I ended April with all the books I had on order at the library arriving at once, including one that’s been on order for months and has 1,460 pages. But here’s what I’ve got to this month before I start to tackle that…
The Names – Florence Knapp
This debut novel had A LOT of hype and, as regular readers know, I’m trying to avoid getting sucked into hype. However, I did like the look of this – a sort of Sliding Doors but with names. One morning, a woman takes her two children to the registry office to name her baby. The choice of name – Gordon, the name passed on from father to son; Julian, the name favoured by the mother Cora; or Bear, the name picked by the baby’s sister – is the thing that changes the history. So we see all three choices play out over a period of forty years. This has a strong theme of domestic violence, which I felt had the potential to overshadow the more interesting examination of how your name changes your character and your destiny. However, on the whole I thought this was a strong debut novel, well written and compelling.
Whistler – Ann Patchett
I had an advance copy of this, which is published in June and I gulped it down in two evenings. I loved it. I immediately loved all the characters and didn’t want anything bad to happen to them. I won’t go into too much detail here as I’ll do a longer review closer to publication but if you appreciate the accumulation of stories and life experience over the years and if you like novels with strong characters and little plot and like Patchett’s work then you’ll love it too.
Enchanted Islands – Laura Coffey
This is about a woman who spends the pandemic travelling alone around islands that could be the islands mentioned in the Odyssey, following a relationship break up and during her father’s battle with cancer. I thought it would be more classics-based travelogue than it is, and spent quite a bit of time irritated at her flopping about wishing her ex-boyfriend (who was clearly an utter toerag) was with her. I really have little patience for women who feel incomplete without a man. And yet, while she is aware of how privileged she is island hopping while the rest of us were housebound, her love for her father and her calls to him through his treatment were moving. Perhaps girls who have good dependable dependent relationships with their dads are more inclined to need a man than the rest of us. Anyway, this improved once she did more interesting things (though she does bang on about wild swimming more than anyone needs to, as wild swimming people are wont to do) and was quite satisfying in the end.
James – Percival Everett
This was the reading group choice this month and I enjoyed it. It’s the story of Huckleberry Finn as retold by the slave, Jim. I’ve not read Huck so I’m not sure how in keeping it was with the other book but it works well enough by itself. I must say though, compared to Everett’s other books that I’ve read, it’s rather more conventional in its telling than I expected. It may have been purely because he was retelling a classic, but for me it didn’t have the innovation or the anger of The Trees or Erasure. There was some humour in there but quite a lot of the time it felt a bit like ‘slavery 101’. Do people need some of this stuff explaining? Perhaps. So, I thought this was a good adventure story but lacking in the power of some of his previous works.
Twentieth Century books
They Knew Mr Knight – Dorothy Whipple
This is a shockingly bad title for a book. And considering my new love for Whipple, this was also harder to get into at first than some of her other books but it pays off. It’s set not long before the Second World War and concerns a family of ordinary people, the Blacketts, slightly down on their luck and hoping for just a bit more, who meet Mr and Mrs Knight and have their fortunes changed. Mr Knight is a financier with a restless air and roving eye. Almost immediately, I had a sense of impending doom, as they get more involved and indebted to Mr Knight. You get to see how each member of the family deals with their changing fortunes, all three children and their parents, as well as their extended family and, to some extent, their neighbours. Whipple’s talent is in the detail and the domestic, but not in a cruel way and this is an exploration of what people feel when they feel content, and what they need to feel content.
The Town in Bloom – Dodie Smith
According to the Storygraph, I’ve already read this, about ten years ago, but I have no memory of it at all. The story concerns a group of girls trying to make their way in the theatre at an unspecified time in the early twentieth century. The story is narrated by Mouse, the youngest of the group, as she comes to London, gets a job at a theatre run by a fearsome actor and promptly falls in love with him. The rest of the story is around the group, their loves and movements one summer and how it impacts the rest of their lives. Being Smith, there are no happy endings as such, and all love affairs are entangling distractions but I enjoyed this. Everything is terribly polite and people care for each other, even as they make all sorts of silly mistakes. It feels like a kinder world.
A Tale of Two Families – Dodie Smith
A second Smith and one with a bit more potential bite than the one above. Two brothers marry two sisters and the families, with their children grown up, move to a big house in the country and its smaller cottage (one of the brothers works in Finance, the other is a writer so you can work out the finances.) They have their father, Baggy, to live with them, and the sisters’ mother Fran comes to visit, as does their aunt Mildred. Mildred is both selfish and unhinged so wittingly tries to stir up all kinds of trouble. BY this point, you know where you are with Smith, these are middle class eccentrics with some warmth and charm and nothing very bad is going to happen to them. None of them will ever match I Capture the Castle but they’re rather a balm when you consider the binfire that is the world right now.
