Mrs Lirriper's Lodgings by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Andrew Halliday, Edmund Yates, Amelia B. Edwards and Charles Alston Collins (1863)

 One of those portmanteau pieces so favoured in Victorian times particularly. This came out under Dickens' auspices in All the Year Round - all seven pieces were printed together as the special Christmas issue for 1863. They vary enormously. Dickens' starter is a classic rendering in a lower middle class landlady's voice, replete with jealousy of a rival landlady down the street, and the posturing of superiority associated with it. He holds the voice brilliantly in his usual theatrical vein. Various lodgers come to the fore, both sympathetic and otherwise, with a mainstay in the Major, who has been with her for a while (having started out down the street!) and who provides chorus-like support. It culminates with an ill-starred couple together under false pretences, where the female of the pair ends up abandoned at Mrs Lirriper's and dying in misery. She does leave a little son, whom Mrs Lirriper and the Major take on, and who becomes the light of their lives, thus fulfilling the required sentimental elevation for a Christmas number. Gaskell's follow-up, Crowley Castle, is barely associated. A stirring and serious tale of a young woman's errors in love and their dire consequences, including bitterness to the depth of murder, it only belongs because she has wrapped it in an extra layer of being related to the Major, I think by Mrs Lirriper as a story she's heard (in a less obviously characterful voice), but I could have misinterpreted that. Halliday's third is a strange one, which begins as potentially supernatural with a doctor suddenly appearing in the midst of a mutual appreciation society of young men starting out in life, full of sweetness and belief. He corrupts it slowly with cynicism and doubt. Then, in a big twist, which frankly feels cranked, he is discovered by one of the young men not to be an unholy demon, but rather a profoundly good man who is ashamed of being kind-hearted! My suspicions were activated; perhaps this was to be used some other way, and Dickens agreed to have it as a contribution if the tone could be lightened? It falls oddly into two parts. Yates' fourth suffers from the same disease. An unbearable braggart and dominator comes to stay at an inn in Wales, planning as part of his stay to visit distant, as yet unknown, relatives nearby. The family are quickly horrified by his boorishness and attempt to avoid him as best they can. He particularly dismisses, as a lofty metropolitan, the fiancé of one of the daughters of the family, and all is set for conflagration as the family take against him more seriously. But then, suddenly, the fiancé gets into trouble while out swimming, and it is our man who dives into dangerous seas to save him. Again the unmistakable feeling of something which starts out as a portent for comeuppance twisting into a tale of heroism in pursuance of a more wholesome tone. Edwards' fifth is a splendid tale of jealousy and ultimately murder among the kilns of the Potteries. It has a quiet mystery which indicates how good a writer of ghost tales she is, with the murdered man appearing to a lonely kiln worker late at night with the deep red oven-glow on his face among the shadows. Why Dickens didn't require of Gaskell and Edwards the same turn to sentiment as Halliday and Yates is a question - were they too well-established to brook interference? Collins' sixth is what could be described as a successful essay upon the terms of Yates' earlier piece. Another stupid boor with pretensions is inveigled into a duel by friends who ostensibly support his objection with a love rival. But we are quietly let into the knowledge, by implication anyway, that his conception of himself is a long way from that of others. In the end a whole charade is gone through; the rival suddenly stops the proceeding to apologise, but is heard laughing on leaving the field. Our man and his friends retire to an inn to celebrate his victory, but their speeches are interrupted by church bells. As these grow more clamorous, he goes to the window just in time to see the love rival and sweetheart riding by in their wedding carriage; they laugh and kiss their hands to him, waving - all his ludicrous dreams of claiming the woman for wife are smashed. This one has been allowed its intended conclusion and is more satisfying for it. Allowed because the author was married to Dickens' daughter? Then Dickens himself returns for a short seventh, rehashing the absolute pleasure the Major and Mrs Lirriper take in Jemmy, the boy they have adopted. He tells a story which highlights his delight in the hearth and home he's been allowed through being their charge. A fun collection with some ups and downs seemingly in its making.

