Harriet Devine's Blog

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken (1962)

My children certainly read this celebrated book when they were growing up. Amazon lists it as suitable for 9-11 year-old readers, so if they did, they would have read it to themselves rather than have me read it to them, which I guess would explain why, although the title is incredibly familiar to me, I had no recollection of the plot. Either that or, as too often happens, I'd completely forgotten having read it. Either way, I was reading it fresh, and I came to it with preconceptions which were rather surprisingly shattered. I was expecting a story about wolves but in actual fact the wolves are almost incidental (unless you interpret the main part of the novel in a rather sophisticated way).

What am I talking about, you may ask? Well, the book is set in an alternative nineteenth century - in 1832, to be exact - and, as we learn in the preface, King James III is on the throne and wolves have made their way to England through the Channel Tunnel. Horrendously aggressive, they have overrun the country and made night-time travel terrifyingly risky. They are highly intelligent, and have worked out that when a train shows down, it means people are about to emerge and they can then make their move. So, when shy orphan Sylvia arrives at the station near her new home at Willoughby Chase, she and the other passengers have to run for their lives. 

This is a very promising start, but that's the last we hear about the wolves. Instead we have the adventures of Sylvia and her feisty cousin Bonnie, whose parents have offered a home to the orphan girl following the deaths of her parents. Sir Willoughby and Lady Green are good people and doting parents, but unfortunately they're about to leave for a year-long journey with the intention of improving the health of delicate Lady Green. They depart believing that they have made a good provision for the girls during their absence, having employed a distant cousin, Miss Slighcarp, who will be their governess until they return. Sadly, they couldn't have been more wrong. Miss Slighcarp (the name might have tipped them off) is the archetypal wicked governess and subjects the little girls to all sort of horrible cruelties. She sacks all the nice faithful servants, just keeping a few who will do her evil work (and one who just pretends to be bad in order to stay on and watch out for the girls). She sells the furniture, takes away all the toys and locks Bonnie in a cupboard. Finally she sends them off to a horrible orphanage run by a Mrs Brisket, who subjects them to a miserable life of drudgery. Fortunately the girls have made a secret friend, young Simon, who lives in a cave and rears geese, which he sells in London every year. Simon manages to rescue them, but where can they go now?

This may all sound a bit clichéd to knowledgable adults, but it's easy to understand why the book has been so popular with generations of children since it first appear in 1962. It's an exciting story and I wouldn't hesitate to give it to a grandchild if I had one of the right age. And, though the wolves do disappear rather quickly, maybe their behaviour is reflected in the cruelty of the adults; and in any case their presence at the beginning creates an atmosphere of fear and terror that's mirrored by what the girls are going to be subjected to.  Whether that was in Aiken's mind or not doesn't really matter. I enjoyed reading it, and would not have done so without Simon and Kaggsy's 1962 Club. Looking forward to reading the reviews that come in there this week.

 

All is Fortune and Other Theatre Stories by Jonathan Croall

Jonathan Croall has authored an impressive number of theatre books, including biographies of John Gielgud and Sybil Thorndike, studies of performances of Hamlet and King Lear over the ages, and of productions at the National Theatre. I've reviewed several of them, both on here and on Shiny New Books. His interest in theatre presumably started in childhood, as his parents were both actors. Now he has turned to fiction with All is Fortune, a collection of twenty-one short stories all based in different ways around the stage.

These stories, it must be said, do not on the whole  present a very cheerful picture of the lives of actors, playwrights and others who have made the theatre the focus of their lives. Aging performers of both sexes are disappointed by the lives they are living, like Gwen, in 'Surviving', who has not fulfilled the promise the narrator remembers from their days at drama school, and now, middle-aged, is touring in poor plays in small, little-known venues, and in 'There's this Captain...' a once famous star is unable to accept his descent into old age and the fact that nobody wants to employ him any more. And in 'Living in the Past', a once famous star refuses to cooperate with his would-be biographer because he wants nothing but flattery in the book, rather than the possibly negative opinions of his contemporaries. Relationships fail to prosper: in 'A Holiday Humour', shy, repressed Edward is offered the possibility of one with a beautiful girl, but can't bring himself to act on it, though he learns a lesson from the experience. 

