A Book Blog 2022 by Books do Furnish a Room

[poppy]

On 12/1/2022 at 11:34 PM, Books do furnish a room said:

Our Spoons came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns

This is my sixth novel by Comyns and another virago publication. This is the usual weird and wonderful world Comyns creates, although with much less of the magic realism that suffuses some of her novels. This is set around the time of the Great Depression (written in 1950). It is loosely based on Comyns’s marriage to artist John Pemberton which ended in 1935. The novel concerns Sophia, a young and naïve woman of twenty-one with no domestic skills at all. She marries aspiring artist Charles and this is the story of her life with him and the workings of their marriage until its end. That isn’t a spoiler, it’s on the first page of the book as Sophia is looking back. It’s a first person novel and the concerns are those of an everyday life; poverty, children, unemployment loss, falling in and out of love, the nature of happiness and relationships.

Comyns usual wry humour is still there, here is a relative giving advice on managing food when poor:

“She cleared her throat once or twice, and said something about poor people should eat a lot of herrings, as they were most nutritious, also she had heard poor people eat heaps of sheeps’ heads and she went on to ask if I ever cooked them. I said I would rather be dead than cook or eat a sheep’s head; I’d seen them in butchers’ shops with awful eyes and bits of wool sticking to their skulls. After that helpful hints for the poor were forgotten.” 

And the mechanics of pregnancy:

 “I had a kind of idea if you controlled your mind and said ‘I won’t have any babies’ very hard, they most likely wouldn’t come.”

Comyns can slip easily into the tragic and horrific very easily:

“about my father eating a wasp in the jam when we were having tea in the garden under the trees, and how he swallowed the wasp and it stung him as it went down and he was dead in twenty-four hours.”

There is also the horror of the commonplace, the descriptions of giving birth in a public hospital are shocking, more so because they were common to the majority of women:

“Besides being very uncomfortable it made me feel dreadfully shamed and exposed. People would not dream of doing such a thing to an animal. I think the ideal way to have a baby would be in a dark, quiet room, all alone and not hurried.”

Again Comyns has a perceptive way of analysing relationships and men in particular, here talking about the reaction of her husband Charles to their new born son:

“Charles still disliked him, but in spite of this made some drawings of us together, so I hoped eventually he would get used to him. At the moment I felt I had most unreasonably brought some awful animal home, and that I was in disgrace for not taking it back to the shop where it came from.”

Comyns has the ability of drawing a certain type of humour from the difficult whilst maintaining the sense of how awful it is. Here Sophia gets a job:

“The first day there, I had to walk to work because we had no money in the house. Charles promised he would bring some in time for lunch, but, of course, didn’t, and I was too shy of the other girls to borrow any, so I became rather hungry and when it was time to leave I waited to see if he would come to fetch me, but again he failed me, so I had to walk home, getting more and more hungry on the way, and angry, too. When I arrived home I saw Charles through the uncurtained window. He was sitting reading with a tray of tea-things beside him. He looked so comfortable, I became even more angry, and dashed in like a whirlwind and picked up a chair and hit him with it. He did look startled. It was the first time I had done anything like that, and he was disgusted with me. I was ashamed of myself, too, but felt too tired to apologise, so just went to bed and wished I was dead.”

As you can see Comyns is very quotable. The novel was certainly realistic about the lives of women and it is a story of survival and the things many women had to do to get by. Although I felt the ending was a bit of a cop out, I did enjoy this, but then I am already a fan of Comyns. This is an early novel and not her best, although it seems to be the best known.

8 out of 10

Starting Now in November by Jennifer Johnson

 

I've had this on my Kindle wish list for some time, sounds very interesting and if her other ones are better, I'll definitely try something by her.

[Books do furnish a room]

She's well worth reading Poppy!

Clustered Injustice and the Level Green by Luke Clements

"Our legal system generates and exacerbates disadvantage."

Luke Clements is a lawyer (professor of law even), but don’t let that put you off, he’s on the right side of justice. He was the first lawyer to take a Roma case to the Court of Human Rights is Strasbourg. This book is about people in society who have multiple legal issues, they are those on the edges of society. They include the homeless, the disabled, disabled children and their carers, prisoners, those in poverty and debt, migrants and asylum seekers, Roma and travellers, people at risk of domestic abuse, people in precarious tenancies and substance misuse. Clements points out that many people have legal problems in multiple areas whether it be in relation to benefits, debt, housing, abuse, social care. Health, child protection, disability etc. Statistics show that those who are poor often have more legal issues grouped together than the rest of society.

The law tends to treat these issues separately as discreet and individual problems. Clements points out that this approach is reductionist and it also leads to a stultifying sort of specialism. One of the strengths of law centres was that they had general lawyers who knew a bit about a range of issues and could help clients who had several messy legal issues. This sort of generalism is common in health, after all most doctors in the community are referred to as General Practitioners. In law the state does not like this sort of generalisation and between 2013 and 2019 in England and Wales half of all law centres and not-for-profit legal advice services closed. Clements argues that the best approach to tackle these problems is a systems approach, avoiding compartmentalisation.

