regshoe

The last few books of the year (plus one from a little while ago).

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848). Well, I thought I hadn't read quite enough nineteenth-century bricks yet this year, and this is a classic and had been on my e-reader for ages, so it seemed an ideal one to try now. Thackeray is the best sort of characterful, chatty, opinionated Victorian novel omniscient narrator, and if somewhat given to caricatures and sometimes offensive stereotypes, is frequently hilarious in his observations and commentary. Becky Sharp, the ambitious, determined social climber of an anti-heroine, is an equally enjoyable main character, and I can see why she was and is so (in)famous. Also, being written in the 1840s and set in the 1810s-20s, it shows the late Napoleonic Wars and post-Waterloo period as it appeared from a generation or so later, which made an interesting historical perspective. The book seems to wander off-course a bit towards the end—it concentrates less on Becky and more on the less interesting, more conventional characters with whom Thackeray apparently felt the need to balance her out, and introduces some random new stuff that doesn't really fit with the rest. But very much worth reading on the whole.

The Big House by Naomi Mitchison (1950). I think this is the kind of novel early Alan Garner might have written if he was Naomi Mitchison. (Mitchison has such incredible range, you can't compare her to herself.) It's a children's fantasy novel set just after the end of the Second World War in a Highland fishing village; Su, the young daughter of the Big House, and Winkie, a fisherman's son from the village, get caught up in an adventure involving the fairies and end up travelling back in time, briefly visiting various periods but spending substantial parts of the book in 1806 and some time in the early Middle Ages (I've not managed to identify the saint in question, assuming he was a real one—does anyone else know?). The whole thing has a strong narrative voice and a confident sense of a) folkloric magic, b) history and c) class conflict and injustice, blending them all together very well, and the precise flavour of time travel—Su and Winkie take on established lives and identities in the periods they visit (or inhabit those of already-existing people), becoming quite at home in these new lives and thoughts and feelings and partially forgetting their present-day selves until something happens to remind them—was very cool and rather creepy.

Bertram Cope's Year by Henry Blake Fuller (1919). I could not resist the line quoted in phantomtomato's review of this early gay novel from the US, and decided to read it myself. It's about a young academic, fairly unremarkable apart from being gay, who's spending a year teaching and working on his thesis in English Literature at a minor university near one of the Great Lakes, and who is utterly irresistible to everyone around him. Bertram has six prospective love interests, two men and four women, though he only returns the feelings of one of them, his established boyfriend Arthur Lemoyne. The writing is emotionally subtle and sometimes very funny, though I was unsatisfied by the lack of warmth and earnestness in it. I think I kept wanting to see more of Bertram's inner life, and I wanted him and Arthur to be more shippable than they really are (look, that 'character gets a bit protective-possessive of partner to ward off unwanted attentions of a third party' thing is iddy to me). Also I, unlike the characters in the novel, never really got what was quite so appealing about Bertram (I would have liked him better if he was more keen/nerdier about his academic interests, but it seems to be more a matter of career ambition than anything else. Also he's an anti-Stratfordian for some reason??). There is a great sequence where Bertram—like a more serious, literary and textually-queer Bertie Wooster—gets accidentally engaged to one of the female love interests out of politeness carried too far and agonises over getting out of it. There's a really fascinating bit where Arthur, who's an actor, experiences the social consequences of being a bit too good at playing a female role on stage. There are some funny cultural details, like the bit where, following a stressful accident, some characters are given (I assume) brandy as a restorative—which would be totally normal in a British book of this period, but in the country that was about to enact Prohibition the drink is apparently so shocking it can't be named by characters or narrative. Possibly my favourite character was Joseph Foster, a blind and wheelchair-using man who's less under Bertram's rather unaccountable spell than anyone else in the book and acts as a kind of detached observer of and commenter on events. (He's an odd contrast to characters like Charles Edmonstone and Phineas Fletcher, where the 'disabled observer' role is associated with queerness rather than commenting on that of more active characters.) The novel is interesting, too, as a book clearly dealing with queer characters without being at all About Homosexuality in the way of e.g. Imre or Maurice. Strictly speaking, it's not textual in the sense of coming right out and saying it—that line about Urania, and one where Foster disapprovingly compares Bertram and Arthur's behaviour to that of a too-indiscreet married couple, are as explicit as it ever gets—and I suppose that's how it managed to remain publishable when those two didn't, but it is clear enough how it's intended to read.

