regshoe

I have been overdoing it again (there are too many good things to do!) and am not feeling brilliantly up to writing complex book reviews, but we'll see what I can manage:

The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (1955). I was browsing shelves at the (tiny local) library a few days ago and realised that they've been keeping the books I reserve from other libraries around the county, rather than sending them back where they started: almost every vaguely old book there, if it wasn't a very well-known classic, was something I'd ordered and read in the last year. This was the one exception I could find, so I picked it up. It's about Caribbean immigrants in post-war London, beginning with Moses, a Trinidadian who's been in Britain for some years already and now observes the arrival of more and various other Caribbeans. The narrative follows each of these people for a little while, exploring their personalities, how they get on in London and how they experience the sometimes hostile reactions of white Brits to their presence. It's written in a blend of standard English with Caribbean dialect (apparently Selvon tried to write in standard English at first but it just wouldn't work; I can see that this works a lot better), and the general mood is partly grim humour and partly what I'd call 'various' or 'it's all really complicated, isn't it'. It's very good, if not the most enjoyable book ever.

Mrs Overtheway's Remembrances by Juliana Horatia Ewing (1869). I picked this one up hoping for something about the early nineteenth century as seen from the perspective of the late nineteenth century, which is one of my favourite themes in Victorian fiction, but it's not really that, though the premise sounds like it might be. A lonely child amuses herself by watching the comings and goings of the old woman who lives across the street; eventually they get to know each other properly and Mrs Overtheway tells young Ida some stories about her early life. But the stories are really just stories that could have been contemporary rather than even incidental historical commentary, and I didn't find them all that interesting as stories; that was disappointing, but at least Ewing's skill at writing child POVs and her love of plants and gardening, fully on display in this book, were good.

The Blood of the Martyrs by Naomi Mitchison (1939). This book is about the early Christians in Emperor Nero's Rome, it's six hundred pages long, it is exactly like what the title sounds like it's going to be like and it is compelling in the way where I really mean that word. Mitchison is so endlessly worth reading.

King of Dust: Adventures in Forgotten Sculpture by Alex Woodcock (2019). First of all, please admire the beautiful cover design. The author's career approached the subject of this book, Romanesque architecture in medieval churches in the southwest of England, from multiple directions: he completed a PhD in the study of it, then trained as a stonemason and spent several years employed in that capacity at Exeter Cathedral. The book isn't a memoir telling that story; instead Woodcock describes his visits to various notable pieces of church architecture around Cornwall, Devon and Dorset, interspersing the descriptions with out-of-order and incomplete bits of his own biography where relevant, and also with the history of the study and appreciation of the Romanesque and some thoughts about the meaning and significance of both the style and stone-carving in general. It's a thoughtfully-constructed and well-written book, and I liked it very much despite knowing almost nothing about the subject.

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? )

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.

Getting a reading post in before Yuletide assignments... and it's been a murder mystery sort of a few weeks, apparently.

With a Bare Bodkin by Cyril Hare (1946). The second of the five Francis Pettigrew books. We're a bit further into the war now than we were in Tragedy at Law, and Pettigrew has decided to give up his standard lawyering job to go and work as a legal advisor in the wartime Ministry of Pin Control, a satire of real Second World War civil service bureaucracy. I was highly disappointed because the first chapter is titled 'Pettigrew Goes North' (to the headquarters of the Ministry), and the rest of the book contains virtually no specific local detail on this promised northern setting. Anyway, as a mystery novel it's great fun, especially in how it plays with genre awareness. Here one of the varied cast of suspects provided by the civil service office setting is a writer of murder mysteries, and he and some of his colleagues pass the time by playing an elaborate game that involves inventing, and casting the people around them in, a hypothetical murder mystery. They pick one especially disliked colleague for the role of murderer... and then she's found dead. I did think the structure/pacing was slightly off in places—the early part of the book follows Pettigrew closely, but after the murder happens and starts being investigated properly we get several chapters in a row of police discussions and interviews without Pettigrew present, which felt unbalanced—but the prose and the intricacies of the mystery were very enjoyable. Also, it occurs to me that 'character is both fat and especially fit and healthy, and this isn't a joke' and 'character notably seldom makes eye contact, and this isn't regarded as at all bad or suspicious (in a murder mystery)' are two rather unexpectedly niche points of progressivism for a book of this date. Also, Pettigrew now has a love interest! This annoyed me less than it might have done; I like her a lot and I hope she plays a significant part in the later books.

