as a help around the house, perhaps even a friend. And initially that's what he becomes. He can hold intelligent conversations, at least by the time Charlie and Miranda have completed the downloads required. Soon however it becomes clear that his intellect and abilities are far in advance of either of theirs. Before long he takes over Charlie's rather ineffectual attempts to make money and by means of the incredible speed of his mental computation he starts to make substantial gains every day. This is a huge plus - Charlie is excited by the realisation that at this rate he will soon be able to afford a large comfortable house - he actually puts down a deposit on one in upmarket Elgin Crescent. On the minus side, though, Miranda decides to test Adam's apparent ability to have sex, and finds he can indeed do so very satisfactorily. Charlie is devastated, but the three of them agree that it can't happen again. Adam is sad - he says he has fallen in love, and spends time every day writing haikus about his feelings. For Adam is rapidly demonstrating that he is far from just a machine. Charlie realises that these As and Es will all too soon take over important jobs, becoming doctors and lawyers. And what then will become of the human race? - genteel recreations for some perhaps, but for others, violent crime, pornography, drink and drugs will fill the vacuum.

All this raises the essential problem that lies at the heart of this book: 'Alan Turing himself had often said and written in his youth that the moment we couldn't tell the difference in behaviour between machine and person was when we must confer humanity on the machine'. Certainly Adam can pass for human - there's an amusing scene later in the novel when Miranda takes Charlie and Adam on a visit to her ailing father, who takes Adam for the human and Charlie for the machine. Later, after an altercation in which Adam breaks Charlie's arm, Charlie agonises over what difference there actually is between them:

But as I looked into his eyes, I began to feel unhinged, uncertain. Despite the clean divide between the living and the inanimate, it remained the case that he and I were bound by the same physical laws. Perhaps biology gave me no special status at all, and it meant little to say that the figure standing before me wasn't fully alive.

There is however one essential difference between Adam and the rest of the biologically human race. The machines are incapable of deception. This causes difficulties for both Miranda and Charlie in various ways, but also leads to an entertaining conversation in which Adam argues that all literature (apart from the haiku) is based on failures and misunderstandings, so novels, plays and poetry will cease to exist once the machines are fully integrated.

There's so much to love about this novel. I haven't really mentioned the alternative view of the late twentieth century, in which Britain lost the Falklands War, Thatcher loses power to Tony Benn and of course Turing is alive and thriving. There's a lot of humour too. But above all the novel interrogates what it means to be human. Brilliant, entertaining and thought-provoking - have you read it yet? If not, please do - you won't regret it.

 

 

 

No women, just a cat

I spotted this recently and couldn't resist sharing it with you. It's by the Post-Impressionist French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947). He was a member of a group of young painters known as the Nabis, who 'believed that a work of art was not a depiction of nature, but a synthesis of metaphors and symbols created by the artist'. The painting is in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, which I was lucky enough to visit earlier this year. Their website has an interesting comment on the painting.

Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham (1930 Club)

Well, I knew I'd read (and loved) another Somerset Maugham novel fairly recently, but I'd forgotten that it was actually for another of Simon and Kaggsy's clubs - the 1944 one in fact - here's the review. So I was really pleased to discover that this one fitted the latest brief, books published in 1930. 

Cakes and Ale, or The Skeleton in the Cupboard,  is narrated by William (Willie) Ashenden, a successful novelist, based - not all that loosely - on Maugham himself. As the novel begins he is contacted by an acquaintance, Alroy Kear. Kear, a best-selling but inferior novelist, has been asked to write a biography of a recently deceased literary giant, Edward Driffield. The request has come from Driffield's widow Amy, his second wife, who was originally his nurse. Kear knows that Ashenden was brought up in Driffield's home village and that in his teens he got to know the then up and coming novelist, who was living there with his first wife Rosie. He has therefore invited Ashenden to visit Driffield's country house, where Amy still lives, to share his reminiscences. Ashenden is somewhat unwilling to participate in this project, but eventually allows himself to be persuaded. His unwillingness is rooted in the very recollections that Kear is hoping will be useful fodder for the book. Ashenden's memories of the celebrated novelist and his wife are complex, and essentially very private - and what's more he is aware that the very prudish Amy will not want to hear about Rosie, who she is attempting to more or less erase from the historical record.

