Recent reading
May. 6th, 2025 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeRight, let's see if I can tear my brain away from the Raven King for long enough to contemplate the other books I've been reading in the last few weeks...
The Wind Boy by Ethel Cook Eliot (1923). Difficult to summarise or explain; the sort of weird children's fantasy novel which is completely committed to and confident in its own weird priorities, sensibilities and worldbuilding, and really enjoyable as such. (I'm not sure about Cook Eliot's views on art: only bad artists actually create things, true artists unconsciously reproduce things that already exist in the Platonic realm of ideal forms??)
The Adventures of David Simple by Sarah Fielding (1744). I was in the mood for something eighteenth-century and found this one on archive.org, though I ended up having to read the text ebook from Wikisource because I couldn't get the pdfs to work on my e-reader. I missed the ſ and other eighteenth-century formatting; I'm really getting quite fond of it. Anyway: this book opens with our hero, the good and true-hearted David Simple, being cheated out of his inheritance by his wicked brother, and I was chuckling at the similarity in fate to another David you wot of and wondering if the rest of the book was going to be about him winning it back, but no, that plot gets resolved quite quickly; the rest of the book consists of the now justly-enriched David wondering what to do with his wealth, deciding—since he's so good—that there's no happiness to be got from money but in using it to help one's friends, and thus setting off into the world on a quest to find someone good and true enough to be a Real Friend to him. Then we get a lot of satire/commentary on the various sorts of wickedness and falsehood to be found in eighteenth-century London, a lot of David meeting different people who narrate their dramatic backstories in long digressions, and eventually David finds some True Friends (his love interest, her brother and his girlfriend) with whom he lives happily ever after. This was all good fun—I do enjoy sentimental, dramatic eighteenth-century novel digressions. There were no long-lost parents in this one, though there are other coincidental reunions and family reconciliations. At one point the love interest and brother are accused (obviously falsely) of incest, in so many words, and I was slightly surprised that that wasn't too shocking to write about openly. Fielding also wrote two further books, an epistolary spin-off and a sequel; I'm intrigued by the idea of continuing the story after what's clearly the conventional ending point (the last chapter is literally titled 'Containing Two Weddings, and Consequently the Conclusion of the Book') and will read those at some point.
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay (1967). This book, set in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, is not really either a mystery novel or a boarding school novel, though it's about a mystery that takes place at a boarding school. Three girls and a mistress go missing while on a picnic in the Australian outback; one of the girls is eventually found, uninjured but with no memory of what happened, and beyond that the mystery is never solved. Much of the book is rather following the ramifications of the disappearance, beginning with the big dramatic event and then exploring what happens afterwards, and as it goes along not solving the mystery it quite cleverly obscures that it's actually building up to a dramatic and properly chilling climax which, while in a sense also a consequence of the mystery, is not directly related to it. I knew going in that the mystery wasn't going to be solved, and I'm not sure how disappointed I would have been if I hadn't known (sometimes it feels like a more typical mystery, with apparent clues to what happened, and at one point the omniscient narrator even saying that something is an important clue which the police missed and so never followed, but not explaining what its importance is!); I was a bit disappointed by how little there was of typical girls' boarding school material (in fact quite a lot of the page-space is taken up by a rather slashy cross-class friendship between two male characters; though there is also a younger girl with a tragic crush on one of the girls who disappears). I did really like Lindsay's omniscient narrator, who comments freely, dispassionately and ironically on events, and who seems to know the truth of what really happened. I think this book will stick around haunting me for a while.
Tragedy at Law by Cyril Hare (1942). This is a proper mystery novel, although the structure is entertainingly subverted (). It's very enjoyably written—Hare really knows how to end a chapter, among other things—and all the details of the legal setting are great. The victim character is a judge who's just going on circuit at the start of the book, and we see various aspects of how provincial assizes work and also the more domestic non-legal details of how a judge on circuit lives; there's also a lot of interesting stuff about sexism and gender roles, with the judge's wife—who, years ago, qualified as a barrister herself but was prevented by sexism from advancing in her own career, and who it's suggested has used her marriage essentially to have a legal career by proxy, playing the wifely role to support, not to say create, her husband's success—also being a major character. I was not convinced by Hare's commentary on the unequal application of justice: early in the book the judge injures someone in a drink-driving accident, and of course it's terribly important that the whole thing be covered up and he not face the consequences that an ordinary person would, because it would destroy public trust in the legal system, and anyway isn't the agony of conscience he feels and the threat that his career will be ruined far worse than trial and imprisonment would be??? That last bit might or might not have been true of powerful people in the 1940s; I certainly don't believe it now; Derek the indulgently-mocked idealist is right, there's no justice if it isn't justice for everyone. Anyway: This is apparently the first in a series featuring detective (well, 'detective'; the police do a lot of the actual mystery-solving here, he just puts the final and most legal-specialist pieces together) Francis Pettigrew, and it was really a bit of a spoiler to read this book in an edition (on Faded Page) presented as 'book 1 in the Francis Pettigrew series', because Frank is actually an otherwise-plausible suspect for quite a bit of the time. I shall continue with the rest of the series eventually!