The Ipcress File – Len Deighton
When Deighton died recently, there were a lot of people mentioning how great his spy novels were, better than Le Carre suggested one person. I have to confess, my only experience of Deighton was clearing his books, along with Frederick Forsyth’s, off my dad’s bookshelf after he died so I decided as I love Le Carre, I’d better try one. Hmmm. This was his debut, so perhaps they improve. I mean, parts of it were exciting and plot based and I did try and read it in the same way as I do Le Carre, in that I didn’t pretend I had any idea what was going on, but… There were long periods of very dense prose where he showed you just how much research he’d done which killed a lot of the interest he’d just managed to build up and I found the denouement to be ridiculous. In addition, and not Deighton’s fault, there were a lot of references to technology which may have been exciting at the time but is now totally obsolete so that was a mystery. I dislike fiction with footnotes and finally he appeared to be obsessed with what newspapers and magazines the characters read. I’m not sure what it added but I’ve never seen someone reference titles as often as this. Was he on commission? Anyway, I also have Bomber to read so I’ll see if he improves.
Chatterton Square – EH Young
At the beginning I found this quite hard going – I don’t know if it was because I was reading it in short bursts before bed or if it was the dense paragraphs or both. It’s the story of two families living next door to each other in a Bristol-based square in the build up to the Second World War. In one house, Mrs Fraser, separated from her husband, lives with her five children and a lodger (the excellently named Miss Spanner) while her husband, who she still misses while also regretting the marriage, is in France. There are domestic incidents as the children grow and as Mrs Fraser grows feelings for a cousin and local farmer. Next door are the Blacketts (another story with Blacketts in a month – sheer coincidence) where we see very slowly the results of another failed marriage but one where Mr Blackett is unaware of the depth of his wife’s loathing for him and the ways in which she amuses herself by disguising it. In the hands of another writer it could have been a sparkling social comedy but in Young’s hands, it has moments of comedy but on the whole is more thoughtful. I ended up liking a lot more than I thought at the beginning, and I think it will benefit from a reread. She has some lovely sentences in there and on the whole the book examines a nuanced look at marriages that either shouldn’t have been, or had run their course, or as being a situation that just didn’t appeal – all three women defy convention in the marriage stakes and the book is a quiet appeal against the norms. There’s nothing scandalous, simply that for Mrs Blackett and Mrs Fraser, marriage is how they have had to make their way in the world but is not suited for either and has left them ‘making the best of it.’
Guard Your Daughters – Diana Tutton
Hmmm. This reads like a wannabe I Capture the Castle and was published a few years after that splendid book. It features a family of daughters with a father who’s a writer and a mother who has some kind of mental illness and so is delicate. They revel in being unconventional, though this really comes from them all being not formally educated and some of them pursuing artistic pastimes (piano, writing etc) rather than anyone doing something genuinely rebellious or unique. It’s all very charming as they try to make their way in the world, or meet men to marry or find something to do with their lives but… It was missing something. I can’t work out exactly what, but perhaps that it’s trying so hard and hasn’t quite succeeded. The ending also bothered me though I don’t want to go into why as it’s a spoiler.
My Husband Simon – Mollie Panter-Downes
Panter-Downes was on my list of people to cover this year as I read more 20th century stuff and I could hardly resist this one, being, as I am, married to someone called Simon. If there’s a theme to much of this month’s reading, it’s unsuitable marriages. The narrator, Nevis, knows Simon is not the best man for her but marries him anyway. She fancies the pants off him which has to account for much of their relationship as they spend a lot of time bickering or disagreeing with each other. Simon is not as nice as my Simon, and shows absolutely no interest in his wife’s career as a writer, despite her being a bestselling novelist before they meet. He and his family are also portrayed as the worst kind of middle class bores, dampening down on everything, embracing convention and dullness. It’s only when Nevis meets Marcus, an American editor sent by her publishers, that she starts to consider her situation and wonder if there’s something she can do to make everything better. Hardly anything happens but it’s very well done.
Moments of Pleasure
I started the month spring cleaning, even the spice rack and larder, and the paintwork and window frames. Dull, you may think, but it did look nice. I do wish they made things in smaller packets though. Not everyone needs a lot of fenugreek at any one time.
We had a short break by train to Rye, in Sussex, and not only did the trains run on time but the week was full of sunshine. I feel rather blessed, even though one of those things is really the bare minimum of what we should expect. We stayed at Whitehouse bakery which has rooms upstairs and each morning you are wake to the smell of freshly baked bread. The rooms are not serviced while you stay but they would leave a fresh loo roll, bottles of water and a paper bag of tea bags and Tunnock’s wafers outside the door each day. Sometimes I think all I need in life is for someone to drop me a paper bag of nice supplies outside my room to top me up. As well as looking around Rye, we took a trip on the miniature steam railway to Dungeness, an eerie landscape even in the sunshine. Empty beaches and steam railways are some of the things I love most in the world so it really was a lovely day.
And E and I went to Birmingham to watch a cinema showing of all six episodes of the BBC Pride and Prejudice 1995 adaptation. There were goodie bags, crafts and afternoon tea.
We also spent a day in Birmingham watching the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in a cinema, with goodie bags, crafts and afternoon tea. Still the best.
Susan E Barsby 