I write this on the first day of March, traditionally a rainy month, and yet feel cheered that we’ve made it through the first two months of this year. Wet and troubled but still here and still reading. Here’s what I got through this month, including twentieth century fiction for my reading challenge.
Twentieth century fiction:
The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West
I’d heard of Rebecca West mainly due to her fairly famous feminism quote: “I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is. I only know people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a prostitute or a doormat.” But The Return of the Soldier is her best known novel, a slim volume written before the end of the First World War. It involves the return of a soldier, Chris, to his home where his wife Kitty and his cousin and childhood friend Jenny wait for him. Jenny is the narrator of the story and she describes how Chris has totally forgotten his marriage and the last fifteen years and is instead in his head still in love with his old girlfriend Margaret, who is married and living in town. The women have to try and help him, which involved a clash of classes and an eventual revelation about the nature of Chris’s trauma. This is a nuanced and mature book, with a huge amount of understanding about the impact of war and loss and fighting and grief, which is not perhaps the conventional narrative about people of the time. I thought it was excellent.
The Priory – Dorothy Whipple
Hold up, this is likely to make the end of year list. What a treat this was. It’s a 500+ page book, all about the general uselessness of the landed middle classes before the Second World War. The priory in question has been inherited by Major Marwood, whose wife died terribly young and who has lived there ever since with his two daughters and his sister, an artist. The girls are badly educated and keep themselves to themselves in the old nursery, the artist spends her days eating and painting and the Major lives for cricket, employing a man all year round to help him run cricket fortnight in the summer. Their lives all change when the Major decides to remarry, Anthea, a spinster who, he thought, enjoyed cricket too. This is essentially upstairs, downstairs as there’s lots of servant story too and, while it isn’t at all revolutionary (the women are really only good for marriage and having children), the characters are all utterly enjoyable to read about, being either charming or engaging in some way. I raced through this in two days.
The Chateau – William Maxwell
Someone on the socials said they much preferred this to Maxwell’s better known and wider lauded book, So Long, See You Tomorrow which I read on New Year’s Eve and enjoyed. So I thought I’d give this a go. It’s longer and different in tone, less knowing. The plot, such as it is, focuses on an American married couple who travel to Europe for three months in 1948. Hoping to have full cultural experiences, they find Europe and Europeans to be different to their expectations and, although they try and make friends and connect with people, they cannot quite do it satisfactorily. It’s ultimately a book about culture shock, which also explores the continuing aftershock of the war in the people who lived through the worst of the fighting. I kept expecting something to happen that would explain all the discomfort but it doesn’t, it just covers people who don’t quite click. I did find interesting to read and if you’ve ever had any form of culture shock or isolation in a strange place, you do recognise a lot of it.
A Murder is Announced – Agatha Christie
I picked this up in the library on a whim. As a teenager I had a massive Christie binge and then haven’t read any since. But of course, if you’re looking at the broad influence of twentieth century writers, Christie should absolutely be there as someone who made a huge difference. This is a Miss Marple book, and I vaguely remembered the premise that someone announces a murder in the paper so people gather to see it and of course, someone gets killed. As much as these books are dismissed as ‘cosy crime’, there is a nasty streak running through much of Christie’s stories and people who are less bothered by killing than you might expect. The plotting is intricate, occasionally the language is terribly dated (mainly when discussing foreigners) but these hold up as a lens on people motivated, as ever, by money and reputation.
Jamaica Inn – Daphne Du Maurier
As I reported back to the reading group that our February pick The Flight of the Falcon was absolutely terrible (see last month’s review) we switched to an alternative Du Maurier title. I skim read it very quickly as I’ve read it before. It fits well as a coming of age type story for Mary Yellan, who moves to Jamaica Inn after her mother’s death to stay with her aunt and uncle. There, she quickly discovers a violent world of wreckers, smuggling and domestic control, all set in the isolated world of an inn on the moors. I always enjoyed this, though it doesn’t have the depth of character displayed in Rebecca. There’s likely an essay to be written about the internalised misogyny and lack of confidence in Du Maurier’s heroines and the impact it has on their fates. Maybe in a spare moment, I’ll play about with this. Anyway, Mary has a low opinion of women in general, and of her own feelings, which is perhaps misplaced, bearing in mind her general attitude to the others in the book.
