regshoe

Ancestors by Alice Roberts (2021). Recommended by verecunda on Tumblr, this book has two strands: 1) the prehistory of Britain, explored through case studies of burials from different eras, from Neanderthals to the beginning of the Roman period and 2) the history and context of archaeology as a science, both its past and the new methods and knowledge now being brought to it via genomic studies. The book doesn't go as far in the latter as Roberts apparently wanted it to—she seems to have started it with the intention of including the results from a cutting-edge piece of research which was then put on hold during the pandemic, and she went ahead with the book including what she could rather than putting it on hold too—and funnily enough I also just saw linked on Tumblr what may be a new piece of work in that direction, backing up and extending some of what Roberts says or speculates about the status of women in the Iron Age! Anyway, what is in the book is all fascinating. Roberts is very emphatic about how archaeology is often based on highly limited evidence, it's important to be appropriately cautious in drawing conclusions and We Can Never Be Sure; but the limited conclusions are interesting enough, as is the stuff about the nineteenth-century history of archaeology. Occasionally Roberts's explanations don't quite hang together, and I am still scratching my head over the bit where she talks about how amazingly tall this one ancient man's skeleton is and then reveals his actual height was calculated at 5'6". But on the whole, very much worth reading.

Revelations of a Lady Detective by William Stephens Hayward (1864). Found while browsing at the library, this is an early detective story, and one of the very earliest to feature a female detective character, rather in the Victorian penny dreadful/sensation tradition. The prose is kind of laughably bad over-dramatic Victorian, fun at first but annoying after a while, and the plots are a continual parade of period-typical stereotypes which also got pretty annoying, so it's kind of surprising how little sexism there is in the portrayal of the main character. She's a thirty-something widow who becomes a detective to support herself, and is suitably intrepid and adventurous. Overall, this is of some literary/historical interest and has its fun moments, but not really recommended for itself.

A Schoolgirl Adventurer: A Story of the '45 by Dorothea Moore (1927). I love Jacobite adventure novels and girls' school stories, so how about this: a Jacobite adventure novel in the girls' school story tradition! I say in the tradition, because it's not actually a school story—it opens in a school setting, with the sixteen-year-old heroine's school in Preston being evacuated ahead of the Jacobite army's anticipated arrival, but quickly leaves the school behind to follow her adventures as she of course meets the Jacobites and gets involved in an adventure plot. This plot is historically dodgy on a few accounts—what's a high-ranking English Jacobite doing apparently having been with the army since before they left Scotland?; the later events involve the historical Jacobite Lord Pitsligo and don't appear to have anything to do with what actually happened to him after Culloden—besides requiring BPC and other Jacobite leaders to be rather foolish in refusing to believe the main characters when they accuse someone who's very obviously a spy of being a spy (of course there was one real spy who may have been an important influence on the fate of the Jacobites at just this point in history, but Moore says nothing about him). But Moore's adventure-novel style is so much fun, and the heroine Alethea so likeable in her headstrong adventurousness, that it's enjoyable anyway! There are Friendship and Honour, ingenious rescues from dastardly villains, pluck, clever plans, disguises and a first-rate secret passage hidden behind a portrait in the hero's dad's house. There is a rather perfunctory obligatory het ending, which is easily ignored because for most of the book Alethea's relationship with the hero is completely platonic and she's obsessed with another girl (the innocent daughter of the villainous Whig family who drive much of the plot: at first Alethea hears about her at second hand and is immensely curious to know everything about her; later they meet and immedidately become BFFs, going around holding hands and all). This book is also notable for being not only a Jacobite novel but a '45 novel set entirely in England with English main characters, though I think it doesn't really make as much of Lancashire as it could have done.

ETA: I've taken the opportunity to update and reorganise the Jacobite fiction list on the website, which is now ordered by date rather than alphabetically—I like how this gives a sense of the development of the genre over time. There are still frustratingly many books on there that I can't get hold of, especially the later, still in copyright ones—I count four books I haven't yet read but could and twelve I can't find, out of 41 total.