The Sibyl in Her Grave by Sarah Caudwell (2001). I had to read this in time to request the series for Yuletide! It is the final Hilary Tamar book, published posthumously following Caudwell's untimely death in 2000. This was twelve years after the previous book in the series and twenty years after the first, and it seems to have been embarking on the Poirot-Marple style of movement through time: the setting is still clearly contemporary, with references to late-nineties technology and the approaching millennium, but the characters have not aged appreciably. The mystery is structured oddly, with

spoilers

the only actual murder—and even that only arguably one; it's rather an interesting philosophical conundrum, actually—taking place right at the end of the book and the two previous suspicious deaths turning out to have been accidents; I especially thought that 'character was making it all up for basically no reason' as an explanation for apparently suspicious events in a mystery novel was rather a bold move, though I can certainly appreciate the point being made.

Apart from that, I enjoyed everything I usually do about these books, and I especially appreciated that the side characters here include a lesbian couple who both survive the book and don't turn out to be murderers or otherwise evil. I wish them every happiness. (There's also a gay male couple one of whom is killed, but the death is not related to him being gay and in fact the relationship is a bright spot of happiness in an existence clouded by the unhappy events leading up to his death.) Also I'm pleased to see that Caudwell is capable of being as amusing about class as she is about gender.

The Master of the Day of Judgement by Leo Perutz (1921; translated by Eric Mosbacher, 1994). Well, this isn't really a murder mystery, exactly: where a murder mystery would go 'well, everyone assumes this death was suicide, but actually... they were murdered!', this book establishes that the death that kicks off the plot was suicide and then the mystery is in why this character—and several other characters over the course of the plot—killed himself. But it does a lot of other things too, and I'm afraid it rather lost me in the process. I don't know how much of it was either the translation or just the original prose style—it's full of comma splices and run-on sentences; I know German does use commas differently to English, so perhaps something got lost there?—but I had a continual sense that I just wasn't following the logic of the characters, dialogue or events. I did enjoy the eventual, completely bizarre, solution to the mystery. But THEN there's an epilogue which apparently upends the whole thing all over again! What was going on there???

...perhaps shouldn't be the title of this post, because the material in volume 9 of the Abinger Edition of Forster's complete works was never published by him under that name: it's a various collection of previously-unpublished and largely unfinished writing put together and published posthumously and only in this edition. I picked it up mostly for Nottingham Lace, an abandoned early attempt at a novel, but I thought I might as well read the rest while I'd got the book (obtained semi-licitly from a local university library). In fact I finished reading it some time ago and never got round to writing up a review, but now that I've got some things to procrastinate on, here goes...

The pieces are arranged roughly in chronological order by composition, so Nottingham Lace is first (it's always annoying when the first thing in a collection is the one you like best, isn't it). I was interested in it because it's something of a precursor to The Longest Journey, and in that light it is thoroughly worth reading. Edgar Carruthers, the protagonist, is a younger and less endearing version of Rickie Elliot, still living at home with his aunt and uncle and, unlike Rickie, not going to a public school, not even the local one near where they live in Sawston. The plot commences when Edgar and his family meet Sidney Trent, a master at the school and a strange composite of Stewart Ansell, Stephen Wonham and perhaps a bit of Mr Jackson. His background is almost identical to Stewart's*, but reflects itself in a totally different way: Forster is, as so often, writing social comedy about clashes between characters of different class backgrounds (the opening line which provides the title, 'They are Nottingham lace!' is Edgar's aunt's disapproving comment on the Trents' ill-bred net curtains), and Trent is Vulgar in manners and personality in a way Stewart, despite his shopkeeper-class origins, never is, and which in TLJ is dealt with rather more complicatedly through Stephen. It's as if Forster is beginning to work out ideas that he'll later shuffle into a better pattern, and although TLJ is much better in basically every way (including fannish appeal and slashiness), this made for some really interesting context for it. Besides that, Nottingham Lace is frustratingly unfinished—it breaks off just as the plot is beginning to get nicely dramatic—and there is some potential for speculation in where it might have been going.

*With one exception: he's from Newcastle. I mourn the Geordie!Stewart that might have been.

