A Book Blog 2022 by Books do Furnish a Room

[Books do furnish a room]

Whose Body by Dorothy L Sayers

I vaguely remember reading a few of these in my teenage years and as I felt it was time to look again I thought I would try the first in the series. This was Sayers’s first novel and Wimsey’s character is somewhat underdeveloped compared to the later novels. Sayers did talk about her reasons for creating Wimsey as a rich aristocrat:

“Lord Peter’s large income (the source of which, by the way, I have never investigated) was a different matter. I deliberately gave him that. After all, it cost me nothing, and at that time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room, I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare, I presented him with a Daimler double six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it.”

Well, it’s never worked for me! In this first novel I felt there was a distinct link with Wodehouse. Wimsey feels like an intelligent version of Wooster. He also has a very bright manservant (Bunter), not unlike Jeeves. Some of the descriptions are even more reminiscent of Wodehouse as in this one of Wimsey:

“His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.”

The plot is rather ingenious and convoluted, but is solved relatively quickly by Wimsey. There is the typical obstructive policeman and another police detective who admires Wimsey and assists him in a Holmes/Watson type manner.

It has been said previously that this first in the series is fairly slight and it certainly is. The entrance of Harriet Vane later in the series apparently makes a difference. This could easily have been a total write off, but there was an interesting addition to the mostly mundane. Wimsey is described as having suffered from shellshock at the end of the War (we are in about 1923). His manservant Bunter was Wimsey’s batman during the War (inevitably Wimsey was an officer). There is a quite effective description of PTSD in the book affecting Wimsey and managed by Bunter which managed to salvage it from being a complete washout. There is also the beginnings of nuance in Wimsey’s character:

“but if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don’t seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin’ in, since I don’t have to make my livin’ by it. And I feel as if I oughtn’t ever to find it amusin’. But I do.”

Parker, the Watson like police detective also has a bit more about him as well:

“Look here, Peter,” said the other with some earnestness, “suppose you get this playing-fields-of-Eton complex out of your system once and for all.”

And then there is this:

“I remember so well that dreadful trouble there was about her marrying a Jew” 
“… I’m sure some Jews are very good people …” 
“A good Jew can be a good man …” 

Here there is no escape from the antisemitism of the time.

It’s an introduction to a series but it has many problems. The series can only get better, but I am not in a great hurry to go on to the second.

5 out of 10

Starting Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky 

[poppy]

I haven't read this Sayers novel but very much enjoyed her later ones. Loved the reasons she gave for Wimsey being rich. I don't remember the anti-Semitism in her books but it certainly grates when you come across it. I gave up on an Edith Wharton novel because it was just so marked. 

[Books do furnish a room]

I will try some of the later ones Poppy.

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

“Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them. A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?”

Another retelling of Greek myth from the women’s point of view. It follows the plot of the Iliad (with a bit of the Odyssey thrown in). Haynes is a classicist and knows her stuff. Barker has focused on Briseis and Miller on Circe, but here Haynes takes a more general approach and we hear from a number of voices, including some on the Greek side (Penelope and Clytemnestra for example. There chapters on Penelope take the form of letters to her absent spouse.

"But this the women's war, just as much as it is the men's, and the poet will look upon their pain - the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men - and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn."

Haynes also adds the perspective of the female gods which adds interest and a different aspect to the tale. The men of the tale are not really heroic at all. Haynes contrasts the wife Paris abandoned for Helen, Oenone, with Menelaus whose wife abandons him. Menelaus:

“loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises her son. Which is the more heroic act?”

The telling is not linear, but the whole does flow pretty well, although it can feel a little disjointed because of the multiple characters. It is a feminist retelling and bears comparison with the other recent novels in this genre. The portrayal of Cassandra is interesting as well. There’s nothing really new, except perhaps for the descriptions of the viewpoints of the female gods. It’s well written and easy to read.

“She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she- all the Trojan women- should be memorialized as much as any other person. Their Greek counterparts too. War is not a sport, to be decided in a quick bout on a strip of contested land. It is a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself.”

7 and a half out of 10

Starting How to find Home by Mahsuda Snaith

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Toto Among the Murderers by Sally Morgan

This novel won the 2022 Portico Prize, one of the prizes I do take note of. It is biennial and open to books that evoke the spirit of the North of England. This one is set in Leeds and Sheffield in around 1973. Morgan takes a very small incident in her own life when she was living in the area. She relates that she was hitchhiking and was offered a lift by (she later discovered) the serial killers Fred and Rose West. This turns into a very small incident in the book. The main protagonist of the book is Jude Totton (the Toto of the title) who is an Art student who has just graduated from Sheffield University. She moves with two friends and fellow art students (Jo and Nel) to Chapeltown in Leeds. There is a focus on the dangers of violence towards women by men. It was the time when the Wests were operating and there were regular reports of young women disappearing or being violently murdered. The Yorkshire Ripper was just starting. Hitchhiking was also common and Toto regularly hitchhikes in the novel: as she says:

“the edge between life and death glitters”

Morgan captures the area well and as I remember it from slightly later in the 1970s. Take this description of a pub:

“a poky collection of fusty rooms, full of art students, anarchists, Irish republicans, homosexuals and prostitutes”

I remember a couple of pubs exactly like that, sometimes with the occasional undercover policeman sticking out like a sore thumb. There are also descriptions of an anarchist alternative school. (I remember escaping from the furore over Charles and Diana’s wedding by going to an anarchist picnic in a Sheffield park just a few years later). Morgan describes areas that were often dangerous and violent, but there were also groups of students, graduates, vegetarian cafes, left wing bookshops, aging hippies (those who hadn’t sold out) and a fair amount of weed. I remember all this well.

