Relatively Speaking

It seems a bit of a habit with me to see plays somewhere towards the end of their run.  I saw the brilliant All My Sons on its final night, and by the time I blogged about Peter and Alice, it was off the stage.  Well, you've got until 31 August to see Alan Ayckbourn's Relatively Speaking (1965), and I deeply encourage you to do so if you possibly can!

We had a lovely surprise when we arrived ('we' is me and Andrea, my frequent theatre-buddy) at Wyndham's - our balcony seats were upgraded to brilliant circle seats, right in the middle of the row and tickets which would have cost nearly double what we spent.  Sadly that was because of poor ticket sales (which is absurd on a Saturday night in London, but is encouraging for anybody hoping to grab a bargain on any night) - why people weren't there, I can't imagine.  It was the best comedy performance I have ever seen on the stage (All My Sons is still the best play I've seen, but nobody could call it a comedy.)

It's difficult to write much about Relatively Speaking without giving away elements of the plot (which I'd accidentally spoilt for myself the day before seeing the play, by starting Ayckbourn's The Crafty Art of Playmaking) but suffice to that the whole thing is a delightful, perfectly executed example of crossed wires, dramatic irony, and conversations at cross purposes.  The first scene opens in Ginny's (Eastender's Kara Tointon) flat with a semi-clad Greg (Max Bennett) wandering around the place.  There are mysterious phone calls and unexplained packages ("It's a book! From the book people!") and poor Greg is getting suspicious of Ginny (a pair of slippers under the bed need some explaining) - yet also getting increasingly in love with her.  They exchange wonderfully witty dialogue, affectionate but with a layer of one-upmanship, while she avoids anything definite and he proposes in the most adorably inept and heartfelt manner.  Both characters are a little rough-and-ready, with hearts in the right place, and the audience is certainly drawn into wanting the best for them... but Ginny is off to visit her parents. (Or is she?)

The next scene sees Sheila (Felicity Kendal - YES, FELICITY KENDAL) and her husband Philip (Jonathan Coy) on the patio of the lovely Buckinghamshire house, engaged in a marital dynamic which seems to be of long standing.  Sheila is a slightly downtrodden wife, but one who could never be entirely trodden down, one feels.  Jonathan Coy is given the only unsympathetic character of the foursome, as a slightly self-important, blustering businessman.  He goes off to find a hoe to do some vigorous gardening, and, through the sidegate of the excellent set, Greg arrives... He wants to come and ask Ginny's dad for her hand in marriage, and has somehow caught the train that Ginny missed.

And this is where the fun starts.  For reasons which might already have become clear, but which I shan't spoil just in case, nobody is quite on the same page as each other.  Least in the know is poor Sheila, and Felicity Kendal is absolutely perfect at her dialogue - her replies show that she has no clue why she has got embroiled in these conversations, and yet is willing to go along with it all, out of sheer kindness.  Kendal was every bit as wonderful as I'd hoped and expected.

But she had a match!  Max Bennett is sublime as Greg.  I saw him in Luise Miller a while ago, and remember being impressed by him, but he excels at comedy.  Everyone's comic timing is exceptionally good, with quickfire back-and-forth conversation delivered beautifully, but Bennett manages to make his character entirely lovable.  He is decent and proper, but also quick-witted, witty, and down-to-earth.  It's rare that a play has a character whom you love and appreciate entirely, but Relatively Speaking manages to have two - which is, indeed, half the cast.  Philip was never intended to be sympathetic, so he's out, and Kara Tointon - though very good - never seems quite to grasp which direction she wants to take her character in, and she sort of fell between two stools.

But the real star of the piece is Alan Ayckbourn.  His writing is perfect.  It is, of course, a standard of farce and comedy to have characters misunderstanding each other, but Relatively Speaking is crafted so brilliantly, with layer after layer of different crossed wires between different characters,  Even better, the responses characters give are believable, and it is also always credible that other characters wouldn't realise they were on different pages.  So difficult to engineer, and so slickly done.

If you want to laugh for two flying-at-the-speed-of-light hours, and have the chance to go before the end of August, PLEASE give yourself a treat and see this utterly delightful play.  I quite want to go straight back and watch it again...

