A Book Blog 2022 by Books do Furnish a Room

[Books do furnish a room]

Beyond a Boundary by C L R James

This is the same James who wrote about Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian rebellion. James was a Marxist, anti-colonialist and agitator for the independence of the Caribbean states. He was a political activist throughout his life. This book is about one of his abiding passions, cricket. James was brought up on the island of Trinidad and cricket was pretty much a religion. James’s account of his childhood is very much about cricket and education. The early part of the book about childhood is one of the stronger parts.

There is a great deal about the history of cricket and the way it is played, so a knowledge of it (even basic) is very helpful. The book has gained iconic status and this is from a Sunday Times review:

“Great claims have been made for Beyond a Boundary … that it is the greatest sports book ever written; that it brings the outsider a privileged insight into West Indian culture; that it is a severe examination of the colonial condition. All are true.”

In my opinion it is certainly one of the best books ever written about sport. Janes parodies Kipling: “What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know”. James recognised that the intensity and passion of West Indian cricket was very much linked to the tensions that came from colonialism. James argues cricket is as much an art form as theatre and ballet! A denial of this would probably make James frown and talk about western elitism. There is an analysis of the conditions which enabled the growth of cricket as it is today which includes an interesting unpicking of Thomas Arnold and his vision of society. He makes some interesting points about the changes in society which led to the growth of organised games in the 1860s. Rugby, football and baseball have their origins at this time, along with a few others. His analysis is interesting. Mike Marqusee makes an interesting point about James’s approach:

“.. what he saw in this [public school] ethic, as embodied in cricket, was something that fit the needs of an emergent West Indian society, a self-discipline that was part of the struggle for freedom and equality. In his view West Indians were not only victims of imperialism, but agents able to seize the tools of the oppressor and use them for self-assertion and self-development. That’s the lens through which he understands cricket. In its story he sees West Indians adopting and adapting the culture and technology of their masters, making it their own, turning its disciplines to their own purposes.”

James makes the same point:

“I haven't the slightest doubt that the clash of race, caste and class did not retard but stimulated West Indian cricket. I am equally certain that in those years’ social and political passions, denied normal outlets, and expressed themselves so fiercely in cricket (and other games) precisely because they were games. Here began my personal calvary. The British tradition soaked deep into me was that when you entered the sporting arena you left behind you the sordid compromises of everyday existence. Yet for us to do that we would have had to divest ourselves of our skins. From the moment I had to decide which club I would join the contrast between the ideal and the real fascinated me and tore at my insides. Nor could the local population see it otherwise. The class and racial rivalries were too intense. They could be fought out without violence or much lost except pride and honour. Thus the cricket field was a stage on which selected individuals played representative roles which were charged with social significance.”

The most English of games becomes the trigger for James’s developing political consciousness.

James lived a full life and inspired people like Nkrumah and Kenyatta and was friends with Trotsky, the Woolfs, Aldous Huxley and Martin Luther King, to name a few. He also describes his battle against academia in his struggle to focus on cricket:

“On one side was my father, my mother (no mean pair), my two aunts and my grandmother, my uncle and his wife, all the family friends (which included a number of headmasters from all over the island), some eight or nine Englishmen who taught at the Queen’s Royal College, all graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, the Director of Education and the Board of Education, which directed the educational system of the whole island. On the other side was me, just ten years old when it began.”

This is a great book which covers so much more than cricket, but you can’t get away from the cricket!

9 out of 10

Starting What Willow Says by Lynn Buckle

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Deerbrook by Harriet Martineau

If you like chunky Victorian novels, then this may be for you. Written in the late 1830s it sits neatly between Austen and Eliot, just prior to the Brontes. The Virago edition is over five hundred pages. Novel writing was not Martineau’s prime occupation. She is now widely recognised as one of the earliest sociologists. I first came across her at university whilst doing a course on economic and social history. Her interests were wide and generally focussed on social justice, education and the position of women. She was interested in the study of society. Although many people see Deerbrook as a love story with rather convoluted set of inter-relationships, this is too simplistic. The real focus is the community and village (possibly small rural town) of Deerbrook and the relationship between the individual, the household and the community. This fits with Martineau’s interests and I saw similarities with Middlemarch: I’m sure Eliot had read this.
I am not going to plough through the plot, it is quite complex, but there are plenty of characters and some good antagonists. Martineau resists the temptation to tie up all the loose ends. Some of the characters do have a strong sense of duty, but the duty is to community and the local Lord and his wife certainly do not have it. There is an epidemic of illness towards the end of the book and the different reactions between the classes is interesting. Martineau does portray rural poverty and Deerbrook is a community in decline. There is a riot and some theft, it isn’t an idealised rural idyll:
“The very air feels too heavy to breathe. The cottages, and even the better houses, appear to my eyes damp and weather-stained on the outside, and silent within. The children sit shivering on the thresholds—do not they? —instead of shouting at their play as they did”
Much of these aspects are towards the end of the book and there is still a good deal of agonising about relationships throughout. Although Martineau is not peddling the love conquers all line, she is really arguing that it takes more than love to make a relationship work.
I enjoyed this and in many ways it is not a typical Victorian novel. Martineau’s other interests and her political and communitarian philosophies can be discerned. I know Virago have also published her autobiography and I will look out for this as well.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting Hudson River Bracketed by Edith Wharton

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Mrs England by Stacey Halls

I have already read Halls’ account of the Pendle witches and she writes historical fiction from a female perspective. This is an undemanding novel, set I would guess in the early 1900s. It is a bit gothic and is a bit of a slow burner. The main character Ruby May is a Norland Institute nurse/nanny. After her first family emigrated she is sent to Yorkshire to the family of Mr Charles England and his wife Lilian and their four children. Each of the main characters has secrets which gradually unravel over the course of the novel. Halls also provides a pretty good description of how coercive control works. The setting is in the Hardcastle crags area of Yorkshire and there is a bleakness to it which is quite pleasing.

Of course there is no such thing as the perfect family and Ruby is alerted from the beginning that all is not well:

‘Something’s not right here.’
I was aware of Mr Booth’s eyes on me, and he seemed to hold his breath. ‘What do you mean?’
‘In the house. With the family.’

One of the shocks at the end is based on a real event.

Having said all of that there is a real twist in the last sentence which makes the reader re-evaluate the whole of the book.