A Natural History of the Hedgerow by John Wright (2016). Found at my new local library, which is a really good thing so far. This book is exactly what it sounds like: an account of the natural, and cultural, history of hedges in Britain from their uncertain origins to the present day. Wright is a highly knowledgeable and somewhat eccentric amateur naturalist of a familiar and admirable type; the 'natural history' section of the book, in which he describes characteristic species of the hedgerow and their various ecological associations (going through the typical insects and fungi found on each common hedgerow tree species, for example) is the strongest, and his writing style veers between erudition and idiosyncratic informality in a very fun way. There are also sections on the history of hedgerows—which inevitably becomes a history of agricultural practices and land tenure—and the practical details of hedge construction and maintenance, of which Wright also has some experience.

Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell (1981). I'd heard the Hilary Tamar books recced various times and decided to give the first one a try; and herein there is another mystery, because the copy I got from the library describes this book as the 'second mystery in the Legal Whodunnit-series', but according to the bibliography on Wikipedia it was definitely published first of the four Hilary Tamar books and those are the only novels Caudwell ever wrote. Is this a Hornblower situation where one of the later books is set earlier? Anyway: this is a murder mystery set among a group of young barristers; one of them goes on holiday to Venice and gets accused of a murder that takes place there, and the others, naturally keen to prove her innocence, investigate. The story is narrated in brilliantly characterful first person by Hilary Tamar, a professor of legal history who knows the barristers via having taught one of them at Oxford; this is interspersed with epistolary sections, most of the letters being those written by Julia, the murder suspect, to her colleagues/friends before the murder took place and providing the background and clues to the mystery. Eventually Hilary, ideally placed to become a detective, solves everything. The style, tone of the writing and sensibilities of the characters are hilarious and highly enjoyable, and I loved Hilary's precise, casually arrogant, academic narration; Caudwell, herself a barrister, makes great use of her legal expertise; there's a lot of playing with gender stereotypes even before you get to the way Hilary's gender is carefully never specified (I kind of wish I hadn't known about that going in, because I'm curious about how long it would have taken me to notice); the mystery is rather ingenious, although

spoiler

I did think that even if Ned cleared up the blood from the floor someone ought to have noticed that there was none/far too little on the sheets?

Also the book is old enough that I was surprised by the amount of queerness and how casually it's treated, although I think some of it ended up having rather unfortunate implications re. the mystery. I think I will go on with the series!

And since no one else wrote any Yuletide fic for it either, I can now say that I read The School on the Moor by Dorita Fairlie Bruce (1931), having picked it up from a Yuletide rec, but ended up not matching on it. It's a really good girls' school story—protagonist Toby (short for Tabitha), who goes to school for the first time aged sixteen and has trouble trying to accommodate her eccentricities to the norms of school culture, is a wonderful main character; there's an appropriate amount of thrilling adventure; it's set on Dartmoor, with an also appropriate amount of landscape description and a lot of interest provided by Toby's idiosyncratic nerdiness about Dartmoor antiquities and archaeology. But what I liked most about it was how gay it is, of course: it stands out even among (fem)slashy school stories in making a clear distinction between friendships and romantic feelings, and there are some lovely and strikingly romantic moments between Toby and Dorinda, the girl she has a crush on. Not to be too unsubtle, I hope this one comes back in future exchange tagsets, because I'd love to have another chance at it.