regshoe

Aargh, Yuletide nominations. My plan this year is to go properly obscure, and so I've just nominated play!Kidnapped, my old standby A Glass of Blessings and one obscure non-Raffles Hornung book. But I think I've never got used to being able to nominate five fandoms, or at least I have two slots free that I can't decide on. Is anyone else planning to nom book!Kidnapped or Jill?—if not I might use them on those two. Otherwise, maybe another obscure non-Raffles Hornung book...?

Yuletide noms tomorrow! \o/


Tension by E. M. Delafield (1920). Found while browsing at the library, in the British Library Women Writers Series edition, which I quite like—they're nicely designed and have a little timeline of relevant contemporary historical events in the front, which is fun and useful. In this case the timeline included the debate on marriage and 'free love', divorce law, obscenity law, understanding and treatment of alcoholism and women in office jobs. The book is set in and around a provincial secretarial college, patronised by an upper-class couple, the Rossiters. A new teacher, Pauline Marchrose, is hired at the college, but Lady Rossiter happens to know about a scandalous (in Lady Rossiter's opinion) secret from Miss Marchrose's past; the result of this and other complications, and the ultimate focus of the book, is the atmosphere of unbearable social 'tension' referred to in the title and its consequences. Lady Rossiter is so acute a portrayal of a particular kind of sanctimonious, hypocritical, officious complete lack of self-awareness that she gets really quite unpleasant to read about, which I suppose is a compliment to Delafield's powers as a writer but which did not make the book exactly an enjoyable read! I also thought the shift re. Miss Marchrose from 'scandalous secret in her past' to 'potentially-impending scandalous behaviour in the present' didn't greatly work narratively; it would have been a stronger story if all the 'tension' was focussed on one thing, or at least two things more closely linked together. However, the ending somewhat unexpectedly turns into a very affecting portrayal of the mess 'tension', gossip and people sticking their nose into what's not their business can cause in clashing with painful personal feelings and experiences, and I liked it (though the twist right at the end perhaps less so). Overall not the strongest Delafield I've read, but has its points.

Now, a tangential thing—this book is not the first time I've seen Robert Louis Stevenson referred to in another book as a ~literary author, a symbol of how sophisticated and cultured the characters reading him are or think they are. Obviously I am not at all surprised at anyone admiring RLS, he is really rather good, but I am a bit surprised at his apparently being widely regarded as high culture, when so much of what he wrote was adventure stories and children's books. The references seem to be more to his poetry and non-fiction, but even then surely you'd think people would clarify when Treasure Island and Kidnapped &c. were so popular and prominent amongst his works?


Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (1956). A very good book which I wanted to like more than I did, but I don't have strong enough feelings about it to be able to say very much. It is a beautifully-written, well-constructed tragedy (I did especially like the way it's structured as the narrator's reminiscences over the course of a single night, with certain important facts about the ending being revealed early on and then gradually more explanation of how we get there) and portrayal of how people get into messed-up situations and treat each other badly under conditions of societal homophobia and poverty among other things, but I just didn't get attached enough to any of the characters to feel it properly. Also, I thought we'd moved past including this amount of untranslated French in novels by the 1950s.

(Tangent—I was just watching the Howard Holmes adaptation of GREE, which for unexplained reasons changes it to be about a French interpreter, and thinking surely that makes the plot not really work, because of how widely spoken French was among educated British people in the 1890s? Even if the villains couldn't speak a word of French themselves surely they would have been able to find someone they knew and could trust to keep quiet rather than taking the risk of pulling in a random professional interpreter who might cause problems by having a conscience and telling Sherlock Holmes what was going on?)


Liza of Lambeth by W. Somerset Maugham (1897). Apparently I am a Maugham completist now, or at least I found an omnibus of several of his obscurer early novels in a charity shop a while ago and have now started reading it. This is his first, a short novel about a high-spirited girl from Lambeth who has an affair with a married man. Ordinary urban working-class life seems a fairly unusual subject for a 'literary' novel at this time (and the frank and on-page depiction of a miscarriage must be unusual), and Maugham was drawing from his own experiences of working in the London slums, but I didn't otherwise find a great deal in it. Just a lot of characters making terrible choices for no good reason? Also all the dialogue is written in phonetic Cockney, which was annoying.

Well, here it is!