This is a well told story, a little earnest at times, but Toto is a strong character and likeable. There is a queer love story at the centre of it as well as a few dysfunctional relationships as well (mainly, but not entirely with men). The sense of male violence is ever present:

“The world runs on the random acts of cruel men”

And Toto is well aware of the dangers of hitchhiking:

“My preferred game is much more dangerous. It’s played with men in small cars who hide girls under leaves on the top of moors and deep in the woods.”

The characters are in that phase between the freedom of youth and the responsibilities of adulthood. Friendship is an enduring theme as Morgan herself indicates:

“I wanted to show friendship across a whole range of possibilities, across class and gender – non-sexual friendship between men and women, the camaraderie of people in the same stage of life, etc., and all the ways friendship can support you through the most testing parts of your life.

The intense friendship between women isn’t as well covered in literature as its male counterpart is, we saw it on screen in Thelma & Louise and in Greta Gerwig’s 2012 film Frances Ha, but it’s not as celebrated as it should be. It can be huge and consuming. There is a viewpoint that desire comes first, and love grows out of desire. And sometimes friendship stays on the side of non-sexual love, and sometimes crosses over into the physical. In Toto Among the Murderers, I wanted to show how love can grow out of friendship and turn into desire.”

This is a novel I really enjoyed. It won’t be for everyone, but it evoked a time and place for me and I liked the main characters.

9 out of 10

Starting The Haunting Season by Bridget Collins et al

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Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald

The title is from Ode to a Nightingale by Keats. It is Fitzgerald’s last novel and is now thought of as one of his best, getting onto all the must read lists. It has also been touted as a feminist novel (I kid you not). His relationship with his wife Zelda and her metal ill-health are also well known. Fitzgerald is a chronicler of the Jazz age. He is undoubtedly a talented writer but he was also indifferent to politics and felt literature should not be used for political purposes or to support activism.

The plot I am sure is well known. Dick Diver is a doctor specialising in mental health. At a clinic he meets a very young woman (Nicole) who is there because she has had a breakdown following abuse by her father. To cut a long story short they marry, despite his being old enough to be her father. Some five or six years later they are living on the French Riviera with a couple of children and Dick and Nicole meet Rosemary Hoyt a young (17) American actress. Dick and Rosemary have an affair. The novel charts Dick’s gradual descent into alcoholism and its effects. There a couple of films, a stage production and a ballet (yes really!)

There are two versions of the novel. The original has a fractured structure and chronology with an extended flashback in the middle explaining how the Divers met. A later posthumous revision put the novel into chronological order. I read the original version.

Given that Diver has a number of similarities to Fitzgerald (and is certainly based on him), there are a number of indications of feelings about women that I noted:

“Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man’s world – they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.”

And:

“Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel.”

Nicole is also modelled on Zelda and her comment on Dick’s decline is telling:

“But you used to want to create things—now you seem to want to smash them up.”

Also telling is that Nicole in the novel is seen as needing rescuing and as having mental health problems from the start; she marries her therapist! In real life Fitzgerald also had an affair with a seventeen year old actress.

None of the characters are particularly likeable, but I think Fitzgerald’s portrayal of the female characters is particularly problematic. They have no real depth or agency and are dependent on men. The female role is a supporting role. Here is Dick speaking and Nicole responding:

“I envy you. At present I don’t seem to be interested in anything except my work.”
“Oh, I think that is fine for a man,” she said quickly. “But for a girl I think she ought to have lots of minor accomplishments and pass them on to her children.”

Then of course there is the issue of race. For example:

 “a big splendidly dressed oil Indian named George T. Horseprotection” 

And:

“He was not quite light enough to travel in a Pullman south of Mason-Dixon; he was of the Kayble-Berber-Sabaean-Hindu strain that belts across north Africa and Asia, more sympathetic to the European than the mongrel faces of the ports”.

Then there is the black male who was murdered and left in Rosemary’s bed. The characters of colour have even less agency than the women.

The concepts of womanhood are not very palatable. Rosemary, the film star is idealised and young with plenty of male attention. Her breakout film was a silent movie and indeed throughout the novel she doesn’t really have a voice. Nicole does but hers is seen as suspect because of her mental health. There is an incident where Nicole takes the wheel of the car and scares Nick, exactly mirroring an incident between Fitzgerald and Zelda.

