regshoe

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.

but 'The Field of Philippi'... 'where Caesar came to an end'... the Ides of March.

(Of course it wasn't; the battle of Philippi was what happened after Julius Caesar's assassination, and the poetical Bunny is probably not predicting his own doom. But I thought it was neat, all the same.)

Anyway, happy Ides!

Right then, here we go :D

The Closest of All (5960 words) by regshoe
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's - Talbot Baines Reed
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Oliver Greenfield/Horace Wraysford
Characters: Stephen Greenfield, Horace Wraysford, Oliver Greenfield
Additional Tags: POV Outsider, 5+1 Things, Siblings
Summary:

Oliver, Wraysford and Stephen, over months and years.

(Or, five times Stephen was oblivious and one time he wasn't.)

I've just been checking my reading log, which confirms that I read five of E. M. Forster's six novels for the first time over the course of 2015*; I never got round to the sixth, I think partly because I just didn't want it to be over!, and also partly because I thought I would probably find the subject matter unappealing. In that I was right, but it is a very good book, and of course I'm glad I've read it.

( Read more... )

*Complete Forster-reading stats to date:
A Room with a View: read twice, first in ~February 2015
Howards End: read four times, first in ~March 2015
The Longest Journey: read five times, first in ~March 2015
Where Angels Fear to Tread: read twice, first in ~June 2015
Maurice: read twice, first in ~October 2015
The Machine Stops: read once, ~January 2016
The Obelisk and Other Stories: read once, ~March 2016
Arctic Summer and Other Fiction: read once, June-September 2025
A Passage to India: read once, January 2026

Trying something a bit different for the annual Sutcliff this time.

We Lived in Drumfyvie (1975) is a series of short stories about the history of a fictional Scottish town (nothing to do with the real Fyvie in Aberdeenshire, setting of my favourite ballad), from its creation as a burgh by David I in the twelfth century to Victoria's Diamond Jubilee at the end of the nineteenth.

( God, it's exhausting being Scottish, in't it? )

Having read the book last Yuletide, I was delighted to match this year to kanna_ophelia on The School on the Moor, a really excellently femslashy girls' boarding school novel. This first fic was an idea I'd had floating around for a while, but which was improved by taking inspiration from kanna_ophelia's request and adding more pining:

The Applecleave Church Plate and Other Treasures (1944 words) by regshoe
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The School on the Moor - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Tabitha "Toby" Barrett/Dorinda Earle
Characters: Tabitha "Toby" Barrett, Dorinda Earle, Algernon Barrett
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Getting Together
Summary:

Another trip to the Blue Tor hut-circle.

And then I wrote another, completely new fic; I really wanted to do something with the Dartmoor setting, and dramatic schoolgirl adventures seemed a promising way to use it:

These Wild Affronting Hills (5686 words) by regshoe
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The School on the Moor - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Tabitha "Toby" Barrett/Dorinda Earle
Characters: Tabitha "Toby" Barrett, Dorinda Earle, Elfrida "Elfie" Rossall
Additional Tags: Rescue, Getting Together, Dartmoor
Summary:

Elfie Rossall runs into danger on the moor, and it's up to Toby and Dorinda to rescue her—together.

This is the eighth Hornblower novel in publication order and the fourth in internal chronological order; the first-published novel The Happy Return being the fifth in the chronology, the series has now come full circle, as becomes increasingly clear towards the end of this book.

( With all the will in the world, diving for dear life, when we could be diving for pearls )

Forester then went and messed things up by writing two more novels (and half of a third) totally out of order, but never mind, I'll see what I think of those next.

[DVD commentary meme]

For phantomtomato, a DVD commentary of my The Longest Journey fic 'The Circle at the Centre'.

( I have tried not to be too silly with this one... )

A little while ago sanguinity was posting about the old fandom tradition of fic writers doing 'DVD commentaries' for fics—i.e. a commentary about the process of writing the fic, the thought behind particular lines or writing choices, the research done, etc. etc.—and how people don't do them often these days. And I remembered enjoying DVD commentaries in the past and thought, that sounds fun, I'd like to take part in reviving this thing!

So here we go, and I'm making it a meme: choose one of my fics—not the FotH, TWN or Flemington ones or any podfic, please, but anything else is fair game; that link is filtered accordingly—and I will write you a DVD commentary on it.

And if you would like to do this with your own fics or other fanworks, you are encouraged to do so. :)