A Share in the Action (22688 words) by regshoe
Chapters: 7/7
Fandom: Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: David Balfour/Alan Breck Stewart
Characters: David Balfour, Alan Breck Stewart
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Gender or Sex, Lesbians, Crossdressing, Fake Marriage, Getting Together
Summary:

Being Memoirs of the Adventures of Mistress Christian Balfour in the Year 1751: How she was Kidnapped, Cast away...

A Girls' Own Adventure. Or something.

Murder before Evensong by Richard Coles (2022). A churchy murder mystery set in a rural village in the 1980s; the protagonist and detective character Daniel Clement is the local rector, and the plot deals variously with the role of the church in the village, the relationship between the village and the local big house (still in private hands, with the family as important characters) and the community's history and especially its Second World War backstory. I enjoyed the setting and local drama and specificity of detail, as well as the portrayal of Daniel's faith and his views and experience as a priest. It did not work brilliantly well as a murder mystery, and I think this is because it takes itself either too seriously or not seriously enough. Perhaps a good murder mystery goes one way or the other—either embracing the sensation-novel drama and puzzle-solving and (without necessarily being totally non-serious) not putting too much emphasis on the realistic horror of murder, as e.g. The Red House Mystery or When the Wind Blows (see below), or it embraces the horror/thriller aspect and gets its entertainment value from that rather than from tropey fun, as e.g. And Then There Were None. This book tries to deal weightily with the meaning of multiple people being killed violently in this peaceful small community, but it doesn't take it far enough and the solution to the mystery is just too silly to bear that weight. I gather from philomytha's post about the rest of this series that Daniel turns out to be gay and in love with the main police character, Neil Vanloo; that's not yet quite text in this book, but there are hints, and for that reason I am considering continuing with the series. Hmmm.

Spoilery details:

I did not find the solution to the mystery quite as absurd as I think philomytha did. I actually guessed part of it (that Kath Sharman was Hervé's biological mother and was trying to stop people finding out the secret), and thought—apart perhaps from the plausibility of that being such a big secret only ~forty years later in a small community when it was apparently generally known about at the time—that this wasn't a hugely silly motive; so then I thought perhaps that was going to be the red herring and the real solution would be some complete nonsense about the toilet controversy. Well, then it turned out to be actually both, as well as some more stuff about secret WWII spy operative goings-on. I can appreciate the point about, sometimes when people are fighting viciously over something that seems completely trivial there are actually serious personal reasons for their strong feelings about the completely trivial thing—and perhaps that links back to the point about whether this needed to be a murder mystery: murder as an extreme and therefore an emphatic way of making that point in the story?—but, yeah, it is just a bit silly.

Rachel Ray by Anthony Trollope (1863). This book is set in a small town in Devon and deals with a) the conflict between the town's established brewer and a newcomer, Luke Rowan, who wants to reform the beer business by the shocking innovation of making good beer instead of bad; b) the love story between Luke and local girl Rachel Ray, which is threatened by the strict Evangelical morality imposed on Rachel by her older sister and c) Anthony Trollope mocking Evangelicals. He had some nerve! As P. D. Edwards explains in the introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition, the book was actually originally planned for serialisation in an Evangelical magazine, until the editor, having read the first two-thirds or so, wrote to Trollope going (paraphrased), 'Um, why do you expect us to publish this when the whole thing is just you caricaturing us in as mean a way as possible? Man, I thought you were better than that,' and politely rejecting the novel. Far be it from me to defend low-church Anglicans, and certainly the morality criticised here is real and deserves the criticism, but it doesn't deserve the mean-spirited stereotyping, and Trollope is capable of better than that—it's something I especially liked about Barsetshire! Not content with only intra-religious prejudice, what would otherwise have been an entertaining bit of nineteenth-century election drama (post-Reform Act but very much pre-secret ballot) is rather spoilt by antisemitism when one of the candidates is a rich Jewish Londoner. And the love story is not good, Luke being the perpetual pushy imperious straight man; this was less surprising, Trollope's romances never having been the strong point of his books, but it's worse when more of the book is about it (also the criticism of Evangelical morality would have been much stronger if the central relationship triumphantly rejecting it had been, like, actually worth anything). I'm making it sound like I hated the book, and I didn't! The detailed provincial setting is great, and Trollope's narrative voice is often genuinely funny. But it was a bit of a let-down.