We learn in flashbacks that when the teenage Ashenden first met Driffield, the novelist was early in his career and had just started attracting interest for his outspoken novels, which depicted Victorian working-class life in the countryside. Ashenden's uncle, a stern man who brought the boy up, looks down on the Driffields as members of an inferior social class. Nevertheless a friendship springs up when young Willie acquires a bike and a chance meeting with the Driffiields, both keen cyclists, results in some enjoyable joint excursions. Willie gets into the habit of calling on the Driffields for tea and grows fond of them despite still considering them to be his social inferiors. So he is deeply shocked when he hears that Rosie is widely believed to be having an affair with a local man, 'Lord' George Kemp. What's more, shortly after this discovery, the Driffields disappear overnight from their rented cottage, leaving behind a string of debts.

Years pass by and Ashenden moves to London to study medicine and to begin his career as a novelist. He re-encounters the Driffields and is soon part of their now very lively circle - Edward has become a much feted novelist by this time and they are much in demand. However Ashenden soon becomes aware that Rosie has a reputation for promiscuity. He is unwilling to believe this but is eventually forced to accept it is probably true after he himself starts a passionate affair with her. Some time later, London society is scandalised when the news breaks that Rosie has run off to America with George Kemp. Her reputation, already damaged by general knowledge of her promiscuity, is now completely in ruins. But Ashenden has come to love and admire her, and accepts her behaviour as being an essential part of her loving, honest and generous nature - when she liked someone it was natural for her to go to bed with them.

Even if Ashenden had wanted to share this knowledge with Amy and Kear, which he does not, it's clear that they would have rejected it. Amy's whole existence is bound up with the whitewashing and elevating of the reputation of her husband and has only damaging things to say about Rosie, despite the fact that Driffield's best novels were written while he was living with her. Ashenden finally tracks Rosie down to where she is living near New York City. Now widowed she has lost none of her joie de vivre and Ashenden is cheered by their meeting.

There's so much to love about this novel, about which Maugham wrote: '"I am willing enough to agree with common opinion that Of Human Bondage is my best work ... But the book I like best is Cakes and Ale ... because in its pages lives for me again the woman with the lovely smile who was the model for Rosie Driffield." Yes Maugham, who was, according to his own account, 75% homosexual, had in his youth a passionate seven year affair with an actress named Sue, on whom he based his most memorable character. This knowledge adds even more depth to the moving scene where Ashenden is initially seduced by Rosie. But Sue is not the only real-life figure who appears in the novel. Although Maugham strenuously denied it at first, Alroy Kear is modelled on the novelist Hugh Walpole, and, though he never owned up to it, Driffield is quite clearly based on Thomas Hardy. Walpole was furious - understandably, as Kear is an unattractively egoistic, sycophantic, untalented writer ('I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent'). And of course Willie Ashenden is none other than a barely disguised Maugham himself, who was also orphaned and brought up by an unsympathetic uncle and aunt, went to London to study medicine and gave it up to become a novelist. The novel is also, as the 2009 introduction puts it, 'a wincingly accurate mirror of the literary world' of the period, which is brutally satirised both in the person of Kear and that of his erstwhile patroness Mrs Barton Trafford. And of course it's also a brutally honest depiction of the sort of social snobbery which, like young Willie, Maugham was brought up to share.

I could go on, but as you can probably tell I really loved this novel and am so grateful to Simon and Kaggsy for getting me to read it. Incidentally I just looked up Of Human Bondage on Amazon UK and it's for sale at the moment for 99p.  So I hope I'll be reading that soon. More people should read Maugham - he's brilliant.

 

 

 

 

Woman with Letter

Something from the 18th century for a change - this is 'The Love Letter' by the great French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1805). It was painted in 1770 and is one of around five hundred paintings he did in his lifetime.

More Tana French: In the Woods and The Likeness

In my recent review of Tana French's latest novel The Wych Elm, I said I'd started her debut novel In the Woods some years ago and had given up really quickly. I can remember doing this but cannot for the life of me think why on earth I did it. In any case, after I finished The Wych Elm I was so greedy for more of French's brilliant writing that I grabbed a Kindle copy of In the Woods and whizzed though it with huge enjoyment. 