There are too many stories to be able to talk about them all in detail. So here are my two favourites. I very much liked 'A Brief Encounter' in which Jessica, a middle-aged woman, once a keen theatregoer, sets off on her own to see a production of Othello at Stratford on Avon after her disagreeable husband opts out of accompanying her. Also heading for Stratford is seventeen-year-old Lennie, who has recently discovered Shakespeare at a local youth club and is desperate to see the play. Disappointed when he discovers the performance is sold out, he joins the queue for returns. There he is approached by Jessica who is hoping to sell her spare ticket. When Lennie can't afford the full price, she lets him have it for the price of a gallery seat. So it is that the two go for coffee and a walk round the town, and are sitting together to watch the play. Both enjoy their conversation and their shared ideas about the production, and hope to meet again. But will they?

Then there's the title story, and the longest in the collection, 'All is Fortune'. The narrator here is a young aspiring playwright  whose morale, following endless rejection letters, is extremely low. So he decides to take a job he's seen advertised in the local paper: he will be cataloguing the collection of a long-forgotten Victorian playwright, whose descendent Mrs Morrison has plans to open a museum. Opening the many boxes he discovers several play scripts of a decidedly inferior kind. But then, right at the bottom of the box, he finds a play called 'All is Fortune', and this is on quite another level.  For a long time he conceals this discovery, hoping perhaps to persuade a theatre company to stage it. But many ups and downs follow, and it appears for a long time that all is lost. However, in a twist at the end, something he has never imagined comes to pass and he is finally contented with the outcome.

Anyone familiar with the world of the theatre will recognise the experiences described in these stories. And anyone familiar with human nature will too!

Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker (1940)

This is a contribution to Simon and Kaggsy's 1940s Club. I read the book back in 2007 on Simon's recommendation, so it seemed only right to resurrect my review from those far off days. So here's a version of it.

Written by Frank Baker (of whom I certainly had not heard) in the 1940s, this is described on the cover as 'A Strange and Charming Book'. Strange it certainly is, but charming does not really encompass the effect of this work, which has taken me a long time to read because I didn't find it at all comfortable. That is not to say that I didn't enjoy it -- I kept returning to it and dipping in -- but it was not the sort of book I felt like curling up with in bed of an evening, my preferred time and place for reading.

Narrated by young Norman Huntley, an organist in a cathedral town, it tells the story of the eponymous Miss H, who is, essentially, a creation of Norman's own somewhat bizarre imagination. A creation, though, who lives and breathes and affects Norman's life in a number of ways, many of them far from comfortable. On holiday in Ireland with his friend Henry, Norman has visited a small out-of-the way church and, in conversation with the vicar, claimed to know an elderly lady, Miss Hargreaves, who he has invented on the spot. Egged on by Henry, he endows her with many eccentricities, including a parrot and a hip-bath which she carries everywhere with her. Imagine his surprise, and indeed horror, when, back home, he gets at message to say Miss H is arriving at his local station. Thinking, and hoping, that this is some kind of joke, he turns up and there she is, just as he described her, complete with parrot and bath. There is, certainly, much comedy of a slightly disturbing kind in their early encounters and conversations -- every time Norman invents some new facet of their supposed earlier acquaintance Miss H immediately 'remembers' it, but her memory appears to be extremely vague on subjects Norman has not mentioned himself. Norman is (understandably) appalled by this turn of events, and tries his best to escape Miss H, who is deeply hurt by his rejection of her. His friends and family are shocked by his apparent rudeness to this sweet old lady, who, they believe, he must have had some kind of sinister designs on. Things go from bad to worse, and Norman's state of mind becomes increasingly desperate and unstable. In the end he finds a solution of sorts, but I am not going to say more about this.

