Friday, August 31, 2012

The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves by Tobias Smollett (1762)

Smollett's shortest and least known book is brilliant. This story of a latter-day knight errant, really a gentleman who has been saddened by the loss of his sweetheart, wandering the English countryside and getting lost in farces and scrapes mainly brought about by the shenanigans of his cohort or the people they knock into along the way, is likenable to a long ribbon of varying colour. Many of Smollett's pet subjects are there - the verbosity of the legal profession, the quackery of doctors, the scheisterhood of astrologers and fortunetellers and, more broadly, the venality of humankind at its worst! But his other pets make it a very rounded meal - the soft deliciousness of love, the delight of a good human heart when rarely one is come across, the glorious silliness of obsessed humans too. In every one of his novels there is a character who could be played by no-one other than Brian Blessed. In this case it's Sam Crowe, a sea captain, whose language is as colourful as his curses are fulminous. He takes a liking to Greaves, and in an almost childlike way seeks to emulate him, his fancy completely taken by his idea of chivalry. In bilgewashed seagoing language he coruscates his way through adventure and misadventure - perplexed behind it all with why he doesn't quite cut the same dashing figure as our hero, and clothed ad hoc in jerkin and tinpot for helmet, where Launcelot has elegant armour and spurs. The plot revolves around Greaves' search for his Aurelia, who has been spirited away by a disobliging uncle, and who lands up in secret hiding places and cast into bedlam. The supporting cast of the mad, the self-aggrandizing, the sneaky, the perpetually complaining, and the few good souls who represent hope, keep this liveliness bubbling, colourful and very joyous.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"...In fact, we are all in the same circus created by Nature to amuse itself --"

"Nature!" said Raphael passionately. "Nature is a bloody fool! It begins by arousing in us all a need to love and be loved - and in nine cases out of ten it can't satisfy it."'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book Four)

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...never daring the banal, the stark word, it is our reticences that trap us after all. It happened everywhere: behind the tidy doors of marriage, in the dark bed of adventure, or in the social bumpings against one another in the crowded rooms where people massed together protectively in frenetic gaiety, hiding stubbornly - "I am alone" - using liquor, music, sex, to say - "You too?" It happened, sometimes, in rooms at the end of the day, after the scratch of gossip, the long political sighs, were done, and there was a lull, with people staring reflectively into their glasses, twirling the stems, that the lull deepened, a sentence died on the air, and it was as if everyone had plunged his arm into a deep well, searching, seeking - but no hands met and clasped.'

from Point of Departure, a piece in In the Absence of Angels by Hortense Calisher

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Men will not really see themselves until they have conquered the unconscious habit of regarding their fellow-men as blind.'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book Four)

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (1956)

Charteris' second novel feels much less rooted in his own life than the first, but who knows whether or not this is true. It occupies a strange matrix-point - triangulated between Evelyn Waugh, Compton Mackenzie and Hortense Calisher. It's set in Scotland, at an estate just inherited by Lionel Spote, the main character. He is typical Charteris (I say cheekily on the basis of two novels and a cursory glance at his others), with Jungian preoccupations, deeply conflicted self, put-uponness and bewilderedness, and a sour tone. This part is autobiographical I think - Lionel has too much in common with John Grant, the lead in his first novel, for this not to be the case. This one also takes us into dour territory, but unlike the first, it isn't especially strangulated and melancholy. Lionel is stymied in many ways, but this is drawn out with humour and absurdity. A pushy local dignitary wants to provide some employment in tough times by building an enormous machine which can, through technologically revolutionary means, make rope out of bracken, which the surrounding estates have in plenty. What follows is a comedy of shifting intentions, political vying, and bracing force of personality. The relish with which this is portrayed is the Mackenzie trig-point (along, of course, with its Scots setting). The Waugh influence is in the fine-point revelation of the upper class, climbing right through the mindset and giving it in superbly able detail. This mixture is then fed through Charteris' spare, unredundant, densely allusive prose, which is the Calisher likening. This is fascinating, and very occasionally mystifying, but always alive. Also included, as there was in the last one, is an at-odds love, in this instance with the bemused daughter of one of Lionel's nearest neighbours, the April of the title, with whose property his own 'marches' (borders). This element seems the least developed - I'll be intrigued to see whether he covers love more centrally again in future.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Commonplace Book

'Swiftly, steadily, she walked to the door. Mice, mice. All of them, always, mice trying to be pirates. Lechers, financiers, statesmen, great men, fathers, lovers...mice, full of craft, scampering away if you just looked at them, stinking with fear and wonder...'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book Three)

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...She knew Lionel like the inside of her bag - and when he read those articles in the Economist he was just the same as he used to be on his pot - couldn't bear to be disturbed. Yet if you had the courage to face his screams when you moved him - and potted him in a different place[,] then he was often happier than ever. And so it would be here when he got settled in. The smallest novelty made him feel insecure. That's why he liked all this psychology: by inviting these weird monkey-gods into his garden - he could pat them on their polysyllabic heads and feel secure from them. Id indeed - three letters were missing if you asked her.'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 23)

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...Peter had a Vauxhall car, a short sharp thing that stood out indignantly from the scrupulous traffic, like a full-stop in a page by Henry James...'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book Two)

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Commonplace Book

'It was dark now and the curtains were undrawn.

"What's that glow in the sky[?]" he said. "I've often noticed it from Rossiemurchat. Is it the Northern Lights?"

She laughed peacefully. "My mother's batteries."

"Her batteries...?"

For a single instant the possibility of her mother being powered by batteries found reality in Lionel's suggestible eyes.

"Hens."'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 21)

Commonplace Book

'...Through the corner of his eye he got a close-up of the Minister. "God" he then murmured. "My God" - like a soldier whose match, which he had been about to strike - had been lit by a sniper's bullet.'

from Marching with April by Hugo Charteris (Chapter 21)

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Commonplace Book

'"...yours is the sort of tolerance that would make intolerance in others punishable by law."'

from Young Men in Love by Michael Arlen (Book Two)