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Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany: Shirley Jackson Special!

Hope everyone is enjoying their weekend so far - I'm going to be seeing Felicity Kendal in Alan Ayckbourn's Relatively Speaking tonight, which is pretty exciting (although I did start reading a book by him yesterday that gave away the plot, ooops...)  Entirely unrelated to that, this week's book, blog post, and link come with a Shirley Jackson theme!

1.) The book - it was via Claire/Paperback Reader's Facebook page that I discovered the obscure Shirley Jackson novels I'd hankered after were - gasp - soon to be reprinted by Penguin!  So, Hangsaman, The Sundial, and The Road Through The Wall will all come out over the next few months.  I'm starting to wish I hadn't spent a pretty penny on The Sundial, especially since I still haven't read it...

2.) The link - the New Yorker had a great interview with Shirley Jackson's son last month...

3.) The blog post - hunting around for a recent Shirley Jackson post, I stumbled on a great review (and discussion in the comments section) of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, over at Estella's Revenge.

Have you read any/much/all of Shirley Jackson?  Let me know your favourites, or you want to read next....

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Remarqueable

Sometimes classic books are a bit of a disappointment, sometimes they're good but you can't see why they're considered better than others, and sometimes they play a real blinder, to use, er, sports terminology.  All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque (see my hilarious post title pun?) is in the final category.  Of course I had heard of it, but it took Folio sending me a beautiful review copy, and my book group choosing to read it, for me to actually get down to it. And I'm so glad I did.

I suspect it'll come as a surprise to nobody to learn that the novel is about the life in the trenches during the First World War.  It is written from the German perspective, but (for most of the novel, at any rate) it could be German, English, French, or any of the nations fighting on the front line.  The same fear, bravado, camaraderie, philosophy, violence, and death happened whichever way you look at it, and Remarque beautifully, movingly depicts the everyman soldier experiencing this mad, unbelievable world. (My edition has a translation by Brian Murdoch, which seems excellent to me.)  There is some justifiable resentment about the way the older generation sent his generation (the main character, Paul, is 19) out to face unfathomable horrors, and the rhetoric they used:

While they went on writing and making speeches, we saw field hospitals and men dying: while they preached the service of the state as the greatest thing, we already knew that the fear of death is even greater.  This didn't make us into rebels or deserters, or turn us into cowards - and they were more than ready to use all of those words - because we loved our country just as much as they did, and so we went bravely into every attack.  But now we were able to distinguish things clearly, all at once our eyes had been opened.  And we saw that there was nothing left of their world.  Suddenly we found ourselves horribly alone - and we had to come to terms with it alone as well.

I've read very few war novels - that is, novels involving front line fighting.  I tend to choose novels set back in England during the wars, perhaps because it is possible - with a stretch of the imagination - for me to comprehend what that was like.  But trench warfare is so alien to anything I can imagine experiencing that it is like reading about another planet.

And yet All Quiet on the Western Front is quite matter-of-fact about the day-to-day experiences of the soldiers.  The novel opens with them being given double food portions, and being joyful about it - the reason being that half their comrades have been gunned down.  The comic and the tragic constantly intertwine in the narrative, and that was one of several things that reminded me of the final Blackadder TV series (although, of course, any influence would have been in the other direction).  So, Remarque tells of army jokes, a ridiculous naked trip to some French women happy, ahem, to help the war effort, a fellow soldier who always seems able to procure smart clothes and exotic foods wherever they are.... but, on the flip side, murder and death are never far away.  Remarque's images are striking and effective:

There in the bed is our pal Kemmerich, who was frying horsemeat with us not long ago, and squatting with us in a shell hole - it's still him, but it isn't really him any more; his image has faded, become blurred, like a photographic plate that's had too many copies made from it.