This book is really challenging in some ways. Mainly, I think, because it provides no easy answers to what has actually taken place. A stray reference at one point to JW Dunne's 1927 book An Experiment with Time provides a clue, I think. This book, which I remember my parents reading with great excitement, is described by Amazon as a work which "explores the relationship between dreams, time, and reality. It shows how a scientific experiment probes the nature of time and the barrier dividing past and future, and offers a scientific argument for human immortality". I've never read it myself, but think I might now have a go. But of course you don't have to get into all this in order to enjoy Miss H, which is really a remarkable and mind-bending read. A film was apparently made starring Margaret Rutherford, and I couldn't help picturing that wonderful actress as I read of the escapades of this extraordinary fictional character.

Simon's own resurrected review can be seen here https://www.stuckinabook.com/

 

The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham (1929 Club)

I'm resurrecting this sadly neglected blog in order to join in Simon and Kaggsy's latest Club. And when I looked for Books Published in 1929 (thank you Wikipedia) there was immediately no contest. As I've probably said many times on here, I have loved Margery Allingham's Albert Campion novels since my mother first introduced me to them when I was about twelve and have been reading and re-reading them ever since. If you'd asked me a week ago I'd have told you that I'd read them all, so imagine my surprise when I discovered I'd never read this, the very first of them. And what a revelation it was. 

If you're not familiar with this series of novels, Albert Campion is what would be known today as the series detective. But he's a most unusual kind of detective - a private one, certainly, but one willing to take on any kind of challenge from a wide variety of sources - in this novel he's working for His Majesty's Government, but at other times he may be associated with Scotland Yard, or helping an old family with inheritance problems, and more besides. He has acquaintances in the criminal fraternity too, and his manservant, Magersfontein Lugg, is a reformed burglar. The books are better described as mysteries as murder doesn't always feature in them, and Campion himself is a bit of a mystery - careful reading of the series will reveal certain hints, but all we know for sure is that he's the younger son of an aristocratic family and that his real name is Rudolph. It's also often said that as a character he was originally conceived as being a spoof on Dorothy Sayers' Peter Whimsey. In this novel, his first appearance, this does seem very plausible, as he appears bizarrely effete and foolish, given to making silly jokes and apparent non-sequiturs. Underneath this rather effete exterior, though, he is revealed to have a sharp mind and the capacity to take drastic and effective action when needed.

The biggest surprise here, though, is that Campion is only a minor character in the novel. He does play an important part in one episode, but he disappears before the end and he gives no indication that he will turn into the series detective. That job, it seems, was intended by Allingham to be given to Dr George Abbershaw, Home Office pathologist, whose quick wits and good sense not only extricate the rest of the characters from a very dangerous situation but also solve the final mystery - who killed Colonel Coombe? Abbershaw is an attractive character, but apparently Allingham's publishers were so taken with Campion that they insisted he should be given the leading part in subsequent novels. Good thinking on their part!

So what's this novel about? It's a bit of a romp, set in an isolated country mansion called Black Dudley, where a house party is taking place. The guests are a bunch of young society people, male and female. Campion is among them, but it turns out nobody knows who he is or who invited him, so everyone is highly suspicious of him.  The guests soon discover they have been infiltrated by members of an international criminal gang, run from who knows where by the mysterious arch villain Simister (who will reappear in subsequent novels). The two men who have found their way to Black Dudley are a German calling himself Dawlish but unmasked by Campion as Eberhard Von Faber, a wholly ruthless and all round nasty piece of work, and his sidekick, the shifty Gideon. During an evening party game, Colonel Coombe, Black Dudley's owner, is murdered, and the crooks reveal that they are searching for some vital papers which have somehow been mislaid in the house. The villains will stop at nothing to recover the papers, and that includes violence and enforced imprisonment of the young guests, none of whom appear to know anything about the lost papers. So there are violent physical fights, shootings, secret passages, imprisonments in impenetrable rooms, a deranged religious maniac maid, attempted arson, a car chase, and the intervention of the local hunt. 