On the whole the problems outweighed the lush writing.

4 out of 10

Starting The Doll Factory by Elizbeth Macneal

[lunababymoonchild]

I read The Great Gatsby and wasn't impressed so there was no rush for me to read Tender is the Night (they were both given to me at the same time). It sounds as if TitN isn't too interesting either. Thanks for that.

Edited October 9, 2022 by lunababymoonchild

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My pleasure Luna!

Witch Bottle by Tom Fletcher

“As a teenager, I found it easier being around people than either before or afterwards. Partly I think because everyone else was in flux, too. There was chaos in everybody – not just me. Not that I understand why I feel the way I do. Generally, I just have this sense of guilt, and a feeling I shouldn’t spend too much time around other people.”

This is a sort of gothic folk horror story with some literary pretensions. The protagonist is Daniel. He has left his wife and daughter for reasons that become clearer later in the novel. He also has memories of his younger brother who died when he was five. He is now living in a remote area of North West England (Cumbria) close to the A595. He is working as a delivery person, in actuality a milkman, but as the area is remote he also delivers fruit, veg and a variety of other things. The significant themes are repressed guilt, grief and fear. The descriptions of the countryside are good and give a sense of the numinous:

“the wind picks up and blows a hail of bright yellow leaves across the brooding black sky, and at just the same moment a flock of crows rises from the fields and flies in the opposite direction. The leaves are like fire against all of the darkness. The crows make it look as if the wind is blowing in two directions at once.”

The novel is mainly written from Daniel’s point of view and things soon take a sinister turn. He starts to see things, odd things like a naked emaciated giant with a black bag over its head, along with a few other groaning apparitions who seem to wander round his house. He lunches in a local baked potato shop and its owner Kathryn and he strike up a friendship. He talks to her about what is happening to him. She happens to be a modern witch and prepares a witch bottle for him which he has to bury near/in his home. This witch bottle is distinctly earthier than the ones you can buy on e-bay these days. It is effective and Daniel soon discovers lots of other people on his rounds are having similar problems. He starts making deliveries for Kathryn as well as others seek her help. The antagonist takes the form of Fallen Stock vans which pick up dead livestock from farms. They start appearing an awful lot on Daniel’s and things start to get strange.

If you like a broken central character majoring in loneliness and hiding in a dead-end job this may be for you. Some of the links are a bit tenuous and the ending is rather abrupt and not thought out. This is a slow burn and is not the usual gore fest, although there is some. I haven’t used the words “deeply atmospheric”, which is apparently mandatory for this sort of novel. That’s remedied that. It had its moments but the working out at the end felt problematic.

6 out of 10

Starting Supporting Cast by Kit De Waal

 

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The Haunting Season by Bridget Collins et al

A collection of eight ghostly tales from modern writers including Natasha Pulley and Laura Purcell. All bar one have chosen to set their tales in the Victorian era, only one (by Andrew Hurley) is set in the recent past/present. They are easy to read and I read this in a few nights.

I found five of the stories pretty run of the mill, but there were three that for me stood out from the rest. A Study in Black and White by Bridget Collins, The Eel Singers by Natasha Pulley and Confinement by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.

Collins sets her tale in an old house with a ridiculously cheap rental (always a sign) and an arrogant protagonist. There is also a chess theme in the background:

“He stared down at the trees, feeling a kind of vertigo that was not quite fear. The unearthly light – the dark shapes against the moon-drenched sky – the clarity of outline, the density of the shadows…He felt the space contract, so that for a sickly second the chess pieces were both huge and small enough to fit in his hand. He shut his eyes, but it made him dizzy and he hastily opened them again. The shadows flickered against the pale glare of the moon, seeming to shift.’’ 

The Pulley story has characters from her Filigree series, which I don’t know. However it is set in the fens and is suitably eerie and atmospheric with sinister locals, and eels!

The Hargrave story looks at Victorian views about childbirth and examines the nature of post-partum psychosis. It is also based partly on the author’s own experience and on a real life Victorian case. This, for me, was the most telling of the stories.

I’m already having difficulty remembering the others!

6 and a half out of 10

Starting Storyland by Amy Jeffs

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All we Know by Lisa Cohen

An interesting biography of three lesbian women of the early twentieth century: Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta and Madge Garland. All had female partners at one time or another. All three married (sometimes for convenience) with varying degrees of disaster. Acosta was well known in the early days of Hollywood, Murphy was a great talker and polymath who was expected to produce great work (but didn’t) and Garland was an editor of British Vogue and a luminary and ground breaker in the fashion industry for over fifty years.

The usual list of suspects turn up and link the three together. Sybille Bedford had a relationship with Murphy. Then there is Gertrude Stein, Woolf, Natalie Barney, Dietrich, Garbo, Nancy Cunard, Cecil Beaton, the Huxley’s, Janet Flanner the Fitzgerald’s, Dorothy Parker, Highsmith, to name a very few.