Arctic Summer is the other longish fragment in this book, and unfortunately its title is metaphorical; I was rather hoping for Forster's take on polar travel. It's another incomplete novel, begun between Howards End and Maurice and dealing with themes familiar from the books Forster had published by that point: the conflict between what he calls the 'civilised' and the 'heroic', as expressed through the meeting of two Englishmen of contrasting background, character and values while on holiday in Italy. I think by this stage of his career Forster has moved more towards his idea of the 'heroic' than I'm really interested in, but what this piece was really worth reading for was an illustration of the writing process, albeit in an unsuccessful form. The Abinger volume prints three separate pieces: the 'Main Version', self-explanatorily titled; the 'Tripoli Fragment', a disconnected fragment related to but out of continuity with the Main Version; and the Radipole Version, a fascinating revision in which the same two main characters meet in a completely different way with a completely different plot and setting—that's so suggestive about how Forster thought of his stories. The Main Version itself is in two pieces, an early part which Forster later reworked fairly substantially in order to give a reading of it at a literary festival in 1951, and some more unpolished later chapters; in between is a note which he wrote to accompany the reading, explaining what he was trying to do and why it wasn't working, and both this and the revisions detailed by the Abinger edition make terribly interesting reading from a writer's perspective. Arctic Summer is also pretty subtextually queer, although not in a way I find particularly compelling; at this stage Forster was finding that the impossibility of writing openly about homosexuality was seriously hampering his writing in general—hence writing Maurice and then not publishing another novel for ten years, presumably.

Apart from these two there are four variously-complete short stories and then a set of short, disconnected fragments, which range widely in time of writing and subject matter. 'Ralph and Tony', probably my favourite of the longer ones, is another very subtextually queer story set in the Alps and featuring a thinly-veiled self-insert and a 'heroic' masculine character who's a medical student passionate about mountaineering. 'The Tomb of Pletone' is a historical story about a cult leader (?) in fifteenth-century Greece; 'Unfinished Short Story', which the Abinger editors didn't give a proper title, is set in Egypt and features a vividly-described aeroplane flight among other things; 'Little Imber' is bizarre kinky sci-fi which I found too squicky to appreciate its completely textual queerness. 'Stonebreaking' is worth a mention among the very short fragments for also being textually gay. The final, untitled fragment, given only in the Notes section at the back of the volume, is a set of beautifully mysterious part-sentences from two unrelated pieces preserved on either side of a single torn-out notebook page—Forster was evidently writing across facing pages of the notebook, so only half of each line survives.

—So, most of the stuff in this volume did not greatly work for me, as Forster's writing goes, but it was still completely worth reading for its fascinating variety and its insight into the writing process, both in itself and by comparison with Forster's completed novels. And I still haven't read all of those, by the way—onto A Passage to India next...

Walking with Murder: On the Kidnapped Trail by Ian Nimmo (2005). Ian Nimmo is a serious Kidnapped fan who has traced out the entire route of David's wanderings across Scotland, walked it himself twice—once in 1960 and once forty years later—and done a lot of research besides into the history and geography of the novel; this book is the result. There's a lot of fascinating material in here, including much that brought parts of Kidnapped to life in new ways for me and some original investigations into the Appin murder, and it's highly recommended for all fans. I did think the book could have done with making clearer and more decisive choices about its subject matter: as it is it's a book about the geography of Kidnapped which turns in the middle into a book about the history of the Appin murder before turning back again, while making occasional digressions into general Scottish geography and changes to the country over time, and while all the material was interesting it could perhaps have been better organised. Also there are parts where Nimmo should have chosen between quoting verbatim from Kidnapped or broadly paraphrasing, because doing something that's not quite one or the other really doesn't work. Also I dislike his decision—having explained that RLS's one-L spelling of Alan Breck Stewart's name distinguishes the fictional character from the historical Allan—to continue using the two-L spelling throughout, even when clearly referring only to the fictional character. But I nitpick like this because the book was so interesting! I do recommend it. I was especially impressed by Nimmo's identification, independently corroborated by two other people, of a plausible specific spot on the hillside in Leitir Mhòr wood from where the murderer of Colin Campbell might have fired the shot.

Jane's Island by Marjorie Hill Allee (1931). This was one of osprey_archer's recommended Newbery Prize winners, which means it's a very good classic American children's book. I enjoyed it a lot! Zoological research and the power of cooperation and friendship across cultural and national boundaries are an excellent set of subjects for a children's book, and I loved all the scientific and natural-historical detail as well as the characters. Some observations:
1) The main character—Jane, the twelve-year-old daughter of a zoologist and keen naturalist herself—is the typical 'same age as or a little older than the target audience', but the story is told mostly from the point of view of a slightly older character, seventeen-year-old Elsie, who's looking after Jane for the summer (not quite a nanny or a governess; I would have described her role as 'au pair, but not foreign'; was that a thing?), and I thought that was an interesting choice.
2) A fairly important plot point involves rival researchers' teams of field workers gathering wild planarians (flatworms) from the seashore for their experiments; the characters worry that one team will gather too many and there won't be enough for the other, but no one ever appears to consider the planarian population itself a potential issue. The nature conservation movement definitely existed by 1931, but apparently it and scientific zoology hadn't met yet!
3) Yes, this book is both generally pro-tomboy and not quite entirely comfortable with gender non-conformity in girls and women in an also interesting way. It's admirable to encourage scientific careers like this, but all the same there are a couple of bits I'm glad I didn't read when I was Jane's age.
4) Why do all the American books I read from around this period go on about people from Boston spending their summers in the countryside/on the coast? Why is that such an important thing to keep coming up??