I'm not sure whether, if I had read this one first, I'd have been as keen to pursue the rest of the series. It all seems a bit juvenile, and is very firmly a product of its time, though none the worse for that. But as someone so familiar with the later novels, it was fascinating to see Campion in this first incarnation. Over time, of course, he matures, and shows his abilities both as a man of authority and a man of action. I'd be hard pressed to say which of the 20 or so novels was my favourite, but I have a tremendous soft spot for Sweet Danger (1933), partly because it was the first one I ever read, but also because in the novel Campion meets the feisty young Amanda Fitton, who some years later will become his wife. I was also deeply impressed a few years ago by Traitor's Purse (1941), which is more of a psychological thriller and a superb one at that, and often considered the finest book of the series. But I've loved them all, even this rather strange first novel, which I'm delighted to have had the chance to read.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954 Club)

 

This is a rejig of a review I wrote for Shiny New Books last year, when Daunt Books reprinted the novel, which was of course published in 1954. I couldn't resist adding to the splendid list of all the books that have been written about - 1954 was certainly a bumper year.

Who Was Changed and Who was Dead is considered by many to be Barbara Comyms'  best novel. I’m not sure whether this is true – I’d probably have voted for The Vet’s Daughter – but in any case it is a remarkable book, which I was delighted to have the opportunity to re-read.

From its strikingly memorable opening sentence, ‘The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows’, we are immediately pulled into a world which is both strange and wholly believable. It’s the first of June, ‘about seventy years ago’, and the village is flooded. Three dead peacocks float round the garden and the hens are committing suicide, dropping one by one from their perches into the flood water. Angry Grandmother Willoweed is fretting about her roses, and wondering when she will get her lunch. Her son Ebin rows his daughters round the garden:

Strange objects of pitiful aspect floated past: the bloated body of a drowned sheep, the wool withering about in the water, a white bee-hive with the perplexed bees still around; a newborn pig, all pink and dead; and the mournful bodies of the peacocks.

The flood waters disappear, not before Grandmother Willoweed has dragged the children under the dining room table to escape a thunderstorm, while demanding that the maids do their job: ‘those lazy bitches must make cocoa’. She is a monstrous tyrant, bullying her servants, her son and her grandchildren, and refusing to walk on land she doesn’t own – later, she is reluctantly forced to allow herself to be carried to a funeral she can’t get out of attending. The whole household is under her thumb, and the main plot of the novel is concerned with how, or if, they will manage to escape from her iron grip and to forge new and more satisfying lives. We will indeed find out by the end who was changed and who was dead.

Meanwhile, however, the village is struck by another, more mysterious, disaster. People start dying. The first is the wife of Dr Hatt, who dies of a sudden and inexplicable nosebleed. The doctor is devastated, looking round dreamily at the funeral mourners: ‘They looked like bloated, sleepy flies at the end of the season. They were imprisoned by tombstones tumbling in all directions’. The subsequent deaths are even more frightening and inexplicable, and mostly involve madness and suicide. Ebin is actually an unwilling witness to one of them in a terrifying scene in which the butcher leaps around on a bridge, shouting and gesticulating, then sharpening his knife on the stones of the bridge before using it to cut his own throat. Ebin is completely traumatised by what he has seen, but later the same day he sits down to write an account of it (‘Mad Village’) which gets published in the newspaper he used to work for, thereby re-launching a career he thought was over and done with.

All this may sound as if Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead might be a grim or depressing novel, but nothing can be further from the truth. It’s often very funny, especially if you like irony and black humour. And there are some peaceful moments amid the chaos. Ebin’s three children, Emma, Hattie and Dennis, manage to enjoy their lives in the idyllic countryside, where they can row on the river and forget the strange occurrences going on around them: Comyns apparently based the village on Bidford-on-Avon, where she grew up. And, unlike many of her other novels, it does have an upbeat ending. 

So it’s partly her ability to mix the everyday with the gothic and grotesque that makes her novels stand out, but most of all it’s her unique style and perspective. Her narrators, whether first or third person, observe and describe the world around them with a curiously objective naivety, even when what they are seeing is potentially upsetting or frightening. If you’ve read her before, you’ll know exactly what I mean. If you haven’t, then you’re in for a treat.