Turtle Diary – Russell Hoban
What an odd book. It featured in several recommendations for twentieth century books and was quite slim, which is also a selling point, but I found it very strange. It’s alternate diary entries between William, a bookseller, and Neara, a children’s author, who decide independently, to rescue the sea turtles from London Zoo and put them in the sea. Somehow they find each other and carry out their plan with the help of the head zookeeper, and the experience is documented in their diaries, except that it’s not until page 125 of the book that this incident happens and before that, there’s a lot of blather and meetings with people you don’t really care about. Which I guess is what happens in diaries but makes a weird read. During and after the rescue, the book improves in plot and incident but you have to wade through a lot to get there. It’s almost certainly not something that would be published these days and, as such, I feel rather protective of its strangeness.
And the later books:
Three Days in June – Anne Tyler
I feel like I should really like Anne Tyler and, while I find her books good, I never find they work for me in the way that her reputation suggests. Having said that, I was keen to read her latest, Three Days in June. The three days in question are mostly concerned with the wedding of the daughter of our narrator Gail. The day before the wedding, Gail’s boss states she will retire, has found a replacement and the replacement will bring an assistant to take Gail’s job. Which doesn’t sound entirely fair or legal to me, but American labour laws are different to ours. Then her ex-husband Max turns up with a foster cat, their daughter Debbie, the bride, calls because her soon-to-be sister-in-law has spilled the news about the groom’s recent infidelity, and there are clashes with Debbie’s ghastly mother-in-law. So far, lots going on. I really enjoyed this, it was funny and relatable. She is good at writing characters, especially ones who are the sort of person you’d cross the street to avoid in real life.
George Eliot in Love – Brenda Maddox
This is a lightly written biography of George Eliot, with a focus on her unconventional relationships but with a clear eye on her work too. I know Eliot wasn’t particularly pro-women’s rights, despite her ‘wild’ lifestyle (rejection of religion, common law marriage to a married man, and making a living by writing), but this does tend to lean on the idea that she would never have done anything without having met her husband, George Lewes. It suggests he created her as a writer and, while I can see that he encouraged and helped her, the writing itself clearly came from Eliot herself. She had security and acceptance, which would definitely be important to her as a writer but she was also admired by many who weren’t backward with their admiration. I’m not totally convinced, I kind of feel she would have done it anyway especially as she was already writing articles and things before she met him. There’s no hint of him editing or changing her work, so the ability is clearly hers alone. Nevertheless, I found the detail interesting, as well as the discussion of her books.
A Family Matter – Claire Lynch
This was shortlisted for the Caffe Nero book prize and is a dual narrative set in 1982 and the present day. It doesn’t take long to see how the two are connected. In the 1980s, Dawn is quietly married with a small daughter when she meets Hazel. In the present day, Maggie is trying to look after her father who brought her up single handed and who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The book explores the punishments and humiliations that the courts placed on mothers who leave their families for lesbian relationships, an area of social history I’d never considered before. It was also a good look at a father-daughter relationship. Recommended.
A Perfectly Good Man – Patrick Gale
I found this on my bookshelves – the ones full of books I’ve already read – and wondered if it was mis[placed as I remembered nothing about it. But it turned out I had read it before, and totally forgotten it. It’s the story of Barnaby, the good man of the title, who is a vicar in Cornwall and who is called by a young rugby player in his parish who has been paralysed by a scrum and who wants absolution and comfort as he kills himself. How and why they got there, and what happens next to the subject of the book. I reread it quickly and it’s good enough.
Moments of Pleasure
I had a few days alone for half term this month and, as is my habit, I watched a lot of films. I saw Is This Thing On? which has been peddled as a film about a bloke becoming a stand up comic, when it’s clearly about a marriage and how to continue in a long term relationship when you don’t know how to articulate confusion and occasional boredom. Plus supporting characters of some of the worst people you could hope not to be friends with. I also watched Iranian film My Favourite Cake which I enjoyed very much. We hear so little about the Iranian people that something like this, that reminds you they’re people just like us, is to be welcomed, especially bearing in mind the current situation over there.
Susan E Barsby 