As I have said, it was undemanding and read easily. Halls is good at creating atmosphere. It didn’t quite, for me, match her first novel, but has been a good summer read. It was written during the first lockdown and is dedicated to the NHS.

6 and a half out of 10

Starting The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson

[lunababymoonchild]

I read Mrs England in June last year. I agree with your review of it. I throughly enjoyed it.

[Books do furnish a room]

What Willow Says by Lynn Buckle

“Sometimes there is no one so deaf as a hearing person”

“We struggle to hear in our household. Age, degeneration, aural complications and congenital conditions. Ignorance. We have confusing discussions, mistaken arrangements, and fights over hearing aid batteries. Plus, the convenience of not hearing when it suits us. Now we are trying to listen, to each other, and to trees. There is so much that we have never heard, so little time to hear it.”

Despite the naff title this is a great book. It’s a novel in the form of journal entries. The voice we hear is that of a grandmother. Following the death of her daughter she is bringing up her profoundly deaf granddaughter. Buckle is a member of the deaf community and knows of what she writes. The setting is the middle part of Ireland, the Bog of Allen. The novel is steeped in the myth, legends and folklore of the area. The novel won the Barbellion Prize in 2021. I must admit I hadn’t heard of this prize. It was only set up in 2020 and it is dedicated to the furtherance of ill and disabled voices in writing.

The pace is generally slow and there is a lyrical and poetic feel to it. Communication and understanding are at the centre as the granddaughter learns sign language, something the grandmother is also trying to learn. They also have their own methods of signing and communicating, peculiar to them. Grandmother is working on a project “A Compendium of Native & Non-Native Trees of Ireland”, which is an illustrative guide rather than a field guide and entails a good deal of drawing. Granddaughter has a metal detector and is doing a few little projects of her own. There are discussions on reflections about how and whether trees communicate: if so, what sort of sounds/vibrations do they make:

“All those years studying their structures, weights, and textures while missing their inherent languages. I do not know what the breeze brings through them or how their sounds differ”

There is a vein of sadness running through it, to say more would be to give things away. There are struggles with the hearing world and with authorities, but it is the relationship with nature and folklore which captivates.

“She makes our sign for garden willows, expects me to follow her and translate their jostling. Perhaps they are out of my frequency. Or quietude is their preserve. Their personality is not consistent with their messy appearance. They have grown vigorously, and there is ample for harvesting. I cut a handful to show her how their shoots can be woven, bent into slaths and built upon to create something useful like baskets or wicker fences. I strip bark from a pliant length of willow, as I tell of female strength weaving itself into basketry. Of generations tying-in their first star which holds our creation together, s we thread between spokes, my hand guiding hers, under and over and round and round. How wicker needs love and stores it for years to come. We bend the ribs up-setting the basket, to create the twelve mother goddesses. Here is Danu of the Tuatha Da Danaan and Boinn of the rivers, there stands Brigid of Imbolc, of Samhain, of all the solstices and equinoxes bringing us circles and cycles of life.”

It is a very moving novel which addresses real issues of communication, love and loss: a real find.

9 and a half out of 10

Starting Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

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Anny, A life of Anny Thackeray Richie by Henrietta Garnett

Biography of Anny Thackeray/Richie, daughter of the novelist William Thackeray. Her sister was the first wife of Leslie Stephen. The author Henrietta Garnett was the great-granddaughter of Leslie Stephen, granddaughter of Vanessa Bell. This means she did have access to papers and information less accessible to others; there’s a family connection.

Anny is an interesting subject as this letter to a friend when she was eighteen indicates:

“O! if I was only a boy, I should make myself a clergyman in order to give a sermon wh. would make their hair stand on end ... I should like a profession so much – not to spend my life crocheting, mending my clothes and reading novels – wh. seems the employment of English ladies ... as my favourite Miss Martineau says it is far nobler to earn than to save. I think I should like to earn very much & become celebrated like the aforesaid Harriet who is one of the only sensible women living beside thee & me & 2 or 3 more I know.”

Anny and her sister seem to have known almost everyone who was anyone in Victorian society. She was friends with the Tennysons, the Carlyles, Ruskin, the Brownings, Eliot, Gaskell, Millais, Swinburne and various assorted writers, poets and painters. Anny wasn’t afraid to share an opinion or two as well:

“Are unmarried people shut out from all theatres, concerts, picture-galleries, parks and gardens? May they not walk out on every day of the week? Are they locked up all the summer time, and only let out when an east wind is blowing? Are they forced to live in one particular quarter of the town? Does Mudie refuse their subscriptions? ... May not spinsters, as well as bachelors, give their opinions on every subject, no matter how ignorant they may be; travel about anywhere, in any costume, however convenient, climb up craters, publish their experiences, tame horses, wear pork-pie hats, write articles in the Saturday Review?”

She was the model for Mrs Hilberry in Woolf’s Night and Day. Woolf, who knew her as Aunty Anny, rated her as a novelist and she produced over the years several novels and short stories. More for the tbr list!

This is a competent biography and there are some useful family trees in the back to unpick the many and complex relationships. There is perhaps and over-emphasis on family life rather than public engagement. Richie is an endearing character, always spending more than she had. Her friendships and involvements fill in a good deal of the background to Bloomsbury. Leslie Stephen is a prominent character and doesn’t really improve with increased acquaintance!

7 out of 10

Starting The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain by Neil Faulkner

[France]

I'd never heard of this and it sounds like the sort of biography I thoroughly enjoy.

[poppy]

Anny sounds a very interesting character and you can understand the frustration of the restrictions on single women at that time.

[Books do furnish a room]

Archipelago by Monique Roffey

My first work by Monique Roffey: set in the Caribbean and Pacific, as far as the Galapagos Islands. Two things in her own life triggered Roffey to write this: a flood which affected her brother and her own travels in a small boat in the Caeibbean. The novel starts in Trinidad, where Roffey comes from. There is a flood which destroys Gavin Weald’s home. His baby son dies. Things are difficult, his daughter (Ocean) and dog are traumatised. Gavin part owns a boat and he decides to take is daughter and dog on a trip from Trinidad to the Galapagos Isles, via the Panama Canal. There is some mystery as to what has happened to Gavin’s wife Claire, but this becomes clearer as the novel progresses. Gavin leaves his job, takes his daughter out of school and sets off in his boat with his daughter Ocean (who is about eight or nine I seem to remember) and his aging dog Suzy.