The Woman of Colour (1808; the author published anonymously and, unlike some other authors of this period who did so initially, their identity is not known to history). Epistolary novel about a mixed-race Jamaican woman, the daughter of a white plantation owner, who travels to England to marry her cousin in accordance with the oddly specific terms of her father's will. This is kind of an unusual subject for a book from 1808, and it was interesting to see a story focussing on a character type who sometimes turns up on the sidelines of other novels (e.g. Vanity Fair, not very sympathetically). But its most appealing feature is the protagonist, Olivia, who is a delight of a main character both when the story is dealing directly with race and slavery and the rest of the time: she's lively, very funny, understandably shaken by the weird situation she's in at the start and the rather eighteenth-century-novel drama she goes through after that, well able to stand up for herself against racist bullying by white characters. She also—in her relatively comfortable upper-class position—shows a strong sense of fellow-feeling and solidarity with black slaves back on the plantations (though her maidservant—the only servant-class black character in the book—is just a bit of an offensive stereotype), arguing with equal spirit for abolition, and the book must have been very topical!

I am not sure what to make of the ending.

On the one hand a woman being uninterested in an obvious potential love interest and getting to stick to that rejection and be happily single is extremely unusual, and I would have unreservedly loved it if the same ending had happened to a white heroine; on the other hand its very unusualness does make one suspect that perhaps the conventional romantic ending was avoided because it would have been unacceptable for that romance to be a mixed-race one. Hmmm.

When the Wind Blows by Cyril Hare (1949; published in the US as The Wind Blows Death). The third book in the Francis Pettigrew series; Pettigrew and his new wife Eleanor have settled down in a provincial city and become involved with the local amateur orchestral society, and that's where another shocking murder happens... This is another enjoyable twisty murder mystery, with the elegantly precise language and sense of humour that I liked about the previous books, although the plot is perhaps just a little bit on the silly side and the humour is slightly too cruel in its mockery of a self-important police detective. (Curiously, the Faded Page edition describes itself as 'an Inspector Mallet Mystery'; Mallet is mentioned by the other police characters but doesn't appear.) I was disappointed by how small Eleanor's role is, after liking her introduction in the previous book; though at one point Pettigrew realises that she must have known about a vital clue if only he'd thought to ask her, so perhaps he'll learn from his mistake and consult her sooner next time! There are disappointing elements of the stereotypical straight marriage in their portrayal too, and Marriage as a subject is a major theme throughout the book, with jealous husbands, divorce, affairs, literary references to famous fictional and historical marriages and ultimately the point of law behind the murder. This last made me laugh out loud on the bus when I got to it:

It is

the Deceased Wife's Sister question. I was aware of the nineteenth-century controversy about this and the eventual Act of 1907; I was not aware that after that Act became law it remained illegal for a man to marry his divorced wife's sister. Thus the murderers here are a couple who have been living as husband and wife for some years, when for inheritance reasons it suddenly becomes vitally necessary that they should be legally married—which they're not, because she happens to be the sister of his divorced ex-wife; the aim of the murder is to turn the divorced wife into a deceased wife and thus make the marriage legally permissible.

From Cabin 'Boys' to Captains: 250 Years of Women at Sea by Jo Stanley (2015). Very various history of the many different things women have done on ships, particularly outside the Royal Navy on cruise ships, cargo ships and so on. A lot of it is about the later half of the period, the recent feminist context in which women are openly working to do a wider range of jobs and get paid and treated properly, often recent enough that Stanley got her information by talking to the people involved. Interesting, as learning about parts of the world one doesn't often think about can be interesting, but there's not much on the earlier period I most wanted to find out about, and much of what there is comes from Suzanne Stark's book which I'd just read. (Also Stanley is oddly insistent on referring to crossdressing sailors as 'boys', as if many of them didn't pass successfully for/as adult men for years at a time—and it's not like she doesn't acknowledge and describe these cases, so I don't know what that was about.)

Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver (2019). A Gothic horror novel, of sorts, set in the Suffolk Fens in the Edwardian period. At the start of the book we learn, via a framing story taking place sixty years after the main events, of a horrible murder committed there by a hitherto-respectable local gentleman and witnessed only by his teenage daughter; we then go back in time and see events over the years leading up to the murder, via interspersed chapters of the daughter's third-person POV and the murderer's diary. As modern historical fiction goes it's good; it is hammering the message of Patriarchy Is Really Bad pretty hard but not as far as I could see unrealistically (though the handling of Ivy's character lets that down somewhat), and the diary sections in particular, barring a few lapses into modern vocabulary and sentence structure, were really a decent pastiche of actual Victwardian epistolary horror. I was increasingly irritated by the artificial drama of the prose, especially in the third-person sections; Paver is very fond of rather contrived dramatic chapter endings and of what you might call emphatic redundancy. She repeats the same information in a new sentence so you know it's really important.—which takes away from the power of what might sometimes have been a good single dramatic reveal. (I thought the repeated twists as to the identity of the intended victim(s) were especially weak, and the final twist right at the end was pathetic. Speaking of the former, I also thought it was rather obvious which pieces of information the opening framing story was carefully not giving us in order to preserve drama later on.) I do like a book that combines disparate influences in interesting ways, which this book does—fenland history and folklore, medieval mysticism and beliefs about demons, various pieces of the author's own family history and experiences—but, reading over her detailed explanation of them all in the afterword, it did strike me that she perhaps hadn't done enough fictionalising and recombining of them. (The medieval churchy bits in particular seem hardly to have been altered at all; why change one letter in a real saint's name and then repeat his story exactly as-is? Either make up a character properly or just use the real saint!) I was also very disappointed by

some spoilery details:

the way the eventual resolution of the story collapses almost all the supernatural elements down to nothing but patriarchal/religio-historical madness. Also, while we're doing spoilers, my mild-to-moderate dislike of the third-person prose got worse on the reveal near the end that it's intended to be Maud's own narrative; sure, it's the sixties now, but I don't believe a recluse with a 'cut-glass accent' raised and educated in a strict Edwardian household would use so many sentence fragments!

Hmm, I did like a lot about the book despite the weaknesses I'm complaining about here. It's just flawed and generally not very subtle.

Micah Clarke by Arthur Conan Doyle (1889). Hey, ACD, look! People ARE reading your non-Holmes historical fiction! :) Anyway, some people on Tumblr were talking about this adventure novel set during the Monmouth rebellion (a Protestant/Whig uprising against James II in the southwest of England in 1685) and ratuszarsenal said it was reminding him of Kidnapped, so of course I had to check it out. Narrated in first person by the title character talking to his grandchildren years later, the story follows Micah's decision to join the rising, the course it takes, various adventures he and his friends get into along the way and its eventual end. There are, loosely speaking, four main characters: Micah, a young man from Hampshire; Reuben Lockarby, his slightly bumbling BFF; Decimus Saxon, a morally dubious career mercenary who brings them the news of Monmouth's rising and then decides to join it; and Sir Gervas Jerome, a London fop fallen on hard times who also joins in for an adventure. I think this is one that wants thoughts in list form:

• Having a group rather than a pair of main characters means there isn't one single central relationship like in Kidnapped. There is one sequence between Micah and Saxon early on which strongly recalls Alan/Davie, but I don't think Saxon and Alan really have that much in common (Alan shocks Davie by having a moral code very different to his own; Saxon shocks Micah by not having much of one at all), and while his memory lingers in a significant way at the end, Saxon isn't as important to Micah personally as Alan is to Davie. Sir Gervas also has some of Alan's comical vanity, but not the rest of his personality! On the whole I liked the dynamics between the four main characters, if none of them really grabbed me. They're a good complementary set.
• There's not very much romance. Obviously Micah has married at some point in the time since the events he narrates, and he occasionally refers to 'your grandmother', but she's not a character in the story at all. Reuben falls in love with a side character and ultimately marries her, but it's mostly in the background.
• I knew very little about the Monmouth rebellion before reading this (he was an illegitimate son of Charles II who decided that the accession of his unpopular Catholic uncle was a good chance to pretend to be legitimate and try to seize the throne), and it was interesting to learn more about this episode in the pre-Jacobite Stuart wrangles period. It is kind of eerie how closely the events as portrayed here recall those of the '45, with the sides swapped: a rising led by a charismatic but undependable prince who comes over from the continent; the ranks filled by admirably loyal peasants from one particular region, often motivated by religious belief; its defeat after an ill-judged and disastrous attempted night attack on the government army's camp; horrific cruelty by the government army towards both captive soldiers and random people from the surrounding countryside; show trials of the prisoners, hundreds of whom are executed or transported. One fairly important difference, of course, is that the Jacobite cause didn't go on to triumph three years later, and it is an interesting choice to set a historical novel during an unsuccessful rising by a cause that was to succeed so soon afterwards.
• Is it a good adventure story? Yes, I think so; it doesn't stand out as one of the most memorable, but it's pretty solid.
• A substantial part of this book's Wikipedia page is devoted to a debate over whether or not Oscar Wilde liked it. Good priorities there.
• Apparently alchemy is real??