Hornblower in the West Indies (1957; titled Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies in the US, and I think this is one case where I like the American title better; yes, remind us he's an admiral now! I bet he's miserable about it!) is the latest-set Hornblower book, and the second-to-last (complete) book in publication order. I have nearly finished the series! It's 1821, and after years of peacetime boredom following the battle of Waterloo Hornblower has been appointed commander-in-chief of His Majesty's squadron in the West Indies, which leads him into various adventures: like some of the previous books this is a collection of loosely-linked stories rather than a continuous novel. Somewhat scattered thoughts, then...

( Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat. )

I have written almost nothing since the beginning of this year, and really my writing has been very wobbly for a couple of years. But there was one draft I've wanted to get back to, and I am now getting back to it! It's the Kidnapped genderswap femslash AU, and while I can't say how good the execution is I do think it's a pretty good concept, and it would have been a shame to let it sit in the drawer indefinitely, so here we go.

The original is about 25k words and I'm now ~8k into a new redraft. I've just got to the first of a couple of parts that want moderately substantial reworking. It's going all right. I think if I keep up this pace I can have it finished before Yuletide, and that'd be nice. Well, we'll see.

I have a few other vague ideas for things I'd like to write in future; not sure yet whether I'll move on to those later, but this is a good start.

Cross-post from Tumblr here, where I was tagged by verecunda. :)

The last book I read: Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver. An interesting book, not sure it totally works but a lot of good stuff in there.

A book I’d recommend: I don't hear much about Naomi Mitchison round here, and I think more people should read her. 'What if Rosemary Sutcliff was a Scottish socialist?' would be far too over-simplified a way to put it; Mitchison is absurd in both prolificness and range and so far everything I've tried from her has succeeded at something different. I started with Travel Light, a fantasy sort-of fairytale deconstruction, and would recommend you do so too.

A book I couldn’t put down: This does not happen to me very often! The first time I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was a memorable exception.

A book I’ve read twice or more: I have read The Longest Journey five times and find something new to love about it every time. ♥

A book on my TBR: *checks TBR* ...Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin has been on there for a while, because I wanted to find out what Raffles and/or Hornung and/or Wilde meant by that multi-layered reference. Next time I want a nice old brick, maybe.

A book I’ve put down: I don't do this very often either! But my last DNF was not that long ago, and it was Fen, Bog & Swamp by Annie Proulx. An ecological-political history of wetlands by the author of 'Brokeback Mountain' sounded so promising! But it was sloppy, which I really can't tolerate in non-fiction (and because it was non-fiction there wasn't the 'but I want to find out what happens' factor, which often keeps me reading fiction even when it's not very good). Maybe one day I will read 'Brokeback Mountain' and see if she's better at fiction.

A book on my wishlist: Is that different to my TBR? Or is it more a book I specifically want to acquire a copy of? In that case, the edition of Kidnapped with illustrations by Lynd Ward, because I love that Alan so much.

A favourite book from childhood: The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series by Michelle Paver. I was obsessed with the detailed and vivid Stone Age wildwood setting (and glad that the would-be canon het couple never explicitly happened).

A book I’d give to a friend: Well, that would depend on what the friend's tastes are!... maybe I would go back to my rec from above and choose the Mitchison I thought best suited the friend's tastes, because she can suit such a wide range of them.

A book of poetry or lyrics I own: I don't think I actually own any books of poetry, embarrassingly enough. I suppose the long fragments of narrative poems in the History of Middle-earth come closest.

A non-fiction book I own: On the other hand I own lots of non-fiction books. King of Dust by Alex Woodcock, about Romanesque architecture in West Country churches, is a recent very good example in a subject outside my usual territory.

What I’m planning on reading next: I've just started Micah Clarke by Arthur Conan Doyle (thank you, chiropteracupola). After that, I have Rachel Ray by Anthony Trollope and Murder before Evensong by Richard Coles on order from the library, so I suppose one of those!

Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail by Suzanne J. Stark (1996). Very interesting exploration of the roles of women in and around the Royal Navy during the Age of Sail, showing the all-male environment portrayed by certain authors of fiction to be somewhat inaccurate. Stark looks at three distinct groups of women on ships: 1) sex workers who went in a body aboard ships in port in a somewhat-organised way (to avoid the men having to go on shore where they might desert, of course), 2) wives of warrant officers and other 'career' sailors (as opposed to random pressed men), who routinely accompanied their husbands on voyages despite their presence being officially unacknowledged by the authorities and of course 3) cross-dressing sailors who enlisted as crew in their own right. This is all very interesting and I recommend the book to anyone wanting to learn more about the subject. I enjoyed Stark's scepticism about the supposed male love interests of female sailors; as she points out, her own research shows that the 'following her love to sea' trope found in folk songs and (for instance) Hannah Snell's autobiography hardly makes sense when sailors' wives could and often did do so openly. She concludes that Snell probably wasn't married at all before she enlisted (though it does seem to be fairly certain that she married later in life), and also doubts the supposed post-naval-career marriage of the shipwright Mary Lacy/William Chandler. I am also delighted by the illustration from a broadside ballad about a female sailor which Stark uses for a cover image.

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (2004). This novel, set in the 1980s, follows a young gay Oxford graduate who becomes attached to the family of a Conservative MP, having fallen in hopelessly-unrequited love with the MP's son at college and then becoming a lodger in their London house. Much about the world of rich, posh Conservatives during the Thatcher years follows—the book opens immediately after the 1983 election and that of 1987 also features prominently—as well as about the main character Nick's love life in the world of gay men in the 1980s. The prose is beautiful in itself and greatly, and believably, concerned with the idea of beauty, and Hollinghurst has an excellent eye for details of buildings, interiors and people; there's not nearly as much of an air of glamour as there might have been in a book with this premise, but perhaps it's just that the characters are portrayed realistically enough to be realistically off-putting. I was frustrated because I didn't like any of the main characters very much (except for Leo, Nick's first boyfriend who disappears after a time-skip and is then not mentioned for hundreds more pages, and Catherine, the understandably mentally-troubled daughter of the MP who befriends Nick and has a difficult relationship with her family), found the combination of Nick's detached emotional perspective and bad priorites very difficult to get on with, and spent much of the book kind of wondering what the point was. There's also a lot of Henry James in it—studying his writing is what Nick is nominally doing for much of the plot—and I have read one novel by James and wasn't impressed, so I didn't find that very interesting or sympathetic either. The ending is more dramatic than I was expecting, but also not terribly surprising: the AIDS element of it is well-foreshadowed and as for the other stuff, well, Nick, what were you expecting? Of course they're going to drop you as soon as it becomes inconvenient to keep you around! They're posh Tories, they're not good people! Why was any of this worth doing? I still don't really think I get that, and much of my feeling at the end is I would rather read a novel about Rosemary and Gemma. Also notable for a detailed multi-page description of welly-whanging (the MP trying to be relatable to his rural Midland constituents), and for using a real Oxford college (Worcester) as the backstory setting, which is an unusual thing to do, perhaps especially combined with a specific timeline.

The Right St John's by Christine Chaundler (1920). School story recommend by girls' school story expert edwardianspinsteraunt for being particularly femslashy. It is that! I enjoyed it for the bits of femslashiness and also for the interesting light thrown on social aspects of the history of girls' education—the plot involves a heroine who's previously gone to a large, 'Modern' day school starting at a small old-fashioned boarding school and reforming its ways along with an energetic new headmistress—but it was all a bit too improbable to take very seriously and there isn't as much character or relationship substance as I want from this sort of thing. Possibly I might have taken a bit longer to guess the big twist if Chaundler had chosen a different title. Also notable for some of the earliest uses of 'OK' I've seen in fiction.

First of all, important book news via Tumblr: Susanna Clarke's 'The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City' is being published properly in October!