Fall River and other uncollected stories by John Cheever (1994)

 This volume has a chequered history. It ran foul, after some time in gestation, of the Cheever estate, but the publishers stood their ground and have kept it in print subsequently. It reprints a selection of thirteen early stories that predate his first book in 1943. Given that period, it is no surprise that the earlier ones (the earliest is 1931) particularly show the influence of modernism, with a sense of folk repetition and starkly simple poetry to the prose. They also show his politics, and commitment to the points of view of ordinary people, touched by the depredations of the Great Depression in particular. As the volume progresses and the 40s come into view there is a slight shift toward more straightforward narrative - a different shade of power is embraced. Quiet determination, or desperation, carry with them the Hopperesque hues of midcentury American human conditions. The details don't stay in the mind overly, just an overall mood - the closest I've come to an equivalent would be the greyey-greens of William Maxwell. As a first exposure it is encouraging, and I want to read more, to see what it was that became his signature, and how this one acts as a first instalment. The first published book is crazily expensive now, so here's hoping some of the collections currently available pull all the stories in it together in one group.

"Little Known of These Waters" by "Standby" (1945)

 "Standby" was the early pseudonym of RS Porteous, who became a well-known novelist in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. This was his first book. It is a collection of fictionalised sketches and stories of a certain brand of life in wartime - in this instance, the life aboard all the ragtag small merchant ships which had been pressed into service during the Second World War in Australia. The stories all relate to the part of this ramshackle fleet which operated around the coasts of New Guinea and northern Queensland, ferrying supplies essential to the war effort. They are stories of action with a very strong human element, and highly entertaining. They range between arenas of moonlit silence with darkened ships, eerie passage sought in stealth, to sailings being stymied by overconfident captains ignoring appalling steering or lack of good navigation. Obviously sea-weather predominates, as do all the tensions in small crews full of big characters who wouldn't normally have been seen as fit for military service. There is a consistent sense of derring-do being undone, underlined with humour and sometimes tragic pathos. The title apparently comes from a rubric on maps of (particularly) the New Guinea coast at the time, where charting was insufficient at best. "Standby" went on to publish a novel in 1949 with seemingly similar themes, Sailing Orders, which won second prize in a Sydney Morning Herald competition for the best novel about the war. Looking forward to that.

A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi (2017)

 This one has been retitled for the UK, and given what I would call a 'modern goo-goo' cover design (though better than many of that stamp), to cater to the tastes of the current craze in "sweet" representation. The original title was Nos Richesses, which has survived into the US edition as Our Riches. The US edition has gone for a travel-style cover design. It's a documentary novel I guess, using slices of history and imagining encrustations upon it (diary entries etc) to flesh out the picture. The bookshop in question is Les Vraies Richesses in Algiers, where Edmond Charlot, from the 30s, helped to jumpstart the careers of Camus, Roblès and other luminaries of Francophone North Africa, particularly Algeria. The author has interfiled numbered chapters concerning the emptying of the closed shop in the current time, and the life of the young man tasked to do it, as well as his interactions with passionate or unconcerned locals, mainly of the street on which it stands, while the job is done. Memories inevitably come up, as does a lot of politics, both historical and current, and how those play out on the street. Between these are largely invented diary excerpts of Charlot and chapters on particular historical moments which were crucially tied to the shop, giving slices of war history, publishing history, the ups and downs of the shop's fortunes and so on. It all forms a chance for the author to essay a broad picture of a narrow set of events and how they ramify. On the whole, it's a savourful and interesting mixture. Every now and then some reference will feel a little emptily gestural, where the intent of being atmospheric and political will be undercut by nods to profundities which feel a bit banal. The author speaks at the end about the closing of the shop being her invention, and that it's still operating - nice to think of that.

Man's Mortality by Michael Arlen (1933)

