Set in a northern mining town, the novel deftly draws us into the secretive life of troubled Gordon Kingdom. Gordon struggles with the fate of his seriously ill wife and patiently observes the unusual goings-on of his neighbours in Cressingham Vale. The arrival of the enigmatic Angelica prompts Gordon to make difficult decisions, as well as to embark on a flurry of cake baking. The book elegantly weaves prosaic tragedy, dark comedy and Hitchcockian menace.
For those who have never heard actors discuss their trade, I may say that there is nothing more painfully boring on earth. I think it is their lack of accuracy, their frightful passion for generality that rob their discussions of interest. They were talking, this time, about that ancient problem of whether one should, while acting, be more aware of the audience of the person or person with whom one is playing the scene: I must have heard this same argument once a fortnight over the last four years, and never has anyone got a step nearer to any kind of illumination, because instead of talking rationally they just wander round the morasses of their own personalities, producing their own weaknesses for examination as though they were interesting, objective facts about human nature.I don't think I realised quite how much I do revere the theatre, until I bristled at this sort of blasphemy! And, oh, what a cow Emma is. I know some say it shouldn't matter how likeable a character is, but I always maintain (as others have said before me) that it does matter if the author clearly sets up a character to be likeable, and fails. And, after all, I often like books because they have charming characters, so why shouldn't it work the other way around?
All her life Thérèse treated money as an illusion: a confidence or conjuring trick that had to be mastered.Spurling goes through Thérèse's family in a little more depth, exploring the characters of various siblings and children (and especially develops the nature of one relative by marriage, an avant-garde artist called... Henri Matisse!) but the outline is there - and, such is the brevity of La Grande Thérèse, that the outline isn't expanded a huge amount. It is astonishing that this trickster got so far - but, of course, it couldn't last. With hundreds of creditors wanting their money, it turned out to be a relatively minor court order (for the address of her mysterious American benefactor) which brought the whole house of cards down. The family disappeared. The nation was in outcry. A lengthy trial eventually... but, no. Although this is not a novel, I shall not spoil the ending.
Thérèse Daurignac was born in 1856 in the far southwest of France in the province of the Languedoc, once celebrated for its troubadours and their romances. Life for Thérèse in the little village of Aussonne, just outside Toulouse, was anything but romantic. She was the eldest child in a poor family: a stocky, bright-eyed little girl, not particularly good-looking, with nothing special about her except the power of her imagination. Thérèse told stories. In an age without television, in a countryside where most people still could not read, she transformed the narrow, drab, familiar world of the village children into something rich and strange.Our sympathies even seem to be nudged towards Thérèse and her family, admiring the audacity of her financial conjuring tricks. In a fairy tale, perhaps she would be a heroine - because consequences in a fairy tale are not really consequences. Yet her selfish ambition destroyed many, many lives - thousands of people were left ruined; a substantial number killed themselves. They are not quite forgotten by Spurling, but this extraordinary tale could easily have been given a more tragic structure, rather than the they-do-it-with-mirrors account Spurling prioritises.
In 2000, or thereabouts, I read an awful lot of Agatha Christie novels - mostly Miss Marple, because my love of slightly eccentric old women started way back then - but since then, I've only read one or two. In 2010 I read The Murder at the Vicarage, and thought it might issue in a new dawn of Christie reading. Well, two years later that dawn has, er, dawned. After hearing an interesting paper on Agatha Christie covers at a recent conference, I decided that a fun way to fill some gaps in A Century of Books would be to dip into my shelf of Christies, many unread. Since she wrote one or two a year for most of the 20th century, she is an ideal candidate for this sort of gap-filling.
"Like a good detective story myself," remarked Miss Howard. "Lots of nonsense written, though. Criminal discovered in last chapter. Every one dumbfounded. Real crime - you'd know at once."
"There have been a great number of undiscovered crimes," I argued.
"Don't mean the police, but the people that are right in it. The family. You couldn't really hoodwink them. They'd know."I love it when Christie gets all meta. In One, Two, Buckle My Shoe one character accuses another, "You're talking like a thriller by a lady novelist." Heehee! But the best strain of meta-ness (ahem) in The Mysterious Affair at Styles is adorable Captain Hastings. He narrates, and he is not very bright. He considers himself rather brilliant at detection, and is constantly sharing all manner of clues and suppositions with Poirot, only for Poirot to laugh kindly and disabuse him. Hastings really is lovely - and doesn't seem to have suffered even a moment's psychological unease at having been invalided away from WW1. Poirot, of course, is brilliant. It's all rather Holmes/Watson, but it works.
Isn't that line about the bullet sublime? (Although, again, demonstrates a remarkable lack of shellshock on Hastings' part.) What I found ironic about this, the first Poirot novel, is that (with decades of detection ahead of him), Hastings thinks:Poirot was an extraordinary-looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound. Yet this quaint dandified little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police. As a detective, his flair had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most baffling cases of the day.