Cohen talks about “the seductiveness of the facts and the necessity of fictions.” in every life and reflects on biography:

“every biography is a disappointment of some kind, premised on unbearable impasses and opacities, on the impossibility of bringing someone back to life, and on the paradoxes of representing, inhabiting and balancing the past and the present.”

What really makes this book is the three subjects who all come to life in Cohen’s hands: they are sharp and interesting and the juxtaposition of the three (they are tenuously linked anyway) helps a great deal. There are lots of interesting facts: Woolf’s short story The New Dress was based on an encounter with Madge Garland. There are a few fallings out. One of Garland’s early partners Dorothy Todd (also an editor at British Vogue) and unpredictable because of her alcoholism is referred to as the bucket in the well of loneliness by Acosta.

All three women lived at a time when being open about their sexuality was very problematic and Cohen analyses how they managed the inevitable tensions. None of them are as well-known as they should be and Cohen sets out to remedy this. She does it pretty well.

8 out of 10

Starting The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism

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How to find Home by Mahsuda Snaith

This was a bit of a random selection, mainly because I knew well the areas where it is set. It is a sort of reworking of the Wizard of Oz. It’s not a work I am familiar with, so most of the references will have gone over my head. The novel revolves around a group of homeless people, and most especially Molly who is 25 and has been on the streets for ten years. The centre of the novel is inevitably a journey. The Journey is from Nottingham (a city I know well and I lived there for some years) to Skegness. Skegness is a seaside resort in Lincolnshire and was a central part of my childhood. It has a unique ambience all its own. It does attract a significant number of homeless people, especially in winter.

Mahsuda Snaith is a writer local to me, based in the East Midlands and has written short stories and a couple of novels. She also writes for the colonial countryside project. She is a British born Bangladeshi writer, who was brought up on a council estate and has struggled with dyslexia.

The novel and the journey involves three people. Molly, her unpredictable friend Jules, the enigmatic Luca who has a sense of being on a quest and a three legged terrier called Boy. Cute dogs are always a danger in this sort of story, but it is true that many homeless people do have dogs as companions. There is also an antagonist called Rusby who pops up periodically. At one time he was Molly’s pimp and is a periodic threat of male violence.

All of the characters are vulnerable, fragile and have mental health problems. One of the themes is what home means to those who don’t have a home. This could have gone badly, but it didn’t. Snaith manages to capture aspects of the homeless life and its unpredictability. The ending is a bit neat and tidy, which for me did not reflect the chaotic lives I see amongst the homeless, but I see that Snaith is giving a sense of hope which I didn’t strongly object to. There are flashbacks which fill in the gaps in Molly’s life. I didn’t get many of the Oz references, but I am sure others will. Not bad at all.

7 and a half out of 10

Starting People of Abandoned Character by Clare Whitfield

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Prosperity by Rachel Thomas

I have a bit of an ambivalent relationship with short stories and only occasionally do I read one outside of a collection, but here we are. This is, I think a variation on the Pride and Prejudice theme. That may have some of you running for the hills. However there are no zombies (thank god) and no one in the cast turns into a sleuth in the mode of Marple or Poirot (again thank god). It is set in the future, probably not too distant and it does have a distinctly dystopian edge.

There are a limited number of characters and the D’Arcy/Elizabeth comparators are clear enough. The dystopia centres on the development of social media and some of the life coaching and self-help that now appears to be developing with it: along with an obsession with the exterior rather than the interior. There is some inventive playing with where social media lifestyle support might lead, mostly amusing with a sense that this might actually happen. It’s a snapshot, a glimpse into a small enclosed world which may reflect a larger one behind it: glimpses of positive human interaction mixed with the dysfunctional.

I liked:

“A grind of blackbirds emerged from still branches, harmonising with their Viking cousins, here for the winter stretch.”

This is a brief story and it does sometimes feel like there is a longer tale trying to get out. There is more behind the façade in the story, things we would recognise, but things sinister too. The tension between reason, impulse and emotion still playing out whether in Regency England or just into the future.

Some of the OTT lifestyle/coaching is very funny, more so because it feels as though it’s a bit close to reality, or where reality may go. I enjoyed this and it is has brevity on its side, although I would have read more.

8 out of 10

 

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Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

How to review this behemoth, almost a thousand pages, not to mention the film. It is much beloved still by many readers. There are so many areas of contention and discussion it is difficult to know where to start. Mitchell hangs the whole tale, covering about twelve years, on the character of Scarlett O’Hara. One review, from the Guardian, summed her up:

"The story exalts an incredibly spoiled, vain, hypocritical, dishonourable and narcissistic woman."

If it had just been the convoluted love story involving Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton then I am sure it would be much less well known. The setting is the key, starting in the ante-bellum South and encompassing the Civil War and its aftermath, including the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.