The trip to the Galapagos is incident prone and there are lots of themes including climate change, tourism, piracy and smuggling, weather (inevitably) local politics and inevitably wildlife. The sea is pretty much a character in itself. There are lots of Melville references and even a white whale. Sometimes Roffey does drift into travelogue mode:

"peaks of harvested solar salt, dazzling and miraculous, rising up like unicorns, or hills of a distant moon" 

But not very often.

The characterisation is good and each character works through the trauma of the flood which destroyed their house and begins to come to some sort of understanding of what has happened:

“It feels like he and Océan have blended. They have softened in themselves and with each other; the sea has dissolved them, and they are suppler in their skin. They have been disappeared for weeks now, and they are sun-henna brown […] He didn’t expect to feel so lost in his own escape; a new space has opened up, an ocean.”

The relationship of the body to the environment and nature are significant and Gavin’s sense of himself and his relationship with what is around him develops throughout the novel. The journey through the Caribbean is also a journey through environmental and colonial history. Roffey also deals with the mythic as well, filtering Homer (the Odyssey) and Melville through Caribbean eyes. There are also echoes of another Trinidadian writer CLR James and his work on Melville where he says:

“Nature is not a background to men's activity or something to be conquered and used, it is a part of man, at every turn physically, intellectually and emotionally, and man is a part of it. If man does not integrate his daily life with his natural surroundings and his technical achievements, they will turn on him and destroy him”

Roffey emphasises this in relation to tourism and climate change, but in a thoughtful way and the reader is led rather than dragged. Gavin and his daughter visit the slave houses of Bonaire and both feel the trauma of the place in different ways.

Gavin questions himself and his own relation to colonialism:

“Why does he accept the earlier invasion of the Dutch, the fancy buildings, the wild donkeys brought by the Spanish, and yet he minds the twentieth-century invaders, those who brought the casinos and Taco Bell? Because Americans are also New World—and they haven’t built grand cities like the Spanish, the British or the Dutch. They haven’t brought people, trees, plants, animals, languages. America is still young and has arrived in modern style, in recent decades. America has colonized invisibly, via cable and satellite TV”

The novel ends in myth, at carnival time. But carnival is as much protest as it is backward looking. As Bakhtin says it is “bodily participation in the potentiality of another world”. This is a novel which tells a good story and airs many issues without really feeling preachy. Roffey is someone I will read again soon.

9 out of 10

Starting Penelope Fitzgerald Offshore

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After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

This has been longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, although I had already identified it for reading prior to that. Published by the very excellent Galley Beggar press. It’s something that I assumed I would love. It is a novel, although it does feel like a selection of fragments of biography. It is a look at the lives of mainly European lesbians and feminists from around the 1880s to around 1928. The women involved include Lina Poletti, Romaine Brooks, Isadora Duncan, Virginia Woolf, Natalie Barney, Nancy Cunard, Radclyffe Hall, Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Stein, Sarah Bernhardt, Eva Palmer, Eileen Gray, Rina Faccio, the remarkable Ada Bricktop Smith (a black woman who had to black up her own face to make a living) and many others. There are also interspersed fragments of and reflections on Sappho which are central. There is also, as the Guardian review puts it, a “Sappho-Cassandra dialectic” which is interesting.

The novel because it is in brief fragments, is of necessity fragmentary, which has been a common critique for many reviewers as it feels difficult to follow. The novel is in the plural first-person (we) which gives it a more collective and communal feel. Noel Pemberton-Billings and his Black Book shows up with an account of the trial relating to Wilde’s Salome. There is also an amusing account of the necessity of having to explain to a judge what a clitoris was!

There are pertinent points for today as well. In 1914 Eugenia Rasponi said:

“We are still denying to women the right to their own bodies? It is as if the new century has changed nothing.”

Given what is happening in the US, this could have been said this year. The role of men here, apart from being patriarchal oppressors don’t appear much at all (apart from Wilde) and Schwartz quotes Woolf:

“Virginia Woolf wondered later if perhaps we should have asked the men of Europe why we went to war. Frankly it hadn’t occurred to us that they might produce a coherent answer.”

There is a good deal of humour as well as pain and women reading to each other in gardens and trees. It is about learning from other women and from ancestors. There are laments as well as paens. A good deal of research has gone into this and I learnt about women I had previously barely any knowledge of. This is experimentally written. It must be pointed out that the women are primarily white and middle class. There are only a couple of black women and as other reviewers have pointed out she is referenced as you rather than us or we.

There are issues with this, but there are lots of positives as well. It is fragmented and sometimes difficult to read, but it documents struggles for freedom and justice.

“…we were not lost souls. We had been fighting for decades, sometimes desperately, for the rights to our own lives”

7 and a half out of 10

Starting The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

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Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

A blink and you’ll miss it novella published in 1979 which won Fitzgerald the Booker Prize. It is based on the time when Fitzgerald lived on a barge moored on the Thames at Battersea Reach. It is set in the early 1960s and involves a community of disparate people living on boats/barges moored on the Thames at Battersea Reach. The epigraph is from Dante’s Inferno:

"whom the wind drives, and whom the rain beats, and those who clash with such bitter tongues"

It’s a fairly sparse novel populated by a group of fairly run down eccentrics and despite its brevity moves at a gentle pace. Everyone (including the barges) is trying to keep themselves afloat. Everything seems to be in a slow decline or in transition. Fitzgerald has always been pretty keen on irresolution and this is no different.

“The barge-dwellers, creatures neither of firm land nor water, would have liked to be more respectable than they were. They aspired towards the Chelsea shore, where, in the early 1960s, many thousands lived with sensible occupations and adequate amounts of money. But a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up, into the mud moorings of the great tideway.”

The two children in the novel (girls aged twelve and six) avoid school and do pretty much as they please:

“Nenna would have felt better pleased with herself if she had resembled her elder daughter. But Martha, small and thin, with dark eyes which already showed an acceptance of the world’s shortcomings, was not like her mother and even less like her father. The crucial moment when children realise that their parents are younger than they are had long since been passed by Martha.”