Clements looks at changes in society and law which have made life for those with multiple problems more difficult. One of these he refers to as juridification, the amount of law which now regulates the lives of the disadvantaged. The volume and reach of the law. An increase in adult dependency in the last forty years has happened alongside a decline in state-funded social care support for elderly, ill and disabled people and their carers. This has led pretty directly to the failure of the domiciliary care sector today which leads to people being stuck in hospital as there is no available care in the community. Clements also has interesting things to say about the proliferation of law relating to identity, especially in relation to its complexity. He feels that being a carer ought also to be a protected characteristic. Clements warns:

“Many people whose characteristics are recognised and protected by anti-discrimination laws live with disadvantage, and many experience clusters of legal problems - but many do not. There is therefore a danger in these identity categories becoming proxies through which we articulate and understand social inequalities such as poverty and other forms of social disadvantage.”

Clements argues the complexity of these laws can distract from growing socio-economic inequalities. The answer is not more law but a more radical approach to social welfare interventions.

Clements also has some very pertinent criticisms of public bodies and their administrative systems. The rise of managerialism and the command and control systems of social welfare these days are based on targets and a coercive culture. Clements looks at the findings of the Munro report in relation to child protection which identified over-bureaucratisation as a key problem. Clements goes on to argue the importance of positive organisational culture and the need to trust key workers to develop it rather than senior management.

“When confronted by a cluster of messy problems, key workers have the ability to go up a level of abstraction – and to avoid the bureaucratic temptation of separating, labelling, compartmentalising and then assigning each discrete problem to other offices. By seeing the bigger picture, they are able to warn the individual of future challenges that may be encountered as well as other – seemingly unconnected – action that needs to be taken. They may be experts in one field or another (for example housing officers, social workers probation officers etc) but their USP will be that they are excellent generalists: comfortable working across systems boundaries and making judgement calls as to which battles have to be fought and which can be skirted. They will have a “backpack” of practical experience to draw on: what works, who can be trusted, which levers to pull and when to pull them.”

This is a good analysis of how injustice works, often with the help of the law and the first three quarters of the book is pretty gloomy. At the end Clements does point to how justice can be worked for and what is required of those working for it in the public sector.

9 out of 10

[Books do furnish a room]

Stalky and Co by Rudyard Kipling

“An Unpleasant book about unpleasant boys at an unpleasant school” (Cambridge History of English Literature 1942).

There is a hoary old joke which goes: Question: Do you like Kipling. Answer: I don’t know I’ve never kippled.

Stalky and Co is a collection of stories set in an English public school in the 1870s/80s revolving around three boys; Stalky, Beetle (Kipling himself) and M’Turk. It’s actually based on the school that Kipling attended, the United Services College in Devon. It was a school designed for those intended for the army and was often a stepping stone to Sandhurst. Public School stories were a popular genre in late Victorian times, stemming largely from Tom Brown’s Schooldays. There is a good deal of slang in the stories and this can take a little getting used to. It is the usual battle between the boys (aged about fifteen to sixteen) and the masters with plenty of internecine rivalry. The boys are split into houses and there is also plenty of bullying of smaller boys (or fags as they are known). As Edmund Wilson says:

“A hair-raising picture of the sadism of the English public school system”

It is clear that the education and experience of school is designed to breed the officers and civil servants of the Empire. Indeed the last chapter skips forward to find many of the main characters of the book out in India or Afghanistan, merrily killing and being killed for the Empire and ruling the “natives”. As H G Wells said:

"In this we have the key to the ugliest, most retrogressive, and finally fatal idea of modern imperialism; the idea of a tacit conspiracy between the law and illegal violence." 

It’s pretty much what you would expect from the arch imperialist Kipling, but it has been influential. Indeed there are shades of Harry Potter (obviously no girls or magic), but it is another middle class public school story.

3 out of 10

Starting Woodbrook by David Thomson

[Books do furnish a room]

Now in November by Josephine Johnson

“I wanted to give a beautiful and yet not incongruous form to the ordinary living of life,” (Josephine Johnson)

Published in 1934, this was Johnson’s first novel (aged 24) and it won the Pulitzer Prize. It is set on a failing family farm in the Great Depression over the period of a year, during a drought. It is written from the point of view of Marget, one of three daughters (Merle is younger and Kerrin is older). There is also mother and father and a hired hand, Grant. The family are in debt and life is a struggle:

“This year will have to be different,’ I thought. ‘We’ve scrabbled and prayed too long for it to end as the others have.’ The debt was still like a bottomless swamp unfilled, where we had gone year after year, throwing in hours of heat and the wrenching on stony land, only to see them swallowed up and then to creep back and begin again.”