So, what are the issues? Obviously race and slavery are central and dominate the book and are linked to the rights and wrongs of the Civil War. Linked to this is the mythology around the South/the Confederacy. It is the referred to as The Cause, sometimes the Glorious Cause or the Lost Cause and conveys a pre-Civil War, abolition of slavery idyll. I will come back to this.

Mitchell herself was born in 1900. She obviously met many veterans and heard their stories:

“On Sunday afternoons when we went calling on the older generation of relatives, those who had been active in the Sixties, I sat on the bony knees of veterans and the fat slippery laps of great aunts and heard them talk.”

Her father was an amateur historian and collected information. Mitchell herself started to collect and write down reminiscences and recollections and she used many for the novel.

The obvious question is whether the book is racist. There shouldn’t be any real debate about that, of course it is. The novel strongly promulgates the myth that pre-war the slaves were happy, well looked after and were not desirous of freedom. The language used would in no way be acceptable today and even had to be toned down for the film. It also pushes the idea that after slavery came to an end the former slaves were lost, easily led (especially by Northern scallawags, carpetbaggers and ruffians) and effectively conned. Passages such as this illustrate the point:

“Aided by the unscrupulous adventurers who operated the Freedmen's Bureau and urged on by a fervor of Northern hatred almost religious in its fanaticism, the former field hands found themselves suddenly elevated to the seats of the mighty. There they conducted themselves as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do. Like monkeys or small children turned loose among treasured objects whose value is beyond their comprehension, they ran wild - either from perverse pleasure in destruction or simply because of their ignorance.”

This is not a character speaking, but an authorial point of view talking about the “horrors” of Reconstruction. There is a great deal more like this.

As well as the racism there is the abiding myth of the Old South. It portrays a happy society with contented slaves and where the poor white trash knew their place. A land flowing with milk and honey where women had their beaux and all was right with the world. It is a myth of course and most countries have similar myths. In the UK there was an abiding myth about idyllic pre Norman Conquest times which talked about the Norman Yoke. This developed into an abiding myth about pre-industrial times. These myths always omit the poor, starving and oppressed and this one is no different. An idyllic past which did not exist.

There are certainly strong female characters in the novel, but then marital rape is ok as well (towards then end, how does Scarlett realise she really loves Rhett?).

It certainly tells a tale which can hold the reader, but so many values I hold dear would have to be suspended to enjoy this and I couldn’t do it.

3 out of 10

Starting A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

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Supporting Cast by Kit de Waal

Kit de Waal is a social worker and has written about fostering and adoption. She has had a career in social care as well as in writing. Her mother was Irish and her father from the Caribbean, she was brought up in Birmingham. She is my age and so remembers like I do the signs in windows saying “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. She recalls:

"We were the only black children at the Irish Community Centre and the only ones with a white mother at the West Indian Social Club."

She has written a couple of novels. This collection of short stories feature secondary characters from the novels. I haven’t read the novels and found it no barrier to reading these stories.

The themes include loneliness, cultural dislocation, thwarted desire and often important points in life like marriage, divorce, death, release from prison, children, holidays, journeys and much more. The stories themselves are often very short, sometimes a couple of pages: vignettes, just a little glimpse.

These little glimpses are powerful, but the whole can feel a little dislocated. Nevertheless they are to the point and powerful and I really enjoyed them.

7 and a half out of 10

Starting The Winter Guest by W C Ryan

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The Gods Arrive by Edith Wharton

“Vance thought of the Cretan labyrinth, of Odysseus evoking the mighty dead, of all the subterranean mysteries on whose outer crust man loves and fights and dies. The blood was beating in his ears. He began to wish they might never find the right door, but go on turning about forever at the dark heart of things.”

This is a follow on from Hudson River Bracketed and centres on the same two characters: young aspiring writer Vance Weston and his muse/lover Halo Tarrant. It follows directly from Hudson River Bracketed. With the two books combined the reader spends over nine hundred pages in their company. By the end this is quite enough! All courtesy of Virago! Vance Weston is a bit insufferable and various alternate titles suggested themselves; mainly along the lines of Portrait of the Artist as a Young (insert your own epithet). Wharton is actually wrestling with the epistemology on an artist/writer. The interplay between imagination, cognition, processes and places.

The plot is simple: (spoilers for the first in the series), after Vance’s wife dies he persuades Halo to leave her husband and go to Europe with him without waiting for divorce and remarriage. Much of the book follows their perambulations around Europe. Society shuns Halo because she is still married. Vance of course is fine because he is a man and Wharton makes her point forcefully. Vance seems much more self-absorbed in this sequel:

“The next morning Vance announced that he meant to spend at least a month at Cordova. He said “I mean” as naturally as if the decision concerned only himself and he would not for the world have restricted his companion’s liberty … It was not that he was forgetful of her, but that, now they were together his heart was satisfied, while the hunger of his mind was perpetual and insatiable.”

There is much about the male artist/writer taking his companion/muse for granted assuming the world is centred on him and what concerns him. The tasks performed by women are taken for granted.