There is a curious conflict in reading the novel, of sympathy with a hero who does not feel sympathy for the enemy.  Paul is intelligent and kind, and even discusses the futility of war - but Remarque shows the veil of dark violence that is second-nature to him in moments of attack.  And yet, when this attack is at close-quarters, things change.  There is an astonishing scene where Paul kills another man in a hole created by a shell in no-man's-land.  He stabs the Frenchman, to stop him alerting anybody to his presence - but, as the man slowly dies, Paul is filled with regret - and speaks movingly to the dead body:

"I didn't mean to kill you, mate.  If you were to jump in here again, I wouldn't do it, not so long as you were sensible too.  But earlier on you were just an idea to me, a concept in my mind that called up an automatic response - it was that concept that I stabbed.  It is only now that I can see that you are a human being like me.  I just thought about your hand-grenades, your bayonet and your weapons - now I can see your wife, and your face, and what we have in common.  Forgive me, camarade!  We always realise too late.  Why don't they keep on reminding us that you are all miserable wretches just like us, that your mothers worry themselves just as much as ours and that we're all just as scared of death and that we die the same way and feel the same pain."

But minutes later, Paul dismisses these words as being the emotions of the moment, and survival is once more his only consideration.  The battle scenes often felt a bit like boys playing at soldiers - only, of course, it was real lives at stake, and real, horrible deaths.  The introduction in the Folio edition mentions that British reviewers in the 1920s (for it was translated almost immediately, and sold over a million copies in English within a year) complained about the indecency of describing soldiers using the toilet.  But slaughter and depictions of lingering death were acceptable.  Go figure, as our American cousins would say.  (I should add, descriptions of death and pain, though naturally upsetting, are never gratuitous in this novel - leaving them out would be a huge disservice to the soldiers who experienced them.)

Above all, All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel which shows the futility, anguish, and unfairness of war. Although never didactic, it is impossible to read about these experiences (which, I assume, reflect many of Remarque's own) without loathing war and what it does to the everyman.  Well, I say that.  Ten years later, of course, much of the world was involved in another.

Towards the end of the novel, Paul thinks:

We are soldiers, and only as an afterthought and in a strange and shamefaced way are we still individual human beings.

That may have been true for the brutalities of war and 'those who died as cattle', but one of the greatest things about this great novel is the way in which Remarque humanises the soldiers.  Paul is, essentially, every hapless WW1 soldier - German, English, wherever - and All Quiet on the Western Front should, in my opinion, be on every high school history syllabus across Europe.

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Life in a Day

I'm greatly enjoying your comments on yesterday's post, so do keep them coming!

Have I mentioned yet that I've set up a two-person film club with my friend Andrea?  I think I have, but I'll recap - we take it in turns to host and choose the film, and then put our comments and scores out of ten in a little notebook.  So far we've watched some truly wonderful films, and a few not-so-wonderful ones.  The list is: I Live in Grosvenor Square, And A Nightingale Sang, The Enchanted April, Secrets & Lies, Like Crazy, Separate Tables, On Approval, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Mildred Pierce, Shakespeare Wallah, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Life in a Day.  We've covered the 1940s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, and 2010s (but not 2000s - yet).

Life in a Day was the one we watched yesterday - my choice, as it's one of my very favourite films.  I shan't repeat what I wrote in my 2011 review (do go and have a read!) but I did want to mention that it's available on YouTube, for those of you who wanted to see it.  And not illegally on YouTube, but legitimately put there by the people who made it - because it was a YouTube initiative, I assume.  Please set aside an hour and a half to watch this delightful, moving, poignant, beautiful, funny, inspiring film.  It reminds me how infinitely varied humans are - and yet how much we all have in common.

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The Greats

This is an idle question, but perhaps an entertaining one too.  I was thinking to myself, while reading a biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett, which authors I would place among the Truly Greats.  There are thousands of authors who are good, hundreds who are very good, but I could only come up with a list of five whom I consider to be Great.  That is, their writing is not only better than other authors', but different somehow - and so different that even imitators seem to belong to another world, or perhaps another plane.

On that list, after careful consideration, I put, in order that they wrote:

William Shakespeare
Jane Austen
Charles Dickens
Virginia Woolf
Ivy Compton-Burnett

I doubt anybody would put together this same list.  I am limited to the authors I have read and that, in turn, is limited to writing in modern English.  Some people might only have one name on their list; a lot would put down many more.  I have not necessarily chosen my favourite authors (although three of these - the women - would qualify for that too.) That would be a substantially longer list.  I have chosen the only writers whose work resonates (to me) with something extra, something special, something which sets them enormously apart from anybody else.