There is a certain whimsicality to it all, but then the mix of people leads to that: a male prostitute, a single mother of two feral children, a failed painter, a dodgy businessman, a rather withdrawn veteran and his unhappy wife. It’s well written and reflective:

“During the small hours, tipsy Maurice became an oracle, ambiguous, wayward, but impressive. Even his voice changed a little. He told the sombre truths of the light-hearted, betraying in a casual hour what was never intended to be shown. If the tide was low the two of them watched the gleams on the foreshore, at half tide they heard the water chuckling, waiting to lift the boats, at flood tide they saw the river as a powerful god, bearded with the white foam of detergents, calling home the twenty-seven lost rivers of London, sighing as the night declined.”

Enjoyable and insubstantial might sum this up, but it did beat A Bend in the River to the Booker!

7 out of 10

Starting At the Still Point by Mary Benson

[poppy]

19 hours ago, Books do furnish a room said:

Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

A blink and you’ll miss it novella published in 1979 which won Fitzgerald the Booker Prize. It is based on the time when Fitzgerald lived on a barge moored on the Thames at Battersea Reach. It is set in the early 1960s and involves a community of disparate people living on boats/barges moored on the Thames at Battersea Reach. The epigraph is from Dante’s Inferno:

"whom the wind drives, and whom the rain beats, and those who clash with such bitter tongues"

It’s a fairly sparse novel populated by a group of fairly run down eccentrics and despite its brevity moves at a gentle pace. Everyone (including the barges) is trying to keep themselves afloat. Everything seems to be in a slow decline or in transition. Fitzgerald has always been pretty keen on irresolution and this is no different.

“The barge-dwellers, creatures neither of firm land nor water, would have liked to be more respectable than they were. They aspired towards the Chelsea shore, where, in the early 1960s, many thousands lived with sensible occupations and adequate amounts of money. But a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up, into the mud moorings of the great tideway.”

The two children in the novel (girls aged twelve and six) avoid school and do pretty much as they please:

“Nenna would have felt better pleased with herself if she had resembled her elder daughter. But Martha, small and thin, with dark eyes which already showed an acceptance of the world’s shortcomings, was not like her mother and even less like her father. The crucial moment when children realise that their parents are younger than they are had long since been passed by Martha.”

There is a certain whimsicality to it all, but then the mix of people leads to that: a male prostitute, a single mother of two feral children, a failed painter, a dodgy businessman, a rather withdrawn veteran and his unhappy wife. It’s well written and reflective:

“During the small hours, tipsy Maurice became an oracle, ambiguous, wayward, but impressive. Even his voice changed a little. He told the sombre truths of the light-hearted, betraying in a casual hour what was never intended to be shown. If the tide was low the two of them watched the gleams on the foreshore, at half tide they heard the water chuckling, waiting to lift the boats, at flood tide they saw the river as a powerful god, bearded with the white foam of detergents, calling home the twenty-seven lost rivers of London, sighing as the night declined.”

Enjoyable and insubstantial might sum this up, but it did beat A Bend in the River to the Booker!

7 out of 10

Starting At the Still Point by Mary Benson

 

That sounds quite lovely writing 🙂 Love the depictions of the tide.

[Books do furnish a room]

Thanks Poppy

Under Fire by Henri Barbusse

One of the earliest novels about WW1. Barbusse was a front line soldier and he drew on what he saw in the trenches and wrote and published in 1916. It charts the life of one particular squad. There is very little about the officer and the characters are ordinary poilu (French infantrymen). There is a nameless narrator and the chapters are episodic, looking at a different aspect or incident. The members of the squad are just ordinary men and as Barbusse says:

 

"Fully conscious of what they are doing, fully fit and in good health, they have massed there to throw themselves once more into that madman's role that is imposed on each of them by the folly of the human race.”

Barbusse made notes whilst still in the trenches. There is no glory here and no heroic warriors and readers are not spared the grim details of everyday life. The experience of war led Barbusse to pacifism and communism.

Barbusse shows the vulnerable side of the soldiers and often they recount their lives before the war. There is a common humanity, even with the Germans, a recognition they are in the same situation as the French soldiers and have as little agency as they do. As Barbusse says:

 

“But don’t talk to me of military virtue because I killed some Germans”

 

“Yes, it’s true, we differ profoundly. However, we resemble each other. Despite the diversity of age, origin, culture, situations and of all that was, despite the abysses that previously separated us, we are basically the same.”

 

There is a strong sense of realism that you find in the best of the contemporary accounts:

 

“I see shadows coming from these sidelong pits and moving about, huge and misshapen lumps, bear-like, that flounder and growl. They are ‘us’.

Who are ‘us’!? The soldiers who are sent to the front are all poor farmers, workers and employees:

“Our ages? We are of all ages.” […]

“Our races? We are of all races; we come from everywhere.” […]

Our callings? A little of all – in the lump. In those departed days when we had a social status, before we came to immure our destiny in the molehills that we must always build up again as fast as rain and scrap-iron beat them down, what were we? Sons of the soil and artisans mostly. Lamuse was a farm-servant, Paradis a carter. Cadilhac, whose helmet rides loosely on his pointed head, though it is a juvenile size – like a dome on a steeple, says Tirette – owns land. Papa Blaire was a small farmer in La Brie.”

The title Under Fire does not reflect what happens in the book, as being under fire is a small part of it. The finding of food plays a significant part as does the management of the dead and the descriptions of corpses in the landscape. There are also descriptions of the landscape and the effects of the war on it

 

“There are trees here; a row of excoriated willow trunks, some of wide countenance, and others hollowed and yawning, like coffins on end. The scene through which we are struggling is rent and convulsed, with hills and chasms, and with such sombre swellings as if all the clouds of storm had rolled down here. Above the tortured earth, this stampeded file of trunks stands forth against a striped brown sky, milky in places and obscurely sparking – a sky of agate.”

 

The whole is a plea that war is pointless:

 

“We’re made to live, not to be done in like this!”

“Men are made to be husbands, fathers – men, what the devil! – not beasts that hunt each other and cut each other’s throats and make themselves stink like all that.”

“Two armies fighting each other – that’s like one great army committing suicide!”

 

It is an impassioned account of the futility of war, populated by ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances.

8 out of 10

Starting Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

 

[Books do furnish a room]

The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex

“In all my years I’ve realised there are two kinds of people. The ones who hear a creak in a dark, lonely house, and shut the windows because it must have been the wind. And the ones who hear a creak in a dark, lonely house, light a candle, and go to take a look.”