The scope is small, mainly just the family farm, and there is a real connection to nature: colours, weather, plants and animals. This is a description of the high summer on the farm in drought:

“In August the smell of grapes poured up like a warm flood through the windows. But they ripened unevenly, with hard green balls all through the purple. The apples fell too soon, crackling in the dry grass,–gold summer apples mushed and brown, and the sour red winesaps with white flesh. The creek stopped running altogether, and the woods were full of dead things–leaf-dust and thorny vines brittle to the touch. It was chill and quiet sometimes in the early mornings, but the head returned, the sun blasting fierce as ever, and the red plums fell like rain in the cindered grass. In places the grasshoppers left nothing but the white bones of weeds, stripped even of pale skin, and the corn-stalks looked like yellow skeletons.”

You can taste the dry dust and thirst, but there are other less tangible thirsts. The relationships within the family, the feelings of the daughters in relation to the hired hand, the lack of an intrinsic justice.

This is a bleak and tragic book and we see close up the effects of drought and economic depression. It is compelling and rivals anything Steinbeck wrote along the same lines. The prose is profound and poetic and for once I think this deserved accolades, it’s very good.

“This is not all behind us now, outgrown and cut away. It is of us and changed only in form. I like to pretend that the years alter and revalue, but begin to see that time does nothing but enlarge without mutation. You have a chance here – more than a chance, it is thrust upon you – to be alone and still. To look backward and forward and see with clarity. To see the years behind, the essential loneliness, and the likeness of one year to the next. The awful order of cause and effect. Root leading to stem and inevitable.” growth, and the same sap moving through tissue of different years, marked like the branches with inescapable scars of growth”

8 out of 10

Starting The 12 Strange days of Christmas by Syd Moore

[Books do furnish a room]

A Clash of Kings by George R R Martin

“Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.”

Completed number 2 in the series. It’s long (very long) and complicated and you can have a bit of fun guessing which characters are going to die as the book progresses. As I have never seen the TV series this does actually work. I don’t think there is any point in making an attempt to address the plot, it would take too long. There are a few new POV characters to follow as well. The appendices at the back are very necessary.

There are plenty of twists and turns, action, intrigue, battles and even a touch of magic. It’s pure escapism.

7 out of 10

Starting A Storm of Swords by George R R Martin

[Madeleine]

I found this one quite hard to get into at first ,as rather than following on from Book 1 chronologically, it goes back, for the most part, and brings in new characters, lots of them in fact!  But I loved Brienne, and the battle at the end is superbly written (actually better than it was on TV, as more happens in the book).

A Storm of Swords is even better, totally un-putdownable and probably the best in the series, people always said to me "wait til you get to Book 3" and now I know what they mean - enjoy!

[Books do furnish a room]

Thanks Madeleine

The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas by Syd Moore

This is a collection of strange, ghostly, chilling, odd and sometimes just slightly absurd stories. There are twelve of them, but there is no specifically Christmas theme. Syd Moore has turned her hand to a number of things, publishing, working for a Channel 4 arts programme, singer, go-go dancer, performance poet, children’s entertainer and working for an arts organisation. Moore is also the founder of an organisation called the Essex Girls Liberation Front, whose objective was to get the term “Essex Girl” removed from the Oxford English Dictionary. An objective that was achieved.

They don’t have a particularly Christmassy theme (apart from a couple) but they are very much within the strange tales genre. The stories fit into a wider series of books Moore has written, the Essex Witch Museum stories starring a character called Rosie Strange, who pops up in at least one of these. Death is one of the common themes.

They are a mixed bunch and not nearly as bad as they could have been, although they are a mixed bunch. There is a variation on the Scrooge story which is ok and set in a pub (ok because there is a mention of Jacob Rees-Mogg having a special place in hell). One is set in Cornwall and has a very Jamesian feel to it. The one about the haunted vacuum cleaner is meant to be amusing, although I found the use of the mother-in-law trope irritating. The House on Savage Lane is quite chilling. There are a couple involving cats. One of those has a couple of bumbling and rather incompetent social workers which amused me at least. There’s one involving death as a character in a modern setting. There are some weaker ones as well. They are brief and easy to read and I’ve read worse.

7 out of 10

Starting Hare House by Sally Hinchcliffe

[Madeleine]

The Rosie Strange series is quite good, they're quite fun (a bit like Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series) and don't take themselves too seriously, also set in Essex.  As a fellow Essex Girl I'm glad she started that campaign - TOWIE has a lot to answer for!

[Hayley]

On 12/25/2022 at 8:58 AM, Books do furnish a room said:

The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas by Syd Moore

This is a collection of strange, ghostly, chilling, odd and sometimes just slightly absurd stories.

I find the absurdity intriguing 😄

[Madeleine]

I didn't like the one about the cats, thought that was nasty!

[Hayley]

2 hours ago, Madeleine said:

I didn't like the one about the cats, thought that was nasty!

Nastiness towards animals is actually a total deal-breaker for me. I won’t be reading it if that’s the case! 

[France]

4 hours ago, Hayley said:

Nastiness towards animals is actually a total deal-breaker for me.

Me too.

 

[Madeleine]

It put me off the whole book. And I didn't see the point of the story either.