As I say, in some ways this is an artificial question - but I suspect some of you might have answers.  And I'd be intrigued to hear them.

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A House in Flanders - Michael Jenkins

I wouldn't usually write a book review for the weekend (although this self-imposed rule might well be something nobody notices?) but today I am seeing a couple of lovely ladies from the internet, in beautiful Malvern, and one of them gave me A House in Flanders - thank you Carol!  (The other is Barbara, of Milady's Boudoir, so I expect to see a post about a Malvern trip there, in due course.)  Since I'll be seeing Carol, I thought I should write about the book she gave me about this time last year - which would mean it was during our trip to Chatsworth, I think.  The edition I have is from Souvenir Press, but it has also been reprinted as one of the lovely Slightly Foxed editions.

Although this book qualifies for my Reading Presently project (I never did write an update on that... well, I've read 29/50, which is a super quick update, and shows I have a little way to go) it would also cover a tricky year for my Century of Books, being published in 1992 - and since it is about the author's experience as 14 year old boy in 1951, that indicates quite how long his memory has had to stretch itself.

In that year, Jenkins spent the summer with his 'aunts in Flanders' - although they were no blood relation, they were mysteriously called aunts by his parents; all is revealed in the book - and, despite being without young companions, experiences the sort of halcyon summer I didn't realise existed outside of fiction.  Most of the other residents of the beautiful Flanders house are elderly women - sisters, sisters-in-law, nieces and the like - with the odd man thrown in, and chief amongst these is Tante Yvonne.  Although she hardly leaves the house and garden any more, and scarcely moves around those, she is a force of kindness and strength that holds the household together.  Everybody - even her intimidating sister Alice - bows to her natural authority, and a rather moving closeness develops between Yvonne and Michael.

I am always dubious about autobiographies which claim to recall verbatim conversations which happened years earlier - I can't remember conversations I had ten minutes ago, let alone forty years - but I suppose that is necessary in order to have any dialogue in the book at all.  What is more revealing is the way in which the characters - from happy-go-lucky, slightly downtrodden Auguste to glamorous Mathilde, and everyone in between - are drawn with a curious mixture of the fourteen year old's perspective and the adult's reflection.  A boy of fourteen is certainly capable of compassion and empathy, to a certain extent, but Jenkins' understanding of age and weariness seems insightful for a man of 55 (as he was at the time of publication), let alone a teenager.

It was a very busy summer. And when I say busy, I mean busy - in fiction he wouldn't have got away with the number of significant incidents that happened, from a legal tussle to helping the local madwoman to the return of a German soldier who had occupied the house during the Second World War.  I kept forgetting that it was all over the course of a few months.  As though to draw attention away from this whirl of action, each chapter focuses on a different person in the milieu (or arriving from outside it), which certainly helps bring the people to the fore, rather than the events.

Jenkins' nostalgia silently permeates the book, and that is another factor which could only (of course) have come with time and reflection.  As he writes towards the end: "I was surprised by how passionately I wanted this world I had so recently discovered to stay intact."  That hope was, of course, impossible - and the book closes with the death of Yvonne, some time after Jenkins returned to his everyday life.  But in the affectionate and moving portrait he put together of his summer in Flanders, and the 'aunts' he met there, he has created a way to keep that world intact, and it is beautiful.

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A trip to buy books...

I was having lunch with Naomi (of the erstwhile blog Bloomsbury Bell) the other day, and in amongst bookish chatter and catching-up, she happened to mention that she had found a magical bookshop in Wantage.  She described it as a sort of Aladdin's cave of literary wonder, and it was all I could do not to push my salads aside uneaten, and hope on a bus to Wantage immediately.  My self-control didn't last very long as, only a couple of days later, I found myself on that selfsame bus...  Since I haven't had a day away from my thesis for a while, it felt well-earned.