This is essentially a locked door mystery based on a true story. The original mystery concerns three lighthouse keepers who disappeared from a lighthouse off the Scottish coast in mysterious circumstances. A mystery which has never been solved. Stonex has moved the mystery to the Cornish Coast in 1972. Three missing keepers, clocks stopped at the same time, door locked from the inside, table set for two rather than three, a log recording a storm that didn’t happen: you get the picture. Twenty years later in 1992 a writer decides to investigate the mystery. He interviews the two wives and girlfriend of the three men. These accounts are interspersed with accounts from 1972 from the three men who disappeared: these read like journal accounts. Stonex gradually builds up the story by layers and the reader picks up the information necessary to solve the mystery very slowly. The company who own the lighthouse are singularly unhelpful.

One of the women sums up the stories that can collect around mysteries like this:

“I’ve heard it all, over the years. Arthur was abducted by aliens. He was murdered by pirates. He was blackmailed by smugglers. He killed the others, or they killed him, and then each other and then themselves—over a woman or a debt, or a washed-up treasure chest. They were haunted by ghosts or kidnapped by the government. Threatened by spies or gobbled by sea serpents. They went lunatic, one or all of them. They had secret lives no one knew about, riches buried on South American plantations you could only find by a cross on a map. They sailed off to Timbuktu and liked it so much they never came back… When that Lord Lucan disappeared two years down the line, there were those who said he’d gone to meet Arthur and the others on a desert island, presumably with the poor beggars who flew through the Bermuda Triangle.

 

I mean, honestly! I’m sure you’d prefer that, but I’m afraid it’s all ridiculous. We’re not in your world now, we’re in mine; and this isn’t a thriller, it’s my life.”

 

The cast of characters is pretty small and most of them are not particularly likeable. If you are looking for ghostly doings, horror or gothic you may be disappointed. Devotees of the mystery and crime genre may also be disappointed. I found the working out of this unconvincing, partly because it never seems to really make its mind up what it wants to be. I seem to be in a minority on this, so check it yourself if you feel so inclined.

5 and a half out of 10

Starting Second Place by Rachel Cusk

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The Way we Live Now by Anthony Trollope

Even by Trollope’s standards this is a monumental tome, one of his longest novels. It is a satire, but it follows the typical Trollope structure. He introduces the main characters individually at the beginning and ties up all the loose ends at the end. As is often the case with Trollope the female characters are strong and many of the main male characters are villainous or a waste of space. Trollope had a particular purpose with this piece of satire in the early 1870s. He had been abroad for a while and returned to a number of financial scandals in high places. In his autobiography he outlines what prompted the novel:

 

“Nevertheless a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now”

 

The plot is complex and multi-stranded and shows very clearly how financial corruption worked at the time. Melmotte is an effective villain with a hazy background, as I seem to remember, well portrayed by David Suchet in the TV adaptation from 2001. Melmotte sums up his villainy thus:

"Judging of himself, as though he were standing outside himself and looking on to another man's work, he pointed out to himself his own shortcomings...No idea ever crossed his mind of what might have been the result had he lived the life of an honest man. Though he was inquiring into himself as closely as he could, he never even told himself that he had been dishonest. Fraud and dishonesty had been the very principle of his life, and had so become a part of his blood and bones that even in this extremity of his misery he made no question within himself as to his right judgment in regard to them."

 All of the young male aristocrats (Nidderdale, Felix Carbury, Dolly Longstaffe, Miles Grendall  etc) are a complete waste of space. They do very little apart from gamble, hunt and waste money. Several of them do aspire to marry Marie Melmotte as she is said to be very rich because of her father. The real gamblers however are Melmotte and his cronies whose dealings in shares and property are shown up as their schemes unravel. Trollope points to the problems in financial dealings, speculation, the movement of capital and basing fortunes on insubstantial and often non-existent schemes. However Trollope’s remedy is, though cosy, also backward looking to a better time. The solution, for Trollope, as he disposes of the virulent capitalists (some of whom he sends to the US!) is a domestic cosiness in a sort of rural idyll (Suffolk in this instance). Looking at the contrast between Melmotte (villain) and Roger Carbury (a more heroic figure), both represent middle class anxieties and both are effectively out-manoeuvred by women. Melmotte by his daughter Marie, despite his abuse of her and Carbury by the woman he loves, Hetta, who loves someone else and resists pressure to conform.

Trollope does illustrate the difficulties women have in this society, as they seem to be oppressed by the demands of the men around them. They have no access to the centres of wealth that the men have. Trollope does give them a level of agency, but even one of the strongest women in the book (Mrs Hurtle) is still limited because she is in love with a man who does not love her. Trollope is essentially a reforming liberal and his solutions are necessarily limited. But Trollope does portray the clash between old and new cultures effectively. Many of the men are weak characters and the novel is about human weakness.

Of course there are issues. Any attempt at inter-class relationships are doomed. And those of the lower orders are virtuous and slow: caricatures (John Crumb). There is a touch of xenophobia about it all. Americans don’t come out of it very well and then there is the question of anti-Semitism. Melmotte’s origins are deliberately hazy, but many of his associates are Jewish. Croll’s conversations are deliberate caricatures of a way of speaking (switching w’s to v’s). When Breghert, a Jewish financier (described as “a fat, greasy man of fifty, conspicuous for hair-dye.”) proposes to a young English woman, her parents are horrified, despite his wealth. Trollope shows that their views are outdated. However unlike Eliot’s Daniel Deronda there is absolutely no spiritual side to the Jews in this novel. However Breghert is actually one of the few morally sound men in the novel. The usual analysis is that The Way We Live Now is anti-Semitic. I think this is too simplistic. I can’t exonerate Trollope entirely, he does show that the views of Georgina Longstaffe’s parents are out of date and the views reflected are the views of a typical Liberal of the time. However he does indulge in caricature (Croll) and Jewish characters are all involved in finance.

Trollope’s satire is effective and he makes his usual points about male/female relations, love and society. He does still make the point that the classes really should not mix when it comes to marriage.