Hastings is wrong, of course, but as a retired man, Poirot must enjoy one of the longest retirements on record. As for the novel itself - Christie tries to do far too much in it, and the eventual explanation (though ingenious) is very complicated. Colin tells me that Christie acknowledges the over-complication in her autobiography. It's not surprising for a first novel, and it does nonetheless involve some rather sophisticated twists and turns.The idea crossed my mind, not for the first time, that poor old Poirot was growing old. Privately I thought it lucky that he had associated with him someone of a more receptive type of mind.
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940)Having sat through an absurd talk recently, where the embittered speaker spat out 'bourgeois' about once a minute (and then, after lambasting his own bottom-of-the-pile education, revealed that he'd been to grammar school) this came as a breath of fresh air! One of my few rules in life is "If someone uses the word 'bourgeois' instead of 'middle-class', they're probably not worth paying attention to, and they certainly won't pay attention to you.' The other thing I loved was the morality Christie slipped into Poirot's denouement... but to give away more would be telling.She paused, then, her agreeable, husky voice deepening, she said venomously: "I loathe the sight of you - you bloody little bourgeois detective!"She swept away from him in a whirl of expensive model drapery.Hercule Poirot remained, his eyes very wide open, his eyebrows raised and his hand thoughtfully caressing his moutaches.The epithet bourgeois was, he admitted, well applied to him. His outlook on life was essentially bourgeois, and always had been[.]
He said: "Miss Fisher says you're here for the day."
"I'm just crossing Paris," Henrietta said with cosmopolitan ease.
"Is that your monkey?"
"Yes. I've had him ever since I was born."
"Oh," said Leopold, looking at Charles vaguely.
"How old are you?" Henrietta enquired.
"Nine."
"Oh, I'm eleven."
"Miss Fisher's mother is very ill," said Leopold. He sat down in an armchair with his knees crossed and, bending forward, studied a cut on one knee. The four velvet armchairs, each pulled out a little way from a corner, faced in on the round table that reflected the window and had in its centre a tufted chenille mat. He added, wrinkling his forehead: "So Mariette says, at least."
"Who is Mariette?"
"Their maid. She wanted to help me dress."
"Do you think she is going to die?" said Henrietta.
"I don't expect so. I shall be out, anyway."
"That would be awful," said Henrietta, shocked.
"I suppose it would. But I don't know Mme. Fisher."
It is never natural for children to smile at each other: Henrietta and Leopold kept their natural formality. She said: "You see, I'd been hoping Miss Fisher was going to take me out."
Leopold, looking about the salon, said: "Yes, this must be a rather funny way to see Paris." But he spoke with detachment; it did not matter to him.In the first quarter of the novel, little takes place to propel the plot. Henrietta meets Mme. Fisher (slowly, wryly, dying in a bedroom upstairs); Leopold snoops through Miss Fisher's letters, and finds letters from his adoptive mother and Henrietta's grandmother, and an empty envelope from his biological mother. What makes this section so special is the gradual, engaging way Bowen builds up the relationship between the children - character is paramount. Although they develop a fragile and fleeting friendship, they have the child's selfish indifference to each other's feelings - as Bowen expresses so strikingly:
With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.This passage demonstrates one of the qualities of Bowen's writing that I most admired and liked - the way she moves from the specific to the general. Authors are often told "show, don't tell", and Bowen finds an original way to follow this maxim while subtly evading it. She never plays too heavy a narrative hand with the characters, letting their actions and words form their personalities, but then she steps back a pace or two, and draws general conclusions about children or lovers or parents or people in general. She shows with the cast, and tells about the world.
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| actual houses in Paris wot I saw once |
As we went under the bridge to get to the elephant-house Amelia insisted on buying buns for the rhinoceros.The most successful sections are such as these - when Amelia and Teddy wander around and indulge in frivolous conversation. It's witty - not the structured, repeatable sort of wit we meet in Wilde, but the variety that puts a happy smile on one's face.
"But they don't eat buns," I objected.
"He will if I offer it to him," said Amelia confidently.
"My dear Amelia," I said, "it is a matter of common knowledge that the rhinoceros, belonging as it does to the odd-toed set of ungulates, has a gnarled skin, thickened so as to form massive plates, which are united by thinner portions forming flexible joints. Further, the animal in question, though fierce and savage when roused, is a vegetable feeder. In fact, he may be said to be herbivorous."
"I don't care," said Amelia defiantly; "all animals in the Zoo eat buns."
"I can tell you three that don't."
"I bet a shilling you can't - not straight off."
I instanced the electric eel, the ceciopian silk moth, and the coconut crab. So Amelia paid for our teas. But in the elephant-house the rhinoceros took his bun with verve - not to say aplomb.
I am a harmless, mild-mannered person. There is nothing "strong" about my work; nothing that calls for any violent display of emotion on the part of my puppets. I doubt if there could be an illegitimate canary (even) in my stories...I can't see quite why Milne took so against Lovers in London. If it is not up to the standard of his next few books, it isn't so far behind them as to make it embarrassing. If it were available in bookshops across the land, I wouldn't hesitate in telling you to get a copy to enjoy on a rainy Sunday afternoon - as it is, in pricey POD editions, you'd be much better off hunting for the much cheaper, much more attractive editions of slightly later books by AAM.