The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott (1819). This book is set in Scotland around the turn of the eighteenth century—Scott actually changed his mind between editions about whether it's before or after the Act of Union, and the Oxford World's Classics edition I read contains a lot of interesting notes about the revisions he made to reflect the change, among other things—and while it only tangentially involves actual Jacobitism, the view it takes of the pattern of history more generally is familiar from the author of Waverley. The proud, ancient family of Ravenswood have come down in the world, ruined at last by an astute, politically ambitious and upwardly-mobile lawyer who buys their grand old house when they're forced to sell it; Edgar Ravenswood, the last heir of the family, then goes and falls in love with the lawyer's daughter, and the romance is about as doomed as you might expect. I found it a frustrating book because it never really fully commits to the drama of its premise: there are some impressive and significant moments, but the narrative keeps pulling back from them to wander off into episodes of farcical comedy, and throughout Scott's ambivalence about how Wrong but Wromantic the Wravenwoods are seems to keep him from making the most of the Ancient Significant Doom that naturally attaches to them. It does at least avoid the boring protagonist problem that Scott otherwise often has. Also there are actual witches, possibly?—among other instances of bad ideas about women.

Wood Leighton by Mary Howitt (1836). But if it hadn't been for the date on the copyright page and a brief reference to the coming of the railways, I would never have guessed 1836; in style, structure and sensibilities this book feels completely eighteenth-century, never mind that most of the plot (in the bit of the book that has one) takes place then. It's a very odd book structurally: the premise is that the unnamed narrator and her family move to the small Derbyshire town of Wood Leighton when they inherit a house there from a distant relation, and she then describes the town, its inhabitats, the new friends she makes there, the surrounding country scenery &c. &c.; the thing is, this includes relating a couple of local stories told to her by those new friends, and one of those stories takes up about three-quarters of the book, so the overall effect is a dramatic eighteenth-century Gothic novel that just happens to be bookended by a few chapters describing a nearby town fifty-odd years later. (The plot of the novel isn't directly relevant to the descriptive parts, or even set actually in the same place.) Anyway, I did enjoy both parts: the Gothic novel is lots of dramatic fun (although frustratingly vague: why do we never find out anything about the origin of that curse??) and the descriptions are lovely, especially in the specificity of their natural history towards the end. The author is most famous for the poem that begins 'Won't you walk into my parlour, said the spider to the fly...', which must be one of the most referenced things in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction, and it was interesting to learn a bit more about its origin! I must also admire Howitt for arguing, against the usual literary convention, that actually the Midlands are the most quintessentially English of all.

I am slowly making my way through most of the classic boarding school books, and Stalky & Co. (it's complicated*), after happening to find it in a bookshop, was therefore next on the list.

I read the Oxford World's Classics edition with an introduction by Isabel Quigley, who I've just realised is the author of that book on school stories that phantomtomato reviewed a while ago, and it seems odd to me that Quigley would choose to write a whole book about the school story genre because the impression one gets from this introduction is that she thinks the genre was a lot of trash written exclusively by unimaginative hacks until it was uniquely elevated by Kipling's peerless genius. Stalky & Co. is Not Like Other School Stories, says Quigley. Well, she's kind of right, I think. Certainly Kipling is irreverent and contemptuous about elements of school tradition which other stories tend to respect (I was genuinely shocked that the main characters sympathetically find cricket boring and get out of watching matches whenever they can); certainly he values cunning (right there in the title: the main character gets his nickname from a piece of school slang meaning 'clever, well-considered and wily, as applied to plans of action') and disrespect for official rules more highly than the usual school ethos tends to; and certainly the level of violence and cruelty portrayed and celebrated in this book rises above even the eyebrow-raising standard of late Victorian public schools. But are they that different, really? Kipling thinks he and Stalky are daring rebels against stuffy conservative authority, but most of his values are the same conventionally masculine Victorian ones—courage, honour, a sense of fair play, 'manliness', being really racist, &c.—that the stuffy conservative authority of the time approves of. Many of the stories revolve around Stalky and his friends getting dramatically violent revenge on teachers, but there is definitely also a sense that this is all part of how the system is supposed to work in the end and to some extent the teachers are kind of in on it. Quigley's view that the book is uniquely concerned with school as a preparation for life is also IMO wrong; The Hill is, in a more conventional way, doing exactly the same thing vis-a-vis education of the rulers of Empire.