7 out of 10

Starting Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald

[Madeleine]

I agree with you re The Lamplighters -  I was disappointed overall.  Like you I didn't find any of the characters particularly likeable, the only one I felt a bit of sympathy for was Arthur.  I also felt the ending was unsatisfactory.  I'll dig out my review to check what else I thought of it, the fact I can't remember much about it says a lot!

 

Here's part of my review:

 

Although the book is quite well-written and fast paced, I can't say I really enjoyed it - I didn't find the characters particularly likeable, or convincing, and there are a couple of strange loose ends too, which I wonder if the author left to deliberately keep up the air of mystery? Obviously I can't say too much for fear of spoilers, but I think my overall verdict would be disappointing. The monotony of the routine on the light was evoked very well, especially as the keepers could see the mainland and the lights of their own homes on the mainland, as was the atmosphere and descriptions of the sea. The ghost story element felt a bit contrived though, and just didn't really feel that convincing

Edited September 4, 2022 by Madeleine

[Books do furnish a room]

Thanks Madeline

The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson

Another in my trawl of historical novels, for which I seem to have a penchant at the moment. Again the first in a series. This one is set in 1727, the year of George II’s coronation and focuses on the Marshalsea prison. The Marshalsea figures in some of Dickens’s novels as the debtors prison, especially in Little Dorrit. That was the second Marshalsea, built around 1811. This is the original built in the fourteenth century. It was primarily a prison for debtors, but included other categories as well (including members of the gay community caught in flagrante, though not in this novel).

Hodgson serves up basically a whodunit. Her somewhat befuddled hero, Thomas Hawkins is thrown into the Marshalsea for a debt he cannot pay, when he loses the money following a mugging. The community within the Marshalsea is quite eclectic and Hawkins finds himself at the centre of a murder mystery. There are plenty of suspects and he doesn’t know who he can trust. The regime is brutal with lots of goal fever and plenty of deaths, particularly on the common side (those who reside there are the poor and this who cannot afford any other accommodation). Some research has gone into this. There are a few historical figures: Acton, the Master of the Marshalsea and former butcher certainly existed as did a few of the other upper class characters. Hodgson also read some of the available records form the Marshalsea.

It’s certainly not Hilary Mantel, but if you like this sort of historical fiction it may be for you. It reads easily enough and as with classic crime there are plenty of twists and turns.

6 and a half out of 10

Starting A Plague on both your Houses by Susanna Gregory

 

[Madeleine]

I loved this book - I think Samuel Fleet also existed, as did  the governor of the prison, who went on trial for some of the things that went on there under his watch, and was found not guilty.  I've read the others in the series, they're all great reads, kind of a ripping yarn I suppose.  I liked the bit with "the ghost", at least there was some light relief.  I think Dickens' father was imprisoned there too, for debts.

[Books do furnish a room]

Yes, I quite enjoyed it too Madeleine

At the Still Point by Mary Benson

A novel set in apartheid South Africa in the mid-1960s. Another fortuitous find, thanks to Virago. Mary Benson (born 1919) was a white South African. She left when she was eighteen with a view to trying her hand at films, but the war intervened. After the war she was secretary to David Lean. Then she read “Cry, the Beloved Country” and became aware of what was happening in South Africa. She left the US and went to London and met the radical cleric Michael Scott. She worked with him for a number of years, met many influential figures and challenged the prejudices she was born with. She returned to South Africa in 1956, in time for that’s year’s treason trials. She met and interviewed many members of the ANC. She also attended and recorded (stenographically) many trials in more remote areas and reported on them. In 1963 she testified to the UN about her findings. She received a banning order and was under house arrest in 1966 and had to leave South Africa. She describes her situation:

“No charge to answer. No trial. No effective appeal. No means of protest, because thenceforth I could not be quoted in a newspaper without the editor committing a serious offence. In one way it is an honour to be house-arrested and banned: it means the South African Government dare not charge one with any offence even under the fantastic network of laws at its disposal; yet it so fears one, or one’s power as a writer, that it arbitrarily imprisons one’s talents and stunts one’s life.”

She continued to write and wrote histories of the ANC based on the interviews, this novel and an autobiography. She lived long enough to see the end of apartheid. She spent her life lobbying and writing for justice in South Africa.

This novel, written in the late 1960s fictionalises the political trials taking place at the time. Benson herself points out some of the tactics used by the regime to mask what was going on:

“Virtually all the trials have been held in camera, in villages remote from Port Elizabeth, on the grounds that state witnesses fear intimidation or reprisals, with resulting difficulty in finding defence counsel and in the Press being able to cover them, so that a dreadful pall of anonymity settles on the Trials.”

Benson was a middle class white activist and in the novel she documents the mores and attitudes of the white community, especially those who were uncomfortable with what was going on and those who actively opposed it. The novel charts a couple of trials and sets the background and attitudes of those members of the white community who opposed apartheid to one degree or another. It charts the gradual move from an authoritarian to a police state and its consequences.

Benson’s characters, whilst fictional are based on actual events and the primary character Anne Dawson is certainly based on Benson. Benita Parry once wrote about (in relation to South Africa) the “liberal novel of stricken conscience” and this falls into that category. There is political awakening and development in the main character, which I suspect mirrors Benson’s own.

The descriptions of the trials are powerful and illuminating:

““You Bantu have an inferior education?”

“Yes.”

“What’s that? Speak up!”

“Yes, Your Worship.”

“En jy is dood tevrede?” The Prosecutor must have been carried away; quickly he corrected himself. “I mean, you are dead happy with your lot, Jerry?”

“Dead happy, Your Worship.” The voice was small.

“Dead happy in your job?”

“Dead happy. I get my pay.”

Jerry’s round boyish face was quite blank, but his knuckles gleamed white in his tense hands. All of a sudden his hands went limp. I realized the Magistrate had spoken. Adjournment!”