 This is one of those novels which I feel would have a better reputation if it had been by someone else, or had come out near the beginning of the author's career. Coming as it does after a long string of hugely successful, elegant, somewhat philosophical, dashing novels of high life, as different to them as it is in a good number of ways - well, the die had already been cast, and it is shrouded and eclipsed to some degree. What Arlen stood for had been determined, and this didn't quite fit. Though I have seen some of the contemporaneous reviews - people were impressed at the time, and saw what a revolution it was. But the fact of how good it is couldn't quite make it out to the light in a more permanent sense. This story of the world fifty years hence (it is set mainly in 1987) is one in which Arlen clearly wants to say that he has something to say beyond his usual fare, and, at this more matured point in his career, the means to say it. He posits a rearrangement of world power into an international stasis via the discovery of certain technical innovations in flight. There is now a company, International Aircraft and Airways, or IA&A, at the centre of the web of global interconnection, and nationalist interests are very much subdued across the world. But there are still a few outliers, Italy and China being the most powerful. Also, the Directors of IA&A, a small but broadly multi-national group of supposedly well-meaning public benefactors, have begun to assume levels of control and attitudes to power which are showing signs of corruption, although this fact is well hidden, all seeming serene outwardly. Into this mix, Arlen stirs an influential father and son whose new invention of even further technical prowess in flight threatens, in the hands of the son, who is aware of the corruption, to become very awkward indeed. Young David Knox has developed machines which can utterly defeat those of IA&A, and he has right on his side, aware as he is of growing chicanery among the bigwigs of the company. What Arlen manages to do, though, amongst these futuristic thriller plotlines, is weave in confidently powerful discussion of the manoeuvrings and sleights of hand as egos battle one another, as beliefs come into high contrast, and as personalities respond to pressure, both raising and lowering, all while very little is out in the open, and secret strategizing is going on at a hectic rate, guessing others' capacities (or lack of them), conniving to be the one who comes out on top. The characters are in a good way recognizable as Arlenian - they are stylish people of the 'thirties, with a sophisticatedly fashionable way of speaking, but he has managed to subdue their high vogueishness much more to the plot. To this amalgam he adds a level of drawing out, a pulling through of threads of personal and political philosophy which are mature and telling. And above and beyond that, even, there are touches which betray a wish for spiritual deep extension, whereby at certain points of stress, what is happening broaches the potentially supernatural and puzzling, in an oddly sinister register. The culmination illustrates how Arlen was feeling about the future, with an inevitable slide to break-up of hegemony, revivified nationalism, and finally war. So this novel is prescient in some ways, a flight of fancy in others, and a fascinating example of a trapped author using watershed-of-career levels of energy to showcase skill.

Barnacles by J. MacDougall Hay (1916)

