Recent reading

[regshoe]

Worrals Carries on and Worrals Flies Again by W. E. Johns (both 1942). These are the second and third Worrals books, but I had a bit of a bother working out which order to read them in. Faded Page lists Flies Again as the second book in the series but Wikipedia says Carries On comes first; the mystery was resolved, however, by this Worrals website, which explains that Flies Again was published in book form first but Carries On was written earlier, having been serialised in a magazine. So there you go; I decided to read Carries On first, and it is clearly set earlier. Hooray for dedicated and informative old book fansites! Anyway—both books are filled with thrilling adventures, action and drama and excitement, spies, aeroplanes, secret passages (I especially liked the underground secret-passage-cum-canal along which the characters make an escape in a boat at the end of Flies Again) and so on. Worrals and Frecks continue to be a great team, and there's a lovely moment in Flies Again where Frecks sees Worrals's plane crash and thinks she's died and is distraught, but then it turns out Worrals wasn't in the plane and she's fine and they are happily reunited. Worrals theoretically has a boyfriend now, but Johns is either very delicate or simply perfunctory about actually detailing romantic content and it's ignorable (and he's a nice enough lad and I like them as friends, so this is ideal!). Flies Again is sadly marred by some ableism (there's a rather horrible grim irony in having your heroically Nazi-fighting characters say things like 'I don’t mind Nazis, but I draw the line at having a half-wit around.'—yeah, Johns, you know who else feels that way about 'half-wits'???... but never mind). Altogether the series continues good fun. Also it's becoming very noticeable that Johns is one of those authors who hates and shuns the word 'said', and uses as many colourful replacements as he can think of; in a more serious book this would be annoying but as it is it kind of becomes part of the charm.

The Wrong Set and Other Stories by Angus Wilson (1949). Apparently Angus Wilson's writing is full of insightful satire and brilliant detailed observation, and he was also notable for being openly gay in the mid-twentieth century, so I was looking forward to trying his books, but unfortunately this one did not work for me at all. I think I can see why people who like it do like it—there is a lot of very precisely-observed social and character detail—but as it is, the whole thing just felt unappealingly, grimly sordid in a way a lot of 'modern' twentieth-century stuff does, and at no point did I really feel any reason to care about any of the characters or what happened to them. (Perhaps I'd have enjoyed it more if I'd been more familiar with the specific nuances of class, politics, culture etc. that Wilson is portraying or satirising, but perhaps not; e.g. compare Mary Renault, goodness knows a lot of her details fly right over my head but, whatever her faults, convincing me to care about the characters is not one of them). A disappointment; I might try one of his novels at some point, but maybe not for a while.

And I re-read The Gleam in the North by D. K. Broster (1927), as material for my Kidnapped crossover WIP, which is set in 1752-3 and uses some bits of plot from it (or at least I re-read most of it; I skipped the more upsetting bits, which are not relevant to the fic anyway). I feel about it pretty much the same way I did the first time: as a book it's a bit of an oddly-structured jumble, as a sequel to Flight of the Heron it'll never do, but Broster knew exactly what she was doing with the story of Archibald Cameron and the tragedy of the final section is brilliantly written. ...some mere transient farewell, some valediction on the brink of an earthly sea, some handclasp ere crossing one of their own Highland lochs when, as so often, the mist was hanging low on the farther shore.... I had tears in my eyes at the end, again. And it's given me plenty of stuff for the fic, as well as further avenues of relevant historical research, which are already proving interesting!

Comments

[philomytha]

The Biggles and associated WE Johns fandom has a wonderfully dedicated set of fans who can tell you absolutely everything about things like when things were published and what edition your book is :-D. And as for the aversion to the word 'said', this is entirely responsible for the fact that my son uses the word 'ejaculated' as a normal dialogue tag when writing stories in class...

And completely agree about The Gleam in the North, it's a gorgeous book in many ways, really odd in others, and not really anything that makes sense as a sequel to FotH, but it does make me cry when I read it too.

[regshoe]

Dedicated old book fandoms really are the best. And, aww, your son has some excellent literary inspirations, in any case.

[osprey_archer]

Johns loves those "presumed dead" sequences. Almost every Worrals and/or Biggles book I've read has at least one scene where one character sees their best friend's crashed plane, realizes with crushing grief that their best friend is dead, (occasionally goes on a well-deserved murderous rampage against the slayers), and then is joyously reunited with the miraculously alive friend!

Broster makes a lot of weird structural choices in The Gleam in the North, but damn if that ending isn't a gut punch. (And I do like the bit where Ewan meets Keith's younger brother and absorbs, fascinated, all these little details about Keith's life and family that he never got to learn from Keith. Now if only Broster followed that up by pulling a Johns, and it turns out that Keith isn't dead after all!)

[regshoe]

It is such a good source of drama!

I'm conflicted about the Francis (and Masters, the old servant) bits of GitN—it is nice, there's some beautifully sad stuff about Ewen and Keith in there, but I still feel it doesn't fit as a sequel/continuation to Flight of the Heron. (However I do always love seeing Francis in fix-it fics where Keith lives!). And that's an excellent idea, clearly Broster should have taken some inspiration from Johns XD

[oursin]

There's more depth and subtlety in Wilson's novels, but he's very much not in the Renault mode of being all about the acceptable queer vs those other camp screamers, and he's all about people of all sorts being moral muddles.

[regshoe]

Yes, definitely! Well, perhaps I'll try the novels at some point—that does sound like a good thing.

[adore]

And it's given me plenty of stuff for the fic, as well as further avenues of relevant historical research, which are already proving interesting!

Neat!

Also neat that the final section was so moving.

[regshoe]

Those are two things Broster does well, whatever her flaws—highly specific and detailed history, and moving tragedy.

[luzula]

I'm glad you enjoyed rereading GitN! I've read it twice, the second time for fic research, but it comes out of copyright in 2023, so I expect I will be recording it then.

[regshoe]

Oh, so it does! Yes, that will be a good one to record. :)