 

A good description of coerced acquiescence. Benson does raise the stakes somewhat when draws links with the holocaust as well:

 

“Indifference equals support of Verwoerd and Vorster. Apathy led to the Nazis’ gas chambers. To be indifferent is to condone. Worse! It is to collaborate. What is the moral distinction between the doctor who cut up his fellow Jews, who dissected two-year old twins, knowing they’d been killed specially, knowing knowing KNOWING, and Hitler and the SS who ordered the experiments? Where draw the line between Jews here who gave a gold medal to the Prime Minister and the farmer who beats a labourer to death? Between Verwoerd and the English-speaking businessmen who whitewash apartheid? Business as usual”

 

This virago edition was published in 1988, Benson was still alive and wrote a powerful afterword which traced what had happened since she had written the novel and commented on it:

 

“South Africa in 1965: as Ben Lowen puts it in the novel, though the sabotage has been well and truly crushed, the Security Police continue “bulldozing every crumb of protest.” He is referring to the Eastern Cape. Yet within a few years Steve Biko and other young Blacks from that area were to found the Black Consciousness Movement, helping to inspire the 1976 uprising when Black schoolchildren in Soweto confronted heavily armed police.”

 

This is a much too little known novel and deserves to be more widely read. There is a love story within it too, which managed not to irritate me too much. It isn’t perfect but it is powerful and draws an illuminating picture of nuances within the white opposition and some of the risks they took from one who was there.

9 out of 10

Starting A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

[Books do furnish a room]

The Decline and Fall of Roman Britain by Neil Faulkner

An analysis of the history of Roman Britain from a Marxist perspective. Faulkner, who sadly died earlier this year, was also an activist and had some interesting perspectives on modern life. He wrote about the First World War as well as archaeology. He has also written a book entitled Creeping Fascism which looks at the rise for the far right (for example Trump, maga and Bolsonaro) and arguing that fascists with come to power through elections. He’s an interesting thinker.

In this work he does not follow the classic Marxist line about Rome, that it was a slave mode of production. He argues from the evidence that Rome was kept going by “robbery with violence”. Conquests produced slaves and loot and then colonies which could be taxed to fund the army. The army took a massive percentage of the Imperial income and was funded by ongoing conquest. This worked whilst conquest was easy and possible. But once the size of the Empire meant it was almost impossible to manage and new conquests were not easy or straightforward then the inevitable decline began.

Faulkner examines the different layers of Roman Britain, urbanisation and the later decline of towns, the untamed tribes in the north, agriculture, taxation and the role of the army and its forts. He uses the archaeological evidence and such written records as are available. It’s a good read and provides a refreshingly different perspective to all the grandeur that was Rome stuff.

8 out of 10

Starting All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen

[Books do furnish a room]

Second Place by Rachel Cusk

This is rather odd and some have said a bit incomprehensible. It is however, beautifully written. It is about a writer M who owns a house on some marshes. She is married to Tony. Also staying at the house for the duration of the novel is her daughter Justine and her boyfriend Kurt. M invites and aging artist L to stay in the annex (the second place) of the house for the summer. L is a somewhat irascible character. He turns up with a young woman, Brett, who is an heiress. The whole novel is a sort of lengthy rambling letter to another friend Jeffers. It also feels like a bit of a mid-life crisis.

All that is well and good. The reader may wonder if all this happened. Well, it is very closely based on another memoir from 1932 Lorenzo in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan. That is an account of when D H Lawrence stayed at her artist’s colony. His stay was somewhat fractious and he even threatened to destroy his hostess; mirrored here by L threatening to do the same to M. There are further parallels. Luhan addressed her memoir to the poet Robinson Jeffers, so there is a link there. Luhan herself was married to a Native American and there is a passage in the novel where M’s partner Tony was said to look like a Native American.

The novel is particularly middle class, but the themes of fate, narrative and will are ones which Cusk seems to come back to. I would probably add identity and confusion to the themes. This one is also about the nature of womanhood, tyranny and gender. A typical passage:

“This had been my mistake, to underestimate my old adversary, fate. You see, I still somehow believed in the inexorability of that other force — the force of narrative, plot, call it what you will. I believed in the plot of life, and its assurance that our actions will be assigned a meaning one way or another, and that things will turn out — no matter how long it takes — for the best. Quite how I had staggered along so far still holding on to this belief I didn’t know. But I had, and if nothing else it was what had stopped me from just sitting down in the road and giving up long before this. That plotting part of me — another of the many names my will goes by — now stood directly counter to what L had summoned or awakened within me, or what in me had recognized him and thereby identified itself: the possibility of dissolution of identity itself, or release, with all of its cosmic, ungraspable meanings.”

Cusk is no doubt playing with novelistic conventions and literary forms. I found this in a review of the novel. I am not entirely sure of its relevance, but it spoke to me and I also found it amusing:

“In the concrete, mixed realities we daily inhabit, and in hybridised writings like Cusk’s, taking the fiction out of auto and the auto out of fiction is like trying to take chocolate out of chocolate cake.” 

Cusk also makes a point about the invisibility of older women:

““If you’re going to paint anyone, then surely it ought to be me!”

He looked at me with a faintly quizzical expression.

‘But I can’t really see you,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ I asked, and I believe it was the utterance that lay at the furthest bottom of my soul, the thing I had always been asking and still wanted to ask, because I had never yet received an answer.”

And also:

“‘second place’ pretty much summed up how I felt about myself and my life – that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory but with that victory always and forever somehow denied me by a force that I could only describe as the force of pre-eminence. I could never win, and the reason I couldn’t seemed to lie within certain infallible laws of destiny that I was powerless – as the woman I was – to overcome.”

There is quite a lot going on here, perhaps a bit too much and the odd construction of it can get in the way. I think knowing where the idea for the novel does help, but it stands alone. It’s an interesting read with a number of layers.

7 out of 10

Starting Toto Among the Murderers by Sally Morgan

 

[Books do furnish a room]

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

One of what Greens called his Entertainments. I vaguely remember the film starring Alec Guinness (it has also been turned into an opera and a play). During the War Greene worked for MI6 and this is a satirical comedy about the security services set in Cuba in the late 1950s, just before the revolution.

Jim Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana who somewhat accidentally is recruited to a British security agency (based on MI6). He is divorced with a teenage daughter (who is a practising Catholic) who has expensive tastes. He discovers he is supposed to recruits agents to gather information and send regular coded reports. He makes up some of the agents and for others, he picks names of people he doesn’t know, but who seem vaguely relevant (engineers, academics and the like). He also does some drawings of vacuum cleaner parts and passes them off as scientific equipment:

 

“When he was alone, Wormold unscrewed the cleaner into its various parts.  Then he sat down at his desk and began to make a series of careful drawings.  As he sat back and contemplated his sketches of the sprayer detached from the hose-handle of the cleaner, the needle-jet, the nozzle and the telescopic tube, he wondered: Am I perhaps going too far? He realised that he had forgotten to indicate the scale.  He ruled a line and numbered it off: one inch representing three feet.  Then for better measure he drew a little man two inches high below the nozzle.  He dressed him neatly in a dark suit,and gave him a bowler hat and an umbrella.”