“The mere fact that she was patient with him, didn’t nag, didn’t question, didn’t taunt, somehow added to the sense of her remoteness. Did that curious tolerance make her less woman, less warm to the touch.”

One reviewer has suggested that Wharton is using the Cupid and Psyche myth in the two novels, explaining the suspicion and disenchantment. It is an interesting follow on. Not Wharton’s best but worth reading, although I did find the ending a bit irritating.

7 out of 10

Starting Loitering with Intent by Murial Spark

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The Winter Guest by W C Ryan

I was pleasantly surprised by this one. It is a number of things. It is set in 1921 in Ireland during the struggle for independence. It is a whodunit and a whydunnit, a sort of crime novel which examines the brutality of British Imperialism and the difficult choices people had to make. It is also a ghost story and a vivid account of what was then known as shellshock.

The main character is Tom Harkin a veteran of the Great War who is suffering from shellshock after having been blown up at Passchendaele along with his squad. Harkin is an IRA intelligence officer who is sent from Dublin to a small community on the Atlantic coast to investigate a murder near to a country house he knows from before the War. A local IRA unit has ambushed a car and murdered a police officer and an Auxiliary, The Auxiliaries or Auxis were all ex-military and were volunteers working for the British and had a reputation for brutality. In the car also was Maud Prendeville from Kilcolgan House nearby. She is an IRA supporter and heroine of the 1916 rising and also an old flame of Harkin’s. She is still alive after the ambush, though concussed. But then five minutes later she is shot whilst still in the car. Harkin is sent to find the killer and deal with a tense situation, his cover being insurance investigator. There is a good cast of characters and plenty of twists and turns with a scattering of evil Brits and a few dubious aristocrats. There are also a couple of romances (one of them gay).

Ryan has based some of Harkin’s experience of shellshock on that of Siegfried Sassoon who when walking around London often saw maimed, dead and dying soldiers on London streets. Ryan also blends in the supernatural elements into the plot well. As he says himself:

“The idea that Harkin, like Sassoon, could both experience these terrifying visions but also function on a day-to-day basis fascinated me. It also worked for the setting of the novel: a haunted country house on the edge of the Irish Atlantic coast. Harkin is never quite sure if the strange things he sees there are supernatural, or the manifestations of his own mind. I hope that the reader is similarly unsure.”

Ryan has based his characters and story loosely on actual events and has a family history to draw on as his forbears fought against the British at the time.

This is a good tale for this genre and the historical background is well researched and portrayed.

8 out of 10

Starting The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock

[Books do furnish a room]

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is traditional sci-fi, a proper space opera featuring starships, stroppy space crew, a variety of alien races, implacable antagonists and some decent world-building. The antagonists are called The Architects and are entities the size of the average moon, they move through space destroying inhabited planets in rather creative ways:

“Earth would always be the same now. Earth was like a flower, forever turned towards the sun. An alien flower whose exemplar might grow in some fecund jungle on a distant world. A thing of creepers and reaching shoots, something more than vegetable, less than animal. Earth’s mantle and crust had been peeled back, like petals whose tips formed spiralling tendrils a thousand kilometres long. The planet’s core had gouted forth into yearning, reaching shapes, formed into rings and whorls, arches, curved arms… A hundred separate processes shaped from the living core of the planet as it writhed and twisted, then was left to cool. A flower twenty thousand kilometres across, splayed forever in full bloom; a memorial to ten billion people who hadn’t made it to the ships in time.”

The Architects seem not to notice the inhabitants of the planets and weaponry has no effect, so other forms of communication are sought. There are also a few concepts thought up by Tchaikovsky. One of those is unspace, a way of moving between stars. Unspace can only be traversed if the ship has a pilot who has been altered neurologically (a risky process) and the main protagonist is a pilot called Idris. There is a timeline and glossary at the back which is useful.

The various factions of humanity are interesting enough and the whole seems to work well. This is the first in a series, so there are plenty of loose ends to be picked up next time. It does take a while to get started, which is inevitable when so much is being thrown into the pot. There are three different points of view in the novel, which helps keep a balance.

One of the principal themes of the novel is diaspora and the treatment of refugees, which seems quite pertinent at the moment.

On the whole this was pretty good.

8 out of 10

Starting Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

[Books do furnish a room]

Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark

Another dry and acerbic novel from Spark. It was nominated for the 1981 Booker Prize, the year Midnight’s Children won. It is set in 1949/1950 and concerns Fleur Talbot, a writer struggling to complete her first novel and get it published. She takes a job as a secretary to Sir Quentin Oliver and his Autobiographical Association. It is an odd grouping who are attempting to write their memoirs. Fleur’s novel Warrender Chase begins to reflect what is happening in the association and this being Spark there is a lot of fun with the interplay between the texts and also two other autobiographies; Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Cellini’s autobiography. Fact and fiction are wound together.