For many more reviews of 1954 books, check out Simon's blog Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings

 

Maigret Goes to School (1954 Club)

I'm having a bit of binge on Maigret at the moment, watching episodes of the 1960s TV series with Rupert Davies as the celebrated police inspector. So it was easy to choose a book to review for Simon and Kaggsy's 1954 Club - you could probably find a Maigret for every year of it, given Simenon's incredible output (75 Maigret novels and 28 short stories). I haven't watched  this one yet - it will interesting to see what the TV adaptation is like. I read it first in 2017, after I'd  rescued it from a terrible fate  - it was headed for the tip. And for such a slim little volume, it gave me the most enormous pleasure, so it's good to revisit it.

It's the first day of spring, and everyone, the police included, is in a holiday mood. The sun is shining and the air feels surprisingly warm. In the police station at the Quai des Orfevres, Maigret notices an unremarkable, slightly unattractive man sitting patiently in the waiting room the police know as Purgatory. He's been there for some time and shows no sign of leaving. Eventually Maigret discovers that he is Gastin, a schoolmaster from the Charente, a seaside region in Western France, who is suspected of having killed an unpleasant old woman, his neighbour. He's come to ask the famous detective for help. There's no evidence that he did the murder, but he and his wife are universally disliked in the village - they are seen as foreigners, having moved from a different area, so they have been seized upon as responsible. Will Maigret come back with him and find the real murderer?

Under normal circumstances the detective would say no, but the springlike weather, and memories of holidays by the sea, eating mussels and drinking the local white wine, are enough to sway the balance, and soon the two are on the train heading for the village. Naturally enough things are not the same as in Maigret's happy memories - mussels are out of season, and the wine is rather coarse and strong (and he drinks far too much of it). Even worse, the sea is not visible from the village. Soon after his arrival, Gastin is arrested, and Maigret is left staying in a seedy old inn and trying to make sense of the complicated relationships between the inhabitants, several of whom seem to be permanently drunk. There are no obvious suspects for the crime, which everyone feels was well deserved and long overdue.

However a young boy, son of the local butcher, has given a statement saying he saw Gastin coming out of his garden shed just at the time the murder was committed. It was done with a .22 rifle, a weapon owned by most of the young boys in the village, which makes things difficult. Maigret interviews people, if they are sober enough, and spends a lot of time talking to the boys, mostly aged around 12. He also enjoys watching the old men in the inn, realising they are quite a bit like children themselves, still interacting in the ways they did when they were at school together. Eventually of course he solves the case, and rings Mme Maigret to say he's catching the afternoon train home. He decides they'll go and see a film together as soon as possible.

This is a totally charming book. Yes, a murder was committed but honestly the woman was asking for it, and neither the other inhabitants nor the reader is going to feel too sorry. Nothing in the village is going to change, but I guess that's French villages in the 1950s for you. I live in a French village myself, and everyone seems pretty friendly and well behaved though no doubt there are the usual animosities under the surface. 

Simenon apparently said Rupert Davies was 'the perfect Maigret', and I certainly prefer him to Michael Gambon, who played him in the 1990s - and the. less said about Rowan Atkinson's recent attempt the better. But for real French style and authenticity, my vote would go to Bruno Cremer, in the French version that ran from 1991 to 2005. But best of all, of course, is to read the books!

Lily by Rose Tremain on Shiny

I was utterly bowled over by this book. If you spotted the cover and had never heard of Rose Tremain, you would probably take it for a 19th-century novel, but of course it's her latest novel, which takes place between 1850 and 1867. However, as a celebrated historical novelist, Tremain has no trouble in taking the reader back in time and plunging them into the sights sounds smells and behaviour of the era. As it happens. her previous book, Angel of Mercy, was also set in the Victorian period, so, as she has said, she had a great deal of research ready made. That's one thing to like and admire, but the plot itself is extraordinarily gripping, or at least it was to me.

Lily is a foundling. Her unknown mother left her by the gate of a park in East London where, by a lucky chance, she was found by a young policeman, Sam Trench. He carries her through the night and deposits her at the London Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields. From there, following the orphanage policy, she is transferred to a farm in Suffolk where she spends her next six years, basking happily in the love of her foster mother. So it's a terrible shock when one day she is taken to London and placed in the harsh and cruel hands of the administrators. Beatings are common, and the children are punished for grieving for their lost foster-mothers. Lily is picked out for special torment by Nurse Maude, whose abuse of her over the years is about as bad as you could possibly imagine. 