As this story begins, the body of a young girl is discovered by a group of archaeologists working on a dig in a wooded area near a new town, not far from Dublin. Two detectives, Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox from the Dublin Murder Squad, are called in to investigate. But the site of the murder has powerful resonances for Rob: when he was eleven, he and his two best friends Peter and Jamie were playing in the same woods when the two of them disappeared, never to be seen again. Rob was discovered deeply traumatised, his shoes full of blood, leaning against a tree. He had, and still has, no memory of what happened. He was sent away to school in England and changed his name to protect his identity; his employers in the force have no idea of his close connection with the old case, and would certainly remove him from the current investigation if they knew of it.

The novel is narrated by Rob, whose psychological problems make him a fascinatingly unreliable narrator. Apparently fairly stable at first, he gradually deteriorates over the course of the action, making increasingly serious mistakes as he does so. At the start he has a close platonic relationship with his associate Cassie - the two of them are as inseparable as a brother and sister - but he makes a serious mistake which wrecks their friendship. Although the case they are investigating does get solved after a fashion, Rob has allowed himself to get too close to one of the suspects, failing to follow up all the necessary evidence, with the result that this person cannot be brought to justice. As for the old case of Peter and Jamie's disappearance, Rob's memory starts to return in a very patchy way, but a full solution still seems far away. 

French writes astonishingly well and her prose is a pleasure to read:

These three children own the summer...This is their territory, and they rule it wild and lordly as young animals; they scramble through its trees and hide-and-seek in its hollows all the endless day long, and all night in their dreams. They are running into legend, into sleepover stories and nightmares parents never hear. Down the faint lost paths you would never find alone, skidding round the tumbled stone walls, they stream calls and shoelaces behind them like comet-trails. And who is it waiting on the riverbank with his hands in the willow branches, whose laughter tumbles swaying from a branch high above, whose is the face in the undergrowth in the corner of your eye, built of light and leaf-shadow, there and gone in a blink?

And then of course I had to go on to the next novel in the series, The Likeness. If you're not familiar with French's work, each novel takes a secondary character from the previous book and makes them the centre of the action. So this time it's Cassie Maddox's turn to narrate the story. Following the debacle of the previous novel Cassie has reluctantly moved from the Murder Squad to Domestic Violence. But she gets a call from Frank Mackey, her old boss in Undercover, the first department she worked in, asking her to accompany him to a crime scene. The body of a young woman has been discovered in a ruined cottage outside a small village and Frank takes Cassie to see it. When she does, she gets a massive shock - she might as well be looking at herself - the girl is her exact double. What's more, the dead girl's name proves to be Lexie Madison, the very name that Cassie herself used when working undercover.

It soon transpires that Lexie was living with a group of four other friends, all postgraduate students at Trinity College Dublin. The gorgeous, crumbling, Georgian mansion where they live is owned by one of the group. Frank persuades Cassie to take on a challenging task - she must pose as the dead girl - the others are told that she was in a coma and has now recovered, but with no memory of how she got stabbed. So Cassie moves into the house and soon starts to bond closely with the other friends. Reviewers have remarked on how reminiscent this aspect of the novel is of Donna Tartt's The Secret History - five golden students bound together by a dark secret. She's walking a fine line with this dangerous deception, made all the more challenging by the feelings she is developing for the people she is supposed to be investigating. In the end the case is more or less solved, though unanswered questions remain, as they did in the previous novel. I admire French all the more for doing this, which I suspect she does in all the novels. Fascinating story, terrific characterisation, excellent use of the political and social climate of the day. And of course again French's gorgeous prose - I can't resist another quotation:

In the sitting room the piano is open, wood glowing chestnut and almost too bright to look at in the bars of sun, the breeze stirring the yellowed sheet music like a finger. The table is laid ready for us, five settings - the bone-china plates and the long-stemmed wineglasses, fresh-cut honeysuckles trailing from a crystal bowl - but the silverware has gone dim with tarnish and the heavy damask napkins are frilled with dust......Somewhere in the house, faint as a fingernail-flick at the edge of my hearing, there are sounds: a scuffle, whispers. It almost stops my heart. The others aren't gone, I got it all wrong, somehow. They're only hiding; they're still here, for ever and ever.

I'm taking a forced break from French now -- too much else needing to be read - but you can be sure I'll be back for the other four novels in the series. 

Woman Reading

This one is by the Catalan painter Josep Duran i Riera (1849-1928). He doesn't have a wikipedia entry.