It’s an odd mix. There is an Ealing comedy/melodrama feel about it and one wouldn’t be surprised to find Alistair Sim or Alec Guinness wandering through the pages. There are also sorts of other references. A nod to A Room of One’s Own and Woolf. Hints of Blake, Spark’s usual irritation with the nature of family, some interesting juxtapositions in terms of friendships:

“I don’t know why I thought of Dottie as my friend but I did. I believe she thought the same way about me although she really didn’t like me. In those days, among the people I mixed with, one had friends almost by predestination. There they were, like your winter coat and your meagre luggage. You didn’t think of discarding them just because you didn’t altogether like them.”

 and a strong female protagonist, one who embraces everything life (and men) throw at her and is not bowed down. As Spark says:

 "The true novelist, one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story"

The mirroring of Fleur’s employer and the main character in her novel (Warrender Chase) is handled well and is quite amusing:

“In my febrile state of creativity, I saw before my eyes how Sir Quentin was revealing himself chapter by chapter to be a type and consummation of Warrender Chase, my character. I could see that the members of the Autobiographical Association were about to become his victims, psychological Jack the Ripper as he was.”

The portrayal of Bohemian life is effective and funny and there is an element of farce in relation to the manuscript of Fleur’s novel. As always Spark poses lots of questions and the satire is effective. Incidentally the trio of siblings at the Triad Press represent the Sitwells. It’s also brief, a good read.

8 out of 10

Starting Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada

[Books do furnish a room]

Storyland by Amy Jeffs

This is an illustrated history of the mythology of the British Isles; ranging from the Orkneys and Shetlands down to Cornwall. It covers prehistory up to about 1200. Jeffs is an art historian and so the illustrations are good, linocuts and wood engraved prints. The story is told, one per chapter and then Jeffs provides a commentary with the background and origins of the myth in question. Sometimes there is geographical information, if Jeffs has visited the area in question. The whole is steeped in old magic, wild landscapes, giants, dragons and fog (inevitably). The sources are varied, but include some of the usual suspects such as Geoffrey of Monmouth.

There are refugees from Troy, giants from Africa, travellers from Greece, Britons fighting Saxons, inevitably Arthur, Merlin (in lots of stories), Joseph of Arimathea, lots of Vikings, Scots, Picts, Stonehenge, curse, treasure hunts, even Nessie. As ever the stories can be brutal and are often magical. Christianity intrudes in the later stories.

There are rather good evocations of the landscape.

Jeffs speaks about her purpose in writing this:

“A desire to share the stories and get people excited about them was the beginning of it all. I was fascinated by how the illustrations in the Brut legend followed the narrative action but they were very concise illustrations and communicated so many elements of an episode so efficiently. I really enjoyed that challenge of persuading people through pictures that these were stories to pay attention to and to enjoy.”

On the whole I enjoyed this. I did feel though that some of the rougher edges were taken off the myths and that was perhaps a shame. The language has been modernised and some of the stories changed slightly. It just felt a little sanitised.

7 out of 10

Starting Game of thrones by George R R Martin

[Hayley]

On 11/16/2022 at 4:13 PM, Books do furnish a room said:

Storyland by Amy Jeffs

I really want to read this one but I'm glad I read your review first. I didn't expect it to feel sanitised, I thought it would be quite focused on accurate retellings through time! 

[Books do furnish a room]

It wasn't a total disaster Hayley, might be worth borrowing from the library rather than buying or keeping an eye on the charity shops

People of Abandoned Character by Clare Whitfield

Here we have yet another twist or variation on the mythology around Jack the Ripper. This is set in London around the time of the Ripper murders, close to Whitechapel. There will be spoilers ahead as it is difficult to say anything meaningful about this novel without. It must also be said that any writer straying into this area after Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five needs to be really good. This isn’t. One can reach for the usual descriptors like, gothic, atmospheric, visceral. But it is just another variant on an old theme.

There are certainly several tropes in play.

Strong female lead, nurse marries handsome doctor who turns out to be abusive, violent and secretive. Unfortunately strong female lead turns out to be a murderer (more than one) as well.  

Of course there is a Jewish doctor as well as this is the East End and Whitechapel. The Jewish doctor is an arranger of abortions, stealer of organs and also a murderer.

Strong female lead also has a relationship with a female nurse. The LGBTQ+ element might be a positive if it wasn’t linked to a homicidal protagonist. There is also a Molly House the descriptions of which have an element of farce and somewhat less than wholesome. It felt a little like a parody.

The ending was so odd and clunky. The last Ripper victim, Mary Kelly being a part of the previous killings; really?

The cuckoo storyline is way too contrived and the housekeeper was somewhat unbelievable.

I generally partial to Victorian Gothic and I know there have been positive reviews of this. But I didn’t get it.