What else, then? The school portrayed is based very closely on Kipling's own school, the United Services College, which was not a traditional public school but a recently-founded institution specialising in the education of boys destined for the army; this does make for some interesting differences in culture but I was also surprised by how overtly military the school isn't and how little the curriculum (lots of classics, a spot of maths and English literature, games, no actual military training apart from that one time and it was a big mistake) seems to differ from those portrayed in the more typical public school stories. A couple of the stories contain longer and more detailed accounts of what actually goes on in lessons than school stories tend to, which was interesting and enjoyable. Also interesting were the multiple more-or-less direct (as in, you need to understand period euphemisms but the euphemisms are undeniably being used meaningly) references to homosexuality, albeit mostly in the context of it apparently not existing at this school, and indeed the book isn't particularly slashy. Kipling writes with that kind of style which is extremely dense in references, allusions and specific subcultural slang (the OWC edition has 28 pages of explanatory notes in small type, only some of which are patronisingly unnecessary) and never says a thing directly if it can be said sideways, which is an absolute delight to read when you're in sympathy with the author and gets annoying fast if you're not, and thus I spent the book bouncing between the two extremes depending on how interesting/repulsive the particular story was.** As in Puck of Pook's Hill the stories are interspered with poems, relevant to and commenting upon the stories but not directly about them; once again the poems are very good, technically if not morally, and I really liked this structure. More authors should do that!

Also, I wondered what was going on with the convention of spellings like M‘Turk (one of the main characters here), and the conclusion seems to be that it's a way of approximating the more conventional abbreviation M^c when you haven't actually got a superscript C among your printing equipment—thus explaining what otherwise looks like a puzzlingly backwards apostrophe, so there you go.


*Originally a series of stories published in magazines from 1897-99, after which all but one of them were collected and published in book form; Kipling wrote four more stories between 1917 and 1929, after which a book including all the stories was published, and that's the version I read. Books published in 1929 have only recently come out of US copyright, so e.g. the version on Gutenberg is the incomplete 1899 edition.

**E. W. Hornung's prose does the same thing in a somewhat toned-down way and I can well believe that Kipling was an influence on him, albeit not particularly on Fathers of Men (and of course they disagree extremely about cricket). Of course Hornung titled a novel after a poem by Kipling, though I suspect Kipling wouldn't have allowed that the thousandth person could be a woman, and this is perhaps one of the important differences between them.

Gilbert White by Richard Mabey (1986). A biography of the deservedly famous eighteenth-century naturalist and writer, written by a respected modern nature writer several of whose books I've enjoyed in the past, so I had to pick this up. Unfortunately it's a bit wanting as history; Mabey has a lot of interesting things to say about nature but he's not a historian and perhaps it shows. Certainly the evidence is lacking in places, but that's no excuse for so many groundless declarations of what White 'must have' thought or felt about something. Anyway, I did find the information interesting. The book gives a nice sense of White's social and family surroundings and the everyday setting of his existence, life and writing, and complicates some of the 'obvious' facts about him and The Natural History of Selborne (his aversion to travel was real but has been exaggerated; his clerical career was just a bit more involved than 'curate of Selborne'; the structure of the book as a series of letters, while based on real letters he did write to Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington, is fairly substantially fake). I also enjoyed the little bit of eighteenth-century Oxford college drama. Anyway, I can't really recommend this book, but I will take the opportunity to say if you haven't read The Natural History of Selborne then you really should.