Excuse that slightly trumpet-blowing story (it doesn't feel trumpet-blowing, since it's about me-a-decade-ago, a very different person to me-now) because it does have some relevance to my post. When reading that Collected Short Stories, the stories which didn't particularly grab me were those from In A German Pension (1911) - Mansfield's first book. A few years ago I bought a beautiful Hesperus edition (tautology, of course - all of their books are beautiful) and I decided that it was about time that I gave In A German Pension another go. I was actually a little pleased to see that my opinion hasn't really changed. It doesn't prove that I was right a decade ago, but at least it means I've stayed fairly consistent in my tastes.At that moment the postman, looking like a German army officer, came in with the mail. He threw my letters into my milk pudding, and then turned to a waitress and whispered. She retired hastily. The manager of the pension came in with a little tray. A picture postcard was deposited on it, and reverently bowing his head, the manager of the pension carried it to the Baron.This is all well and good - but it is not where Mansfield excels. The dry, sardonic quip, the understatement, is a far cry from the subtle, clever examination of sorrow or guilt or self-awareness that Mansfield paints in delicate shades in her finest work. Instead there are caricature women criticising one another - the sort of ribaldry and comedy-writ-large which one would expect from Jerome K. Jerome, perhaps:
Myself, I felt disappointed that there was not a salute of twenty-five guns.
"Of course it is difficult for you English to understand when you are always exposing your legs on cricket fields, and breeding dogs in your back gardens. The pity of it! Youth should be like a wild rose. For myself I do not understand how your women ever get married at all."As a brand of humour, it can be very successful - but it feels awkward from a pen that is already learning some sensitivities. It's certainly not bad at all - it is even good. It's just the wrong fit for Mansfield.
She heard him walk down the passage and then pause - lighting a cigarette. Yes - a faint scent of delicious cigarette smoke penetrated her room. She sniffed at it, smiling again. Well, that had been a fascinating interlude! He looked so amazingly happy: his heavy clothes and big buttoned gloves; his beautifully brushed hair... and that smile... 'Jolly' was the word - just a well-fed boy with the world for his playground. People like that did one good - one felt 'made over' at the sight of them. Sane they were - so sane and solid. You could depend on them never having one mad impulse from the day they were born until the day they died. And Life was in league with them - jumped them on her knee - quite rightly, too. At that moment she noticed Casimir's letter, crumpled up on the floor - the smile faded. Staring at the letter she began braiding her hair - a dull feeling of rage crept through her - she seemed to be braiding it into her brain, and binding it, tightly, above her head...Of all the writers taken too early, I think Katherine Mansfield's death at 34 is the most tragic, and the most frustrating. Her talents were not in decline - indeed, in the two years before she died of tuberculosis she wrote not only her best stories, but the best short stories I have ever read. Who knows what she could have written had she lived another 30, 40, 50 years? Still - in those 34 years she achieved quite astonishing brilliance and beauty with her writing. If In A German Pension isn't quite up to the level of her best work, then at least it serves to show us, a little, how she got there.
He was a lieutenant when he and my mother were married. The had first met when they were both fourteen, at a mixed hockey match, and he always claimed that the first word he ever heard her say was 'Damn', which I suppose, to judge from her vehemence in protesting that it was the first time she had ever said it, was quite a word in those days. My father's invariable retort - oh, the lovely ritual changlessness of family hokes and traditions! - was that for a first time, she said it with remarkable fluency.I think my favourite thing about childhood memoirs is the revelation of family jokes. It makes the reader feel, at least for a page or two, that they've been inducted into the family. We all have these, don't we? And they're usually senseless and silly, and oh so precious!
In a small back room with peeling wallpaper, under the eye of a gaunt elderly maid, I was stripped of my coat, leggings and tam-o'-shanter, in company with twelve or fourteen others of my kind. And with them, all on my own, so grown up, I filed through into the schoolroom, to be receive, as Royalty receives, by Miss Beck herself, who sat, upright as Royalty sits, in a heavily carved Victorian armchair.Isn't that blissful? There is quite a bit about this school and Miss Beck, who stayed in touch with every pupil she taught (or so Sutcliff claims!) - it is all fairly ordinary, but made extraordinary through Sutcliff's lovely writing and engaging personality.
My schooldays proper had begun.
Looking back with warm affection at that first school of mine, I can hardly believe that it was real, and not something dreamed up out of the pages of Cranford or Quality Street. I suppose nowadays it would not be allowed to exist at all. Miss Amelia Beck had no teaching qualifications whatsoever, save the qualifications of long experience and love. She was the daughter of a colonel of Marines, in her eighty-sixth year when I became one of her pupils; and for more than sixty years, in her narrow house overlooking the Lines at Chatham, she had taught the children of the dockyard and the barracks. She accepted only the children of service families. Oh, the gentle snobbery of a bygone age; bygone even then, and having less to do with class than totem. It was her frequent boast that she had smacked, in their early days, most of the senior officers of both services. Both, not all three, for the RAF was too young as yet to count for much in Miss Beck's scheme of things. But I do not think that it can have been true, unless she had gentled greatly with the passing of her years. For I never knew her to smack anybody during the year that I sat at her feet.