 

 All of this impresses London and he suddenly acquires a secretary and staff. Then suddenly things start to happen to the names on the list and the plot thickens. George Smiley this is not. The recruitment takes place in a pub toilet.

Greene’s Catholicism is fairly tangential in this one, but there are a few in jokes. Wormold is a non-believer, but his daughter says her novenas to get a horse. She also tells her father that he doesn’t need to become a Catholic as he is already “invincibly ignorant”. One of Wormold’s friends Dr Hasselbacher has the following exchange with a stray American in a bar, they are talking about the next day’s lottery which Hasselbacher imagines he has already won:

 

““I have won them as certainly as you exist, my almost unseen friend. You would not exist if I didn’t believe you existed, nor would those dollars. I believe, therefore you are.”

“What do you mean I wouldn’t exist?”

“You exist only in my thoughts my friend. If I left this room…”

“You’re nuts”

“Prove you exist then.”

“What do you mean prove? Of course I exist. I’ve got a first-class business in real estate: a wife and a couple of kids in Miami: I flew here this morning by Delta: I’m drinking this Scotch, aren’t I?”

The voice contained a hint of tears”

 

Plenty of twists on Theology and Existentialism there!

Greene also throws in lots of one-liners, as he is wont to do:

“A picture postcard is a symptom of loneliness”

“Someone always leaves a banana-skin on the scene of a tragedy”

“A big wardrobe stood open and two white suits hung there like the last teeth in an old mouth”

There’s also a fair amount of whisky involved as there is in The Power and the Glory. The part where Wormold plays checkers with Captain Segura with whisky miniatures is very funny.

There are however several racial slurs, one on the first page, which do jar and cannot be ignored.

On the whole this is funny and a good counterpoint to Smiley and Bond.

7 out of 10

Starting Whose Body by Dorothy L Sayers

 

[Books do furnish a room]

A Plague on both your Houses by Susanna Gregory

Another novel which is the first in a crime series set in medieval England (like Cadfael and Shardlake). As the title suggests it is set in 1348, when the Plague arrived in the country. The protagonist is Matthew Bartholomew who is an academic and physician at Michaelhouse College (now part of Trinity). I think there are now about twenty in the series.

There are lots of characters and the plot is quite complex with plenty of twists and turns. This does mean that the characterisation was a bit limited apart from the main character. Gregory does try to make Bartholomew slightly more modern. He is sceptical of practices such as using leeches and opts for what feels like a more modern, common sense approach (a bit like Cadfael). There are some attempts at realism and there is plenty of slime, rot, blood, sewage, decomposition and the like. Gregory does try to convey the effect of the Plague where almost half the population died, the issues with how to manage burials, contagion and the inevitable gaps in society. The author has been a coroner’s officer and does show off her depth of knowledge about death.

The plot is all over the place and I found it difficult to see the point of the villainous plan when it was revealed. All in all Bartholomew doesn’t really appear to do anything apart from being a pretty adept physician and manages to get himself in a few situations where the opposition could bump him off; unfortunately they don’t.

5 out of 10

Starting Witch Bottle by Tom Fletcher

[Madeleine]

I've read a few of these books, I haven't read the first one, but started with number 11 and I have enjoyed them, I expect the characters become more settled once they get established.  Brother Michael provides some humour too.  

[Books do furnish a room]

Hudson River Bracketed by Edith Wharton

This is the first novel of two featuring the two main characters, Vance Weston and Halo Spear/Tarrant. The title itself refers to a style of architecture particularly found in New York State (developed by Alexander Jackson Davis). Inevitably it is the Virago edition with an afterword by Marilyn French. I much prefer afterwords.

The novel is set in the early 1920s and is really a type of coming of age story: Vance Weston is only nineteen at the beginning. It’s also supposed to chart the development of an author, a little like Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

“Never was a girl more in love with the whole adventure of living, and less equipped to hold her own in it, than the Halo Spear who had come upon Vance Weston that afternoon.”

There is a sort of love story going on, unrequited as they marry others. The novel charts Weston struggling to become a writer.

Wharton also has some fun with other contemporary authors:

“Of the many recent novels he had devoured very few had struck him as really important; and of these The Corner Grocery was easily first. Among dozens of paltry books pushed into notoriety it was the only one entitled to such distinction. Readers all over the country had felt its evident sincerity, and its title had become the proverbial epithet of the small town atmosphere. 

Some of the novels people talked about most excitedly--Price of Meat, say, already in its seventieth thousand, or Egg Omelette, which had owed its start to pulpit denunciations and the quarrel of a Prize Committee over its exact degree of indecency--well, he had begun both books with enthusiasm, as their authors appeared to have; and then, at a certain point, had felt the hollowness underfoot, and said to himself: "No, life's not like that, people are not like that. The real stuff is way down, not on the surface." 

For The Corner Grocery read Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. Egg Omelette is probably Ulysses and Price of Meat probably The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. The prize mentioned, the Pulsifer Prize, is a lightly disguised Pulitzer.

The geography of the Hudson Valley is central to the novel, an area Wharton knew well and her descriptions are effective:

“The house, which was painted a dark brown, stood at the end of a short grass-grown drive, its front so veiled in the gold-green foliage of two ancient weeping willows that Vance could only catch, here and there, a hint of a steep roof, a jutting balcony, an aspiring turret.  The facade, thus seen in trembling glimpses, as if it were as fluid as the trees, suggested vastness, fantasy, and secrecy.  Green slopes of unmowed grass, and heavy shrubberies of syringa and lilac surrounded it; and beyond the view was closed in on all sides by trees and more trees.  “An old house, this is the way an old house looks!” thought Vance.”

This is one of Wharton’s lesser known works and it is possible the portrait of Weston may be based on her. Weston isn’t particularly sympathetic and Wharton certainly paints Weston’s misogyny effectively and subtly. Weston has dreams and doubts as would any young writer. It’s a good novel, not her best, but worth reading.

8 out of 10

Starting The Gods Arrive by Edith Wharton