The Wind Boy by Ethel Cook Eliot (1923). Difficult to summarise or explain; the sort of weird children's fantasy novel which is completely committed to and confident in its own weird priorities, sensibilities and worldbuilding, and really enjoyable as such. (I'm not sure about Cook Eliot's views on art: only bad artists actually create things, true artists unconsciously reproduce things that already exist in the Platonic realm of ideal forms??)
The Adventures of David Simple by Sarah Fielding (1744). I was in the mood for something eighteenth-century and found this one on archive.org, though I ended up having to read the text ebook from Wikisource because I couldn't get the pdfs to work on my e-reader. I missed the ſ and other eighteenth-century formatting; I'm really getting quite fond of it. Anyway: this book opens with our hero, the good and true-hearted David Simple, being cheated out of his inheritance by his wicked brother, and I was chuckling at the similarity in fate to another David you wot of and wondering if the rest of the book was going to be about him winning it back, but no, that plot gets resolved quite quickly; the rest of the book consists of the now justly-enriched David wondering what to do with his wealth, deciding—since he's so good—that there's no happiness to be got from money but in using it to help one's friends, and thus setting off into the world on a quest to find someone good and true enough to be a Real Friend to him. Then we get a lot of satire/commentary on the various sorts of wickedness and falsehood to be found in eighteenth-century London, a lot of David meeting different people who narrate their dramatic backstories in long digressions, and eventually David finds some True Friends (his love interest, her brother and his girlfriend) with whom he lives happily ever after. This was all good fun—I do enjoy sentimental, dramatic eighteenth-century novel digressions. There were no long-lost parents in this one, though there are other coincidental reunions and family reconciliations. At one point the love interest and brother are accused (obviously falsely) of incest, in so many words, and I was slightly surprised that that wasn't too shocking to write about openly. Fielding also wrote two further books, an epistolary spin-off and a sequel; I'm intrigued by the idea of continuing the story after what's clearly the conventional ending point (the last chapter is literally titled 'Containing Two Weddings, and Consequently the Conclusion of the Book') and will read those at some point.
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay (1967). This book, set in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, is not really either a mystery novel or a boarding school novel, though it's about a mystery that takes place at a boarding school. Three girls and a mistress go missing while on a picnic in the Australian outback; one of the girls is eventually found, uninjured but with no memory of what happened, and beyond that the mystery is never solved. Much of the book is rather following the ramifications of the disappearance, beginning with the big dramatic event and then exploring what happens afterwards, and as it goes along not solving the mystery it quite cleverly obscures that it's actually building up to a dramatic and properly chilling climax which, while in a sense also a consequence of the mystery, is not directly related to it. I knew going in that the mystery wasn't going to be solved, and I'm not sure how disappointed I would have been if I hadn't known (sometimes it feels like a more typical mystery, with apparent clues to what happened, and at one point the omniscient narrator even saying that something is an important clue which the police missed and so never followed, but not explaining what its importance is!); I was a bit disappointed by how little there was of typical girls' boarding school material (in fact quite a lot of the page-space is taken up by a rather slashy cross-class friendship between two male characters; though there is also a younger girl with a tragic crush on one of the girls who disappears). I did really like Lindsay's omniscient narrator, who comments freely, dispassionately and ironically on events, and who seems to know the truth of what really happened. I think this book will stick around haunting me for a while.
Tragedy at Law by Cyril Hare (1942). This is a proper mystery novel, although the structure is entertainingly subverted (
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Date: May. 6th, 2025 05:49 pm (UTC)I also knew going into Picnic at Hanging Rock that it wouldn't solve the mystery, and still found the lack of resolution to the mystery tantalizingly tormenting, which of course is one of the reasons that the book has stuck with me so long. And yes there IS a slashy cross-class friendship between two male characters, which was nice although I was also slightly put out because I'd gone into it hoping to ship some of the girls! No luck in that department, though.
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Date: May. 7th, 2025 04:13 pm (UTC)(Also illustrating ECE's slightly wobbly grasp of dialogue punctuation, but never mind.) Yeah, it's certainly an 'understanding everything isn't the point' kind of book!
I think there were definitely grounds for shipping Sara/Miranda at least one-sidedly, though of course that doesn't exactly end well... Albert and Mike were fun, it just wasn't quite what I was looking for :D
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Date: May. 7th, 2025 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: May. 6th, 2025 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: May. 7th, 2025 04:14 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: May. 7th, 2025 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: May. 7th, 2025 04:08 am (UTC)I love this book and Frank Pettigrew, everyone look shocked.
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Date: May. 7th, 2025 04:17 pm (UTC)Aww, it is a really enjoyable book :D
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Date: May. 7th, 2025 01:17 pm (UTC)Haha, true! It's definitely doing its own thing, and I love it for that reason. I'm glad you enjoyed it!
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Date: May. 7th, 2025 04:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: May. 8th, 2025 07:20 am (UTC)Tragedy at Law
You make this sound pretty good. Thanks for the rec! Just got hold of a copy.
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Date: May. 9th, 2025 03:25 pm (UTC)