The Sirens Sang of Murder by Sarah Caudwell (1989). After reading this book (the third of four) I like the series enough to have nominated it for Yuletide—and specifically Julia and Selena, because a) if Julia is going to keep getting mistaken for a lesbian the least she deserves is actually to get to be a lesbian and b) I'm sure Selena would treat her better than any of these men do—so I'll have to read book four by sign-up time and I hope there's no very major continuity for those two in there. This one is a murder mystery about tax dodging, and gets a lot of humour out of its subject matter but also some genuinely cool and evocative settings (second most notable book set in the Channel Islands, I reckon, after Sir Isumbras at the Ford). As with previous books it's partly narrated in first person by Hilary and partly epistolary—this time in the form of messages sent by telex, which was a new word for me, which just goes to show how technology progresses. I did think it was pretty badly let down by the (rather Arthurian) rape-by-deception played for comedy; the comedic treatment of sex in these books is a bit of a thing—sometimes it's hilarious, sometimes it goes too far. I have bought book four and it's due to arrive tomorrow, so we shall see.

Humbug: A Study in Education by E. M. Delafield (1921). I thought I should take the interesting chance of a Delafield novel I knew nothing about, and chose this one for the intriguing-sounding title. It is what the subtitle says, broadly interpreted—a study of how the upbringing of a young girl in Victwardian England constrains and stifles her character and happiness. It is not as miserable as Consequences or as nasty as The War-Workers, but it's also less effective than either of them. I really liked the family relationships in the early chapters, in which the main character Lily is favoured by their parents over her disabled sister Yvonne and both girls suffer horribly as a result in different ways—it reminded me of The Mill on the Floss as a precise and well-observed study of how awful the internal experience of being a child can be—but I thought the book went astray later on, became less interesting and less focussed, and eventually tried for a triumphant happy ending I felt it hadn't really earned. It strikes me that my favourite books in the 'upbringing of a girl in Victwardian England and how badly it's done' genre—Alas, Poor Lady and The Crowded Street—continue with the main character failing to fulfil the goals of her upbringing by remaining single, and in this one she does make a conventionally-acceptable, unhappy marriage and the book then tries to pull apart the failures it's criticising from within that structure, and perhaps that's part of why it didn't work for me.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles (1959). The edition I read has 'AN AMERICAN CLASSIC' in big letters across the top of the front cover, and what I think is that if Americans so badly want to write CLASSICS then they can jolly well learn to format and punctuate dialogue correctly. Anyway: If you took schooldays-era Raffles and Bunny, only they're the same age, and also they're American, and also it's the Second World War, you would not exactly have something like this book, but you might have something not entirely unlike it. I did not enjoy the book on the whole; a lot of the appeal of boarding-school stories for me is in the cloistered setting, the school as its own closed-off little world, and this book does not have that because the school setting can't be closed-off when the war keeps intruding everywhere, and this is a large part of the point of the book. However (wobbly grammar aside) it is a very good portrayal of a very specific kind of messed-up relationship, and indeed just a little bit gay even though the author apparently didn't mean it that way (?), and also very good at what it's trying to do vis-a-vis the war intruding on everything else in the world. Actually my favourite character was 'Leper' Lepellier, who is not involved in the central homoerotic relationship, but I think he deserves a nice boyfriend and also some more cool snails to make up for everything he has to go through.

Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee (1959). Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham was in my last reading post, and it kept reminding me of this (because ale/cider, main character called Rosie, and for some reason the only thing I knew about this book is that it's set in Gloucestershire and Somerset hence reminded me of that), so I decided to read it. Most of it I merely didn't get on with very well—the style favours rich impressionism over descriptive or narrative substance more than I like, and there's neither the perceptive social observation (Flora Thompson <3) nor the likeable narratorial personality that I think make for a good memoir. Also most of the way through the book I was getting a sense that the author was kind of dodgy about women. (If I say as a synecdoche that he uses the word 'voluptuous' too much to sum up what I don't like about Lee's writing, does that make sense?) Anyway, in the penultimate chapter it turns out that he is not slightly dodgy but horrifyingly awful, and I think that's enough books by straight men for me this year at least. If you want to read a beloved classic memoir, please read Flora Thompson instead.