It all started very cheerily on a walk I discovered the other day.  The other day I realised that this beautiful riverside walk was my path to the town centre from my new house (more or less), and so I headed along here to catch the bus.  It's slightly longer than the walk along the roads, but I think we can all agree that this is a much better alternative?

I must stop judging places by their name.  'Wantage' is such an unprepossessing name that I'd assumed it was concrete and ugly - whereas in fact it is a beautiful market town.  As demonstrated, indeed, by the market that was happening while I was there - which stopped me taking photos of the gorgeous old buildings.

Detailed instructions from Naomi led me to this door...

Rather curious that it's called a 'shopping mall', since it's actually only one shop - well, a furniture shop combined with a bookshop.  And inside, as Naomi promised, there was a long corridor flanked with books.  One bookcase was filled with Viragos (and not quite filled with them by the time I left) but the rest were romance and unexciting modern fiction.  But that corridor led to various other rooms, at strange and architecturally spurious angles, and it was a definite book haven.  The hardback fiction section wasn't quite as brilliant as I'd hoped, but the biography and paperback sections were superb, and the most fruitful room was filled with a miscellaneous selection of classics and hardbacks that should, were the shop logical, have been shelved elsewhere.  And there were these...

(Karyn - I took the photo for you, and this isn't even all of them!  You'll have to add this to your itinerary next time you're in the UK.)

You're probably waiting to hear what I bought - and with very cheap prices, I didn't restrain myself...

The Long Weekend by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge
I've been keeping an eye out for this during my whole DPhil, since it's a really useful social history of the interwar years.  I didn't realise how cheap copies were online, otherwise I'd have bought it years ago - but hopefully it'll still be useful for final thesis edits!

Love, Let Me Not Hunger by Paul Gallico
Gallico and puppets was genius in Love of Seven Dolls, so Gallico and circuses could well be a brilliant combination.  So long as it doesn't go all fey and whimsical... Gallico can fall either side of that line.

The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf
The Autobiography of Storm Jameson (vol.1 & vol.2)
I still haven't read anything by Jameson (beyond a non-fiction book about contemporary novelists) but I do love an author autobiography - and I do, of course, love anything connected with Vita or Virginia.

The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester
I don't work for the OED any more, but whenever I told people that I'd read a book about it (which was Lynda Mugglestone's Lost For Words) they thought I was talking about this one.  And it's not too late to learn a bit more about the history of the job I loved so much.

Mr Beluncle by V.S. Pritchett
I loved Pritchett's autobiography (my review here), and this was in the back of my mind somewhere... maybe mentioned in that book?  Or own up if you were the person who mentioned it!

The Hothouse by the East River by Muriel Spark
The Finishing School by Muriel Spark
A couple more Sparks to add to my collection!  I think that I have all of them, now - I especially like the beautiful edition of The Finishing School, and that might push it to the top of the pile - although the excellent reviews given to A Far Cry From Kensington during Muriel Spark Reading Week are strong competition...

At The Jerusalem by Paul Bailey
I wonder how many people have bought something by Bailey after reading that he was the inspiration for the author in Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont? (Is that right?  That's how I remembered it, anyway.)

An excellent haul, I think you'll agree - and the whole lot only set me back £23, which is pretty impressive.  It's been too long since I went to a newly-discovered bookshop, so I'm very grateful to Naomi for sharing the secret of this one!

Afterwards, I took my packed lunch off for a walk, certain that Wantage would have a little park somewhere - or a beautiful churchyard at the very least.  I was doubly rewarded - I walked through a beautiful churchyard to get to a JOHN BETJEMAN MILLENNIUM PARK.  Some of you may know that I avidly 'collect' millennium projects - my ex-housemate Mel and I used to go in hunt of them, and they range from boulders to mosaics to church gates.  Almost every village has one - and most of them were unveiled in about 2003.  My own village in Somerset has a signpost telling you all the road names, since this information is otherwise kept secret.  So a millennium park was pretty impressive - and equally nice were the various pieces of sculpture with Betjeman's poetry on them. Turns out he lived in Wantage between 1951-1972.

All in all, a delightful day out!  If you're ever in the area, I recommend a day trip to Wantage - and, of course, the bookshop.

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