 I have to approach this one very quietly, because the feeling is that its essence is delicate. Very easily loseable. Hay's only other novel, 1914's Gillespie, is regarded rightly as a Scottish classic, and has been in print permanently since its "rediscovery" in the late 70s (there was a lonely second edition back in the 60s). By contrast, this second one is decidedly not celebrated. It is very different in key ways. I think some of the appeal of Gillespie, some of what gives it its primacy, lies in the plot, which is soaked in blood and deceit - a widely approachable pathway to notions of what is 'great'. This one has some of that, as a backstory to one of the main characters, but the remainder is another kettle of fish altogether, plot-wise, and tonally. Barnacles himself is not really the subsidiary character who appears in Gillespie. That gentleman had the same skin condition which gave him his nickname, but was a slightly windy rouser of men, known for his galvanizing capacity. This Barnacles is "one of God's innocents", a gentle wanderer, with a Christ-like demeanour. He is abused by his touchy and domineering father on their farm until he can take no more. He runs away with a sheep and heads into Paisley, causing great amusement there wandering around with the animal, trying to sell it in order to pay for a violin, which he loves to play. Hay has us understand his difference by his feeling of fellowness with the creature and his strange honesty when dealing with people, a balance of seeing through to deeper things, especially those of a moral nature, and not seeing the usual worldlinesses at all, or being able to dismiss them. We are then introduced to the life of a banker he meets, who is intrigued by him and encourages him in his search for work. At his house, where he comes to play the violin, Barnacles meets a woman into whose story we are also taken. When younger, in Glasgow, she was engaged to a good young man but was a relative innocent herself. As soon as the young man's brother entered the picture, things began to go awry. The brother was a scheming manipulator, who managed to wheedle his way into the family, and turf the other brother out, replacing him in her 'affections', making the most of any hesitancies, jealousies and immaturities he can twist to his obsessed advantage. This is the closest part to the Hay of Gillespie; it's dark and savage. Barnacles in the meantime has taken up with a poor man, a carter named Skelly, his young son, Wee Kitchener, and his doddering father, Hector the sailor, in digs in the worst part of town. These three have an almost Dickensian quality of theatrical simplicity, sorrow and sweetness. Another three varieties of innocent are added to our roster. Back in the darker story, the woman marries the evil brother; the original fiancé is lost in his own personal hell, and becomes a tramp. Martha, Mrs Normanshire as she becomes, already stressed and unhappy under all the manipulation which she has endured, realises as time goes by that Ganson, her new husband, is capable of extraordinary cruelty, both physical and emotional. After enduring horror, and the deaths of several of her family, she leaves him and comes under the protection, through friends, of the banker. She ends up buying a house nearby to his in Paisley, and is a close friend of the family in some secrecy and seclusion, as she fears Ganson finding her and all hell breaking loose. Barnacles is fascinated by Martha, placing her on a pedestal of beauty and goodness in his innocence, and responding deeply to her sorrow. She finds herself, despite his simplicities, or perhaps because of their contrast to her recent experience, also intrigued by him, but hamstrung by her married status, and their common shyness (hers through hesitancy and exhaustion, his through ignorance) on the subject of love. Barnacles' job as clerk for the council, always rather tenuous, falls through. He answers an advertisement to become factotum to a religiously-obsessed woman in Brieston (the locale of Gillespie), whose scheme for the redemption of the world appeals to his ideas of how things should be. He admires her, and is slavish to her dominance and high expectations - comedy abounds in her one-eyed crazedness, and is made subtle by Barnacles' positive responses. She sends him finally on a mission back to Paisley with great plans. In his time away, his beloved Hector has died, and Skelly and Wee Kitchener are no longer in their rooms. Barnacles, in some puzzlement, with a sense of loss and the beginnings of despair, heads to Martha's, seeking comfort, still unaware of his full feelings. He slips into her garden at night, hoping to hear her sing, one of his favourite things. But she hears his steps and comes outside to see him. She lets him know something that we have already been party to - that both Ganson and his done down brother Patrick are dead. Previously, we have been witness to the dire fight between them which ends in the total burning of the house in Glasgow - a harsh reckoning, echoing the scenes in Gillespie between Eoghan and his mother, resulting in the death of both. This has released Martha from both primal fear and her tied status. She and Barnacles can finally approach understanding of one another. They marry, and Barnacles is also reunited with Skelly and Wee Kitchener - Skelly is to be married to Martha's strong but eccentric housekeeper, who adores his boy. Style is the commonality between the two novels; both are fervid and spiralling. The harsh eye of Gillespie, squarely on the world and unremitting, contrasts the view in Barnacles, with folk-sweetness leavening the mixture, creating very interesting counterpoint. I admit to the wish that Hay had lived longer, to see what might have come next, given this well-strung richness.

A Fine Country by Elizabeth Troop (1969)

 Another neglected fine modern woman writer. I'm guessing the reason in this instance is her interest in the negative. She has an edgy sourness. It's a voice which bristles and indicates a steely glare. This is the story of Sylvia Cass, who has had a tough life, growing up poor and ramshackle through the war with an emotionally difficult single mother, and then a rough-and-tumble bohemian existence, tinged with frustration and melancholy, since. As a child she was a bit of an intelligent outsider, and the trope has continued since; she lives a somewhat separated life in her own world, sometimes getting others more than they do themselves, sometimes hopelessly behind the eight ball about them. In the now of the novel, she has worked her way up to a 'respectable' existence with husband George and two children, but the faultlines are starting to appear in mental instability and slightly wild behaviour. Of course I wonder how much of Sylvia is Troop herself. The current action (from which standpoint a lot of her history is surveyed) is her voluntary stay in a mental home to see if her condition can be divined more acutely. It is not her first stay there, which gives scope for Troop to essay her knowing spitty comments on staff, programmes and the like. She has developed a fascination for Rosa Luxemburg, finding presumably a fellow-feeling for firebrands and victims. The experimental style of this novel lends itself to some intermingling of Sylvia-and-Rosa as a conglomerate identity, though this might have been made more of. Troop's career grew modestly into the 70s and 80s until her early-ish death, and is now completely eclipsed. The "previous works" sections in her later novels do not mention this one, so she must have disavowed it at some point before her second novel, much later in 1976, with a different publisher. All I can say is that this one makes me want to read more.