All this information is fed to the reader slowly, and interspersed with an account of Lily who, nearly seventeen, has left the orphanage and is employed as a wig maker by the successful Belle Prettywood, a part-time courtesan with a heart of gold. Lily's life should be happy, but, as we learn on the first page, she is wracked with guilt and fear owing to the fact that she has committed a murder. Again it takes time for the circumstances to be revealed, though given the book's subtitle, it's not hard to get an idea. If this wasn't bad enough, Lily has met her rescuer Sam Trench, now a police superintendent, who proves to have been watching over her from a distance all her life. The two draw closer and closer, despite the fact that Sam is married. But worst of all, of course, is that Lily fears that she will one day feel forced to confess her guilt to Sam, with the inevitable result that she will end up on the gallows.

I was so completely caught up in Lily's story that I actually put the book aside for a few days before I could bring myself to read the concluding chapter, in which her final fate is revealed. I'm obviously not going to say what happens, but there' some reason for cautious optimism. What Tremain achieves so brilliantly here is the way she shows Lily's inner life as she struggles with all the conflicting elements in every aspect of her life. Here's what I wrote in my Shiny review, published a few days ago:

With so much poverty and distress and suffering Lily could easily have become a misery memoir., but Lily, despite her childhood trauma and the guilt that is hanging over her manages to retain an innocence, a goodness of spirit and a capacity for joy.

If you want to see what else I said about it, my review is here.

Which Way by Theordora Benson on Shiny

Just a quick shout out for my newest Shiny review. This is one of the latest batch of the British Library's Women Writers series. It was published in 1931 and is the story of Claudia, a highly intelligent but totally feckless young woman. whose life is spent in gossip and  cocktail parties. Three eligible men loom up in her life: which one will she end up with? This clever, witty novel gives three versions of her future, based on which choice she makes from three competing invitations. 

As I say in my review, 'There’s so much to enjoy in this delightful, thought-provoking book. As always there’s useful introductory material and a helpful Afterword by Shiny co-founder Simon Thomas. A great addition to a great series'. You can read the whole review here - or better yet, read the book!

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout (Shiny review)

I've been silent on here for so long I'm almost ashamed to show my face. I've started several posts but abandoned them for whatever reason. Anyway I'm breaking my silence to tell you about a book I've just reviewed on Shiny New Books, and which will undoubtedly be on my list of my favourite books of 2021. I've loved Elizabeth Strout since I first discovered her novels back in 2017 and have reviewed three of them on Shiny. This one belongs to what seems to be a trilogy - the first two being My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible. In the unlikely event that you're not familiar with these, Lucy is a writer who lives in New York. That's a long way from her childhood home in Amgash Illinois, where she was brought up in household of terrible poverty, deprivation and abuse. I hasten to say, though, that she never writes bitterly about the conditions, or about her parents, despite the often unnamed horror to which she was subjected. 

In this latest novel, Lucy has reached the age of 63. She's very successful. She has two married daughters who she loves very much, and she has managed to maintain a relationship of sorts with their father, her long-ago ex-husband William Gerhardt. Oh William! tells the story of an episode in their lives -William has discovered he has a half-sister who lives in Maine, and persuades Lucy to accompany him on a sort of road trip.

But the novel does much more than just tell the story of their journey. What it's really about is the relationship between these two people, which has deepened into a profound, if not uncomplicated, friendship. Here's what I said in the review:

As for William, the father of her daughters, to whom she was married for twenty years, she sometimes hates him, sometimes pities him, sometimes loves him. But their relationship is undoubtedly a deep one, probably a better friendship than they had during their marriage, since William was serially unfaithful. Now, however, he confides his frequent night terrors to Lucy, telling her that he gets through them by reminding himself that he can always call her, no matter what the hour. It’s Lucy he calls when his third wife walks out on him without warning, shockingly removing furniture and rugs but leaving behind the expensive vase William had given her for Christmas. And when Lucy’s beloved second husband dies, it’s William who she calls first and who comes round to comfort and sit with her.