:(

( I was now Pharaoh and King of Persia—not bad for twenty-five! )

Book meme borrowed from phantomtomato.

General Questions

This week I'm reading: Just finished The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, about which I have mixed feelings. I'm not sure what to start next; options are a femslashy boarding school book, a(nother) non-fiction book on women sailors and Michelle Paver's Wakenhyrst.
My favourite book of all time is: Oh, you know... :)
My current favourite book (read or re-read in the last 3 months): Best book of the last three months was The Celestial Omnibus by E. M. Forster, and I am pleased to remember I have The Eternal Moment still to read at some point.
The last book I bought was: The Persian Boy by Mary Renault. I don't know why I keep doing this to myself.
The first book I bought with my own money: I do not remember; thinking of my taste around the time I started buying things independently, it may well have been one of the twentieth-century domestic middlebrow-type authors.
The first book I received as a gift: Definitely too long ago for me to remember!
The last book I received as a gift was: edwardianspinsteraunt surprised me with A Schoolgirl Adventurer: A Story of the '45 by Dorothea Moore, which is a very funny concept. Interested to see if this is the het version of White Cockades which it kind of looks like.
The last book I borrowed from the library: The above-mentioned Wakenhyrst. I live near a county boundary and am therefore fortunate to have access to two local library systems; one of them said it was on the shelves at the branch nearest me, but I couldn't find it there, so I reserved it in the other one.
The book physically closest to me right now: On the floor on either side of my chair are Concise Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland by Martin Townsend, Paul Waring and Richard Lewington and From Cabin 'Boys' to Captains: 250 Years of Women at Sea by Jo Stanley.
Do you read bookfic, and if so what is your favourite bookshop fic? I don't think so. Books set in bookshops always seem a bit suspiciously cutesy-sounding to me, but perhaps I'm being unfair.

This or that

Physical book or e-book: Physical book for the reading experience. Ebooks are a good way of getting to read obscure out-of-copyright books for free.
Used or new: I know 'second-hand' isn't always strictly accurate (I own some books bearing evidence of having been sold more than once before I bought them, as well as a few old enough to be virtually certain to have had more than one previous owner), but I don't like the term 'used' applied to books. Books aren't tools. Anyway, second-hand.
Fiction or non-fiction: Fiction.
Read at a coffee shop or at the park: Coffee shop. I will get distracted by natural history at the park.
Paperback or hardcover: My ideal book format is a hardback, but it's a very rare and now virtually extinct type of hardback (I have three perfect examples on my shelves, none much less than a hundred years old, and maybe a dozen 'almost's). I prefer the average paperback to the average hardback.
Romance or Crime: *E. W. Hornung voice* Why not both? ;) (Serious answer, I'm not particularly into either genre, though I occasionally enjoy both gay historical romance and murder mysteries.)

Yes or no

Stream of consciousness? No.
Poetry? Yes to the old-fashioned kind with some structure and metre (one stereotypically says 'the kind that rhymes'; rhyme is good, but I don't need it—I like Tolkien's Anglo-Saxon-style alliterative poetry and Shakespeare's non-rhyming iambic pentameter—I do need metre). No to more modern free verse, which can be very beautiful in its language but which my literal-mindedness struggles to keep up with.
Memoirs? Not really.
Philosophy? I like a bit of philosophy in fiction, and sometimes read sort of philosophical-theological religious books, but not philosophy books as such, no.
Thrillers? Usually no.
Chronicles? Like, the kind of fantasy books that have 'The Chronicles of...' in the series title? Yeah, OK. I have not read the actual Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or anything like that.
Dialogue heavy? All right, but I prefer more narration.

The 'ugly little town' where the Ansells live is oddly non-specific in comparison to the rest of the book's locations. I think here it's the household rather than the town that counts, but also I can't resist a geographical puzzle, and so:

( A geographical puzzle much more complicated than it looks but also much simpler than it looks )

I found this in a shop near Ballachulish and thought it would be fun to read another book about the Appin Murder, so here we go. James Hunter is uniquely well-placed to write such a book, being both a professional historian and originally from Duror; in the introduction to this book he describes playing as a child in the ruins of Acharn farmhouse and being told by his older neighbours that someone called James of the Glen once lived there, and then reading Kidnapped and being thrilled to find places he knew well in real life in a book.

( John, John, before too long it will be me they hang this on )