4 out of 10

Starting Our Spoons came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns

[Books do furnish a room]

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

An awful lot of people love this, and it won the Booker Prize. It is based on a real life event from 1862 during the Civil War: the death of Abraham Lincoln’s young son Willie from typhoid. It is set on a single night in a cemetery. Most of it is brief snippets from contemporary sources or brief snippets from the occupants of the cemetery. The occupants of the cemetery are some of those buried there. They appear to be spirits with some hint of corporeality, who don’t yet know they are dead. Although they all seem to recall the moments of their deaths. There are shades of Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense! Some of these spirits periodically disappear with a flash of light and a loud bang if they realise they are dead. An occurrence called the “matterlightblooming phenomenon” by the rest. Some of these spirits have been around for years and they provide a commentary on young Willie and the president, who visits a couple of times.

The idea of the bardo comes from Buddhism and is the name for a transitional state between lives, a stage where these souls are stuck. Coffins are referred to as sick boxes, where they are resting before returning to life.  Many of the contemporary sources are actual quotes, some are made up. As well as the serious stuff there is also a comedic element. There are black and queer characters scattered about as well as the inevitable WASPs.

There’s lots of playing around with the nature of memory and the subjectivity of memory. Basically looking back and looking forward is mostly guesswork. Saunders drags in all sorts of issues as all types mix together in the cemetery: racism, homophobia, slavery, but obviously also grief and loss. It’s all a bit surreal, but also well meaning. Parts of it reminded me of the Greek chorus, some of it was sheer Monty Python (one of the characters died on his wedding night before consummation and wanders round with a “prodigious member”) and a little puerile.

There are interesting aspects to this, but I also found it messy, incoherent and somewhat tedious as well.

“None of it was real; nothing was real.
Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear.
These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth.
And now we must lose them.”

6 out of 10

Starting Stalky and Co by Rudyard Kipling

[Books do furnish a room]

The Doll Factory by Elizabeth MacNeal

Another debut historical novel and yet more Victorian Gothic. This one is set at the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Iris and her sister Rose are both employed painting porcelain dolls. Iris is noticed by a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Louis Frost (an invented member). He decides she is ideal for his new painting and wishes to employ her to sit for him. There are two other main ensemble members. Silas is a taxidermist who poses small animals and dresses them up. He becomes obsessed with Iris (one reviewer went on to say the novel was stuffed with excitement, but I will avoid all taxidermy jokes). Then there is Albie, a street urchin who finds small creatures for Silas and is fond of Iris. Whatever the backdrop, this is an obsessive stalker novel, even if Millais and Rossetti wander through its pages.

Iris is looking for a way out of her mundane existence:

“She will never escape. She will never be free. She is destined to eke out this pitiful life, to suffer the slaps and insults of Mrs Salter, to endure her sister’s jealousy, until, at last, some scrawny boy fattens her with child after child, and she spends her days winching laundry through a mangle, swilling rotten offal into Sunday pies, all while tending to infants mewling with scarlatina and influenza and goodness knows what else, until she contracts it too…”

Consequently she decides to accept Louis’s offer as long as he agrees to teach her to paint as well. Inevitably there is an element of romance as well. The portrait of the sights and sounds of London is well done and it does feel a little Dickensian. The cover art is also pretty good.

However it’s all a bit formulaic and you could transpose it to any modern city fairly easily. What promised to be a fairly open ending is ruined by the epilogue. An obsessive taxidermist and curio collector as the antagonist, we are almost in Fowles territory (The Collector). It was run of the mill and I’ve read too many similar bits of Victorian Gothic.

5 out of 10

Starting The Silk and the Sword: women of the Norman Conquest by Sharon Connolly

[Madeleine]

I read this for Victober, I agree it did fizzle out a bit at the end, and I found it a hard book to enjoy, though I did like Iris - and the wombat was great fun!  Yes it is a stalker novel, and some of it was very nasty indeed.  But I liked the way some of the real Pre-Raph artists featured, as it was done without the use of real people feeling forced.

[Books do furnish a room]

A Game of Thrones George R R Martin

I’ve heard that they’ve made some rather obscure TV adaptation of this. I haven’t seen that but I’ve decided to read the books to see what the fuss is about. I will try not to bother too much with the plot because it is rather complex and convoluted. Suffice to say that I have a sense given the first book the best way to sum up all five (seven if you read the printing where there and five are split in two) is by the title of what I think is a recent YA book, “They all Die in the End”. Martin appears not to be sentimental about his characters. Just a few points to make.

It all feels a bit medieval, its swords and horses. Martin has taken his lead from much of European history. The Wars of the Roses are an obvious reference point as are many other medieval European conflagrations. Plenty of betrayal, civil war and general rowdiness.

The characters have some nuance. There are lots of protagonists (or antagonists if you prefer). And they all have real weaknesses and even the seemingly good ones have feet of clay. There is a marvellous quote from a website entitled “goodbooksforCatholickids”:

“In essence “A Game of Thrones” has an alarming lack of just plain good characters”

If that doesn’t recommend it nothing will.

The whole is brutal and violent with lots of sex (of varying types). There isn’t much more to say without getting lost in the plot intricacies. Martin writes well and I enjoyed it more than I expected to. We’ll see how the rest of the books go.

8 out of 10

Starting A Clash of Kings

[Books do furnish a room]

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