This is a beautiful, moving novel, written in Strout's signature simple prose - short sentences, uncomplicated vocabulary, lots of exclamation marks. The prose may be simple, but the feelings it describes are not. If you'd like to read my review, here's the link.

Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

I have no idea when or how I got this book, which I found in my Kindle library recently. But it was published by my favourite independent publisher, Pushkin Press, so I thought it would probably be worth reading. And oh yes, it was. 

'One lie can have a thousand consequences in this page-turning psychological suspense', says the blurb. This is a fair description of what happens, but when I see 'psychological suspense' I imagine something dark, probably with murder involved. This book is far from dark, though it is suspenseful. Let me explain. The central character here is Nofar, sixteen years old when the story starts. Nofar is not happy with herself. She feels unattractive, constantly comparing herself with her gorgeous, popular younger sister. She's recently lost her only friend at school, and feels like a total failure, feeling sure that when she gets back to school she'll be seen as 'the only girl in the class still a virgin'. She's taken a summer job in an ice-cream parlour, hoping she'll make friends that way, but that hasn't happened. Then one day a man comes in to buy ice cream. He's actually a fading TV star and musician, Avishai Milner, and he's in a bad mood, which is not improved when Nofar fails to recognise him. He shouts rudely at her, and when she runs outside, upset, he follows her and shouts more abuse at her. He gets too close to her and she screams. Passers by come running to comfort and support her.. Everyone assumes she's been sexually assaulted, and when the police turn up and ask her she confirms that yes, she has.

The lie is easily told, but it will have huge consequences. Avishai is arrested and imprisoned to await trial. Nofar, on the other hand, becomes a celebrity. She's interviewed on TV and in the newspapers, celebrated for her bravery in speaking up. But she's increasingly wracked with guilt about what she's done to an innocent (though extremely unpleasant) man. And there's another problem. A teenage boy called Lavi, clever but lonely and introverted, has seen the whole thing from his upstairs window. He approaches Nofar, and a relationship develops between them, though it starts on an unusual footing - he promises to keep quiet about what he saw if she will say on TV that he has been helping her with self-defence. Slowly the two are more and more drawn to each other, but Nofar's lie about the self-defence leads Liam into a lie of his own - he tells his father he is secretly training to apply to join a special combat group. His father is beyond delighted, as he always thought his son was a complete wimp, but now Lavi has a secret of his own.

Then we meet Raymonde, an elderly woman who lives in a retirement home. Nofar meets her on a school trip to Poland, on which they will get to know some Holocaust survivors who are accompanying them. There's only one problem - Raymonde, though Jewish, lived in North Africa during the war. She's on the trip because she's masquerading as her recently deceased friend Rivka, who was indeed in the camp they are visiting. Like Nofar and Lavi, she finds her lie makes her more interesting and popular but, like them, she finds it increasingly uncomfortable to keep it up, especially when she meets and falls in love with a real Holocaust survivor, who wants to set up home with her.

The primary psychological suspense here comes from Nofar's ever-increasing desire to tell the truth. She comes close again and again, but each time finds she's not quite ready to do it, especially as she believes she will be punished for deceiving the police and for causing so much distress to an innocent man. What happens in the end I'm not going to tell you. But what is so great about this novel is how much sympathy we have for each of the liars, and how little for Avishai who, though not a child molester, is a deeply unpleasant person, so you come to feel he almost deserves his punishment. Also, of course, the lies Nofar and Raymonde tell have undoubtedly positive effects. In Nofar's case, many young girls find the strength to speak about assaults they themselves have suffered, and it changes public opinion about ways sexual assaults are handled. As for Raymonde, she is able to continue Rivka's important work in keeping alive the terrible events of the Holocaust. And Lavi and Nofar's relationship, though it hits a bad patch, eventually develops in a wholly pleasing direction.

Altogether this is a moving, thought-provoking and ultimately heart-warming novel, excellently translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston. I'd never heard of Ayelet Gundar-Goshen but she's an award-winning novelist and clinical psychologist based in Israel. Highly recommended.