A Room above a Shop by Anthony Shapland (2025). I struggle to get on with literary prose. I do like prose for its own sake; I read fiction first for the story, but language certainly isn't just a vehicle for telling the story and beautiful, elegant prose can add a lot to a book and indeed to a story; but I don't want to feel like the author is putting prose ahead of telling the story or—especially—that I'm having to work to get to the story through the prose. So I'm not sure how to feel about this book. The story is that of a relationship between two men, known only by their initials M and B, in the Welsh Valleys in the 1980s; M owns the local ironmonger's shop, he gives B a job there, they live together in the single room above the shop—hence the title—which becomes a sort of symbolic image of the private relationship they have to keep secret from the world to which they're simply colleagues. It is very much a literary book, and I got annoyed with the prose, which I found difficult to interpret at points (a flexible approach to sentence construction in which 'sentences' don't necessarily have a verb, a habit of using nouns and adjectives as verbs and an aversion to the definite and indefinite articles (by which one might otherwise identify which words are nouns) are not a good combination for making it easy to interpret sentence structure). But the style—in how spare it is and how carefully-constructed, if not in how ungrammatical—creates an impression, and it's memorable, and I can nevertheless see that at least some things about it are good, thoughtful choices that serve the story rather than pointlessly obscuring it, and the book wouldn't be as effective a book as it is if it was written in the more straightforward way I prefer. The spareness and fluidity of the prose suit the simplicity and significance of the events and emotions. Even that rather silly gimmick where the characters don't have proper names kind of emphasises the sense of hiddenness, the indirectness and intimacy at the same time with which we readers much approach the characters, the precariousness, uncertainty and specificity together. I also enjoyed the way Shapland sprinkles information about dates and time throughout the story rather than just giving us simple numbers, which was pleasing to my fandom timeline-constructing brain. I am not sure about the ending, but again, the way it's presented works.

The Story of a Governess by Margaret Oliphant (1891). I had a look through Oliphant's long bibliography for interesting titles and chose this—what'll she do with that favourite nineteenth-century theme, I thought? Well, the novel starts out sounding as though it's going to be a comic subversion of the 'poor oppressed governess' story, and I suppose the whole thing kind of is a parody of Jane Eyre in a sense, but what it eventually turns out to be is half romantic drama and half attempt at a sensation novel, and unfortunately the overall effect of both sides is that it doesn't work and it's really annoying. And the ending not only involves the heroine getting married again; not only does so in a way that's uncomfortably reminiscent of the worst aspect of Miss Marjoribanks; but comparing the two, one begins to get the impression that what Oliphant turns to when she's not writing the very good endings she's sometimes capable of is not only not good but really quite ugly indeed.

So this leaves me with the question, what next? I've read five of Oliphant's novels now; two of them are among the best Victorian novels I've ever read; one is very good; one is about two-thirds of a brilliant book that badly lets itself down towards the end; and one is kind of terrible. And she has, as I say, a long bibliography: how many more books like this am I willing to risk in the hope of finding another Kirsteen??

The Wrong Box by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne (1889). This novel, co-written by RLS and his stepson, is a rather macabre comedy of errors and unfortunately I find that style of heavily misunderstanding-based humour and plotting stressful rather than funny, so I didn't enjoy it very much. (It also had me repeatedly thinking, surely that's as much contrived coincidence as you need to make the plot work?... No, evidently not, here's another one...) But on the level of sentences and dialogue it's very well-constructed and I admired that. As I noted of The Dynamiter (co-written by Fanny), it doesn't show obvious signs of having two different authors, and if the style and subject are rather different from RLS's other books it's not clear how much of that was due to Osbourne's style and how much was RLS varying things as he was wont to do.


They Were Defeated by Rose Macaulay (1932). I can remember the title of this book catching my eye years ago, but I didn't get round to reading it until I recently found a copy in a second-hand bookshop with a cover design immediately making clear that it's set in the 1640s in Cambridge. That sounds interesting, thought I, and the good thing about the Civil War is that you can call your book They Were Defeated without giving away which side you're writing about, because do you stop in 1649 or keep going to 1660? In fact it's more complicated than that: the book is set in 1640-41 and only reaches the actual war briefly in the epilogue, the title is not a straightforward reference to one side or the other and the average main character's viewpoint is that the Puritans in Parliament are worse than the King but the King is hardly worthy of ardent loyalty either. It is a strange book and has several aspects worth discussing, so I'll take it in points:

1) Macaulay really commits to the use of historical language in dialogue. She warns the reader of this in a prefaratory note and apologises for any inaccuracies; I don't know the period well enough to comment on how accurate it really is, but it's certainly believable and doesn't feel forced or unnatural. Occasionally there are letters written by the characters which—between unfamiliar language use and abbreviations and period-typical bad spelling—get genuinely difficult to read, and I say that while having some experience of reading seventeenth-century letters and diaries. I'm impressed.