I have been reading some books! Here is one of them:

( Facilis descensus Averno... )

I have not been brilliantly attentive to my last few books due to the whole 'new obsession' situation, but here they are anyway:

Bagthorpes v. the World by Helen Cresswell (1979). Picked up from a box of random free stuff left outside someone's house to be got rid of. The Bagthorpe saga (this is the fourth of ten books; I correctly guessed it wouldn't be sufficiently continuity-heavy to need reading in order) seems to be basically a wacky 70s sitcom in book form, featuring the adventures of a variously eccentric middle-class English family. In this book financial worries lead them to attempt to become self-sufficient, while they also have to manoeuvre for an inheritance from the eccentric great-aunt and deal with the five-year-old cousin's dedication to her 'death and funerals' phase. It's funny but not brilliant; it made decent enough reading during stressful travelling, which is what I did, but I won't seek out the rest of the series.

King Lear by William Shakespeare (c. 1606). Whenever I watch or read a Shakespeare play I enjoy the brilliant intricacies of language while probably missing about 90% of them, and then decide I'll have to think about it for a bit before forming proper opinions. Perhaps I should have watched a performance before reading; my mother has recommended the film with Laurence Olivier, and I will watch it at some point but see above re. I can only watch one thing at the moment. As it is, I thought the tragic ending was beautiful ('And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life!/Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life/And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more/Never, never, never, never, never.'— ;__; ), and I was interested to read in R. A. Foakes's introduction to the Arden edition that a) while, as usual with Shakespeare's plays, the story of King Lear was a previously existing one which he adapted, his ending is different from that of the previous versions and b) between the late seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries virtually all productions used a rewritten/bowdlerised version of the play which replaced Shakespeare's ending with a happier one. Clearly the ending is an important matter! I was also puzzled by a passage where Shakespeare uses the word 'choughs' and Foakes says in a footnote that it means 'jackdaws': the scene is set on the cliffs of Dover so I thought it seemed likely that Shakespeare did mean choughs (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax), but Wikipedia, citing Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey who are probably reliable sources for this sort of thing, agrees that 'chough' formerly meant 'jackdaw' (Coloeus monedula). But that's also puzzling because I have heard both birds and it seems to me obvious that 'chough' is better onomatopoeia for P. pyrrhocorax and 'jack' for C. monedula. Hmmm.

Metal from Heaven by August Clarke (2024). Set in a world undergoing a fantasy Industrial Revolution based on ichorite, a mysterious substance which causes a mysterious disease in the children of people who work with it; our narrator Marney Honeycutt (which rather inappropriately reminded me of Lucy Honeychurch) is one of the first to be afflicted, and also her entire family were massacred when the owner of the factory where they worked decided to put down a strike the really thorough way when Marney was twelve. She escapes and ends up being adopted by a gang of bandits who've made themselves an amazing socialist bandit paradise by murdering a local aristocratic ruler, pretending to all the other aristocrats that he's just really reclusive and taking over his house and land; meanwhile Marney plots how she's going to get revenge on that factory owner. Also, almost everyone is a lesbian. I thought various parts of the plot probably wouldn't stand up to thorough scrutiny, and there were some seriously questionable decisions made (e.g., if your entire plan for the future of your bandit paradise depends on the continued survival of one person, I think you can not let her go out on highly dangerous bandit raids, actually); I found the language often careless and sometimes jarringly modern for the fantasy Industrial Revolution; most of the sex scenes made no emotional sense to me (I don't want to overstate this as a flaw, I'm sure it was important and meaningful for the author and for the right kind of readers, but I was not one of them). However, I did like the book on the whole, and I think it's very good, largely for two reasons: 1) the worldbuilding is thoughtful and really interesting, especially in portraying a range of different religions, views of the world, naming systems and concepts of sexuality and gender, and in how these things vary by class; and in the eventual discovery of what ichorite really is; and 2) it is absolutely committed to being exactly what Clarke wants it to be, no holding back at all, and I respect them for that. Also the way it's narrated, with Marney speaking in first person to a specific other character, is great and used to good effect, and the ending is weird and amazing. I did guess the first big twist as soon as we found out the relevant backstory fact about the character in question, but I had no idea what was coming next.

I've just collected a 600 page book on the history of ballet from the library, so that's something more relevant to read next.