 

Death in the Grand Manor by Anne Morice

I love Dean Street Press for many reasons. Primarily, obviously, because they publish the kind of books I love, reprints of unjustly forgotten writers of the mid to late twentieth century, but also because once they've discovered a writer worth reprinting they go the whole hog and publish everything they've written. Such has been the case with the novels of Anne Morice, who started publishing in 1970 and continued producing a novel a year - and two in some years - until her death in 1989 at the age of seventy-three. So she was a rather late starter, but achieved a great deal, and was much admired by contemporary critics. She was elected to the Detection Club in 1976. The first twenty-three of her novels feature Tessa Crichton, a bright, sparky young actress who finds she has a talent for solving murders. In her final year she turned to a new protagonist, Tubby Wiseman; the second of this new series appeared posthumously in 1990. Morice's books started re-appearing at the beginning of this year, and there are more to come through the rest of 2021.

I'd probably have stumbled on these anyway, as I love a witty mystery, but I had another reason for plunging in with this first of the series - I actually knew the author, whose daughter became a great friend back when we were both 18, and who I've kept in touch with ever since. I was aware that her mother became a novelist in her fifties, but only found out recently that the books had found a new home. If this one's anything to go by, they are going to be full of reminders of places and people she knew, thinly disguised of course but totally recognisable to anyone who knew her. She came from a theatrical family (her sister was Angela Fox, mother of James and Edward, grandmother of Laurence and Emilia) so it's no surprise to find Tessa's acting career is an ongoing theme in the novels.

One damp and cheerless day last July, my cousin, Toby Crichton, telephoned to invite me to spend a few weeks at his house at Roakes Common, and, in doing so, put his finger on what I can only describe as the fatal switch. Possibly, the reason I can only so describe it is that I am writing this saga in the intervals of rehearsing for a Victorian melodrama and the florid prose is rather infectious. Doubtless the style will cool down, as the narrative proceeds, particularly if I am lucky enough to secure a contemporary part, in the course of it.

It turns out that Toby has an ulterior motive for his invitation. His flamboyant wife Matilda (a 'rotten actress' but a surprisingly popular one) is off on tour, and he wants Tessa to keep company with his eleven-year-old daughter Ellen. Having just completed a TV series, Tessa is happy to go; she loves Ellen and Toby and loves the house, which stands on a horseshoe-shaped common in a country village not far from London. It's a little community all its own, and most of the neighbours are very pleasant and friendly. Not so, however, are the nouveau-riche Cornfords, who have bought the manor house. Toby has always defended them when the rest of the neighbours complained about them, but things changed when they were suspected of killing Ellen's beloved dog. Of the two Cornfords, it is Mrs Cornford who is most hated in the community, so naturally enough it is her corpse that turns up shortly after Tessa's arrival. Having just met a totally gorgeous young man who turns out to be the detective assigned to the case, Tessa decides it would be enjoyable, and probably helpful, to do some investigations of her own. She proves to be extremely good at it, and indeed solves the mystery on her own, though not without getting into some danger into the bargain.

There's a great deal to enjoy here. Village life, with all its highs and lows, is always an attractive setting, and seeing it through the eyes of a sophisticated but affectionate Londoner adds a bit of spice. It's a pleasure to meet Toby, a successful playwright who seems to have hit a barren patch - he retires to his study every morning, only reappearing for lunch, but spends his time in there reading, though he claims to be working for a deadline. Ellen is a charming eleven-year-old, clever but not precocious, and very attached to her father, who brought her up on his own after her mother died: her stepmother Matilda seems to be almost permanently on tour, so Toby is still the centre of her life. And then of course there's Tessa herself, and it's her narrative voice that carries the novel: she's honest, bright and witty, and her observations on the life of the village and its inhabitants will prove to be vital in solving what seems to be an insoluble mystery. She has a great turn for a one-liner, as here: 'Sackcloth and ashes would have been overdressing for the mood I had sunk into by then'. Unlike that other great observer of village life Miss Marple, Tessa has her own life and career elsewhere, and her various auditions and engagements add an enjoyably theatrical flavour to the mix. And of course there's her burgeoning romance with the handsome policeman, to whom, I gather, she will be married in the subsequent novels.

I'll be reading more of these so watch this space.