2) Barbara Pym might have liked this book, because it has a lot of her seventeenth-century poets in it. The book is divided into three parts, each of which has a poetic epigraph whose author appears as a major character, with the most major being Robert Herrick. (Herrick's Wikipedia page notes that he wrote a lot of love poems addressed to women, but that he was a lifelong bachelor and it's generally supposed that these women were fictional; Macaulay conjectures that they were mostly fictional but one of them was real, while also giving a definite impression that Herrick is in love with the recently-deceased Ben Jonson.) Anyway, I'm not a huge poetry fan but it was an interesting aspect of history to see in a book.

3) More relevant to my interests was the discussion of contemporary theological and political controversies: it's very much a book set in the lead-up to the Civil War and the details of King and Parliament, Puritans and Papists and Arminians and Calvinists and what all the different factions are doing and arguing about and I found it all terribly interesting. For an author who's such a stickler for historical accuracy in language I did find the repeated mentions of witch-burning rather odd, and I wondered about the plausibility of one main character's openly-avowed atheism and absolute disbelief in the supernatural, especially its being regarded by the other characters as regrettable and embarrassing in one's friend/father/associate but no worse.

4) About three-quarters of the way through, the book (somewhat suddenly, but not without foreshadowing) plunges into one of the worst het romances I have ever encountered in fiction. Straight up on the shelf that contains Jamaica Inn, The Bostonians and that one Georgette Heyer book I tried to read before running away in horror. I am not known as the world's greatest fan of Lucy Honeychurch/George Emerson, but if I wanted a reminder that 'I want you to have your own thoughts, even when I hold you in my arms' really was a pretty good and important thing for someone's male love interest to say, I clearly only had to read this. Mitigating things slightly, this isn't a romance novel, there's plenty of other interesting stuff in the book and the author is partially (though certainly not fully or with good priorities) aware that it's not a good thing. Aggravating things quite a lot, the plotline is resolved through a ridiculous melodramatic ending.

So what do I make of it on the whole? I don't know. It's a weird one. A deeply flawed book that ultimately doesn't work in saying what it wants to say, but possibly worth reading for the stuff you get along the way.


Ashenden; Or, The British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham (1927). I recently bought an omnibus of some of Maugham's lesser-known novels, and also Of Human Bondage has been on my list of things I really ought to read for a little while, and so naturally I next decided to pick up a book that's neither Of Human Bondage nor in the omnibus. Ashenden is a collection of short stories about a writer who becomes a secret agent during the First World War, closely based on the author's own experiences doing the same thing. It opens with a preface in which Maugham explains and defends his fictionalisation process: real life, and especially the real life of a spy, doesn't have the neat plots, full explanations of what happened and nicely-tied-up loose ends desirable in fiction, so some editing is necessary. There follow a series of stories about Ashenden's time as a spy in Switzerland, Russia and elsewhere, which are remarkably lacking in nicely-tied-up loose ends, neat plots and full explanations of what happened given that introduction. I suppose they're still neater than the real events that inspired them, but the endings definitely incline towards ironic twists and abrupt revelations of inefficacy and sometimes of tragedy that leave a lot of questions unanswered. Thrilling and dramatic spy stories these are not; the general mood is of half-resigned, half-amused cynicism about both the humorous, absurd little details of the spy's life and the horrific larger events in which he takes part (and Ashenden is complicit in some pretty bad actions over the course of the book). It would make an interesting comparison with John le Carré later in the century, probably. I didn't find the prose as enjoyably precise as in Cakes and Ale, there are a lot of comma splices, which I don't particularly remember in that book.