Seashaken Houses by Tom Nancollas (2018)

 This is a really interesting history of what are called rock-lighthouses, those built not on a mainland patch, or on something definable as an island, but on reefs or rocks, often out at sea, but not always. The author is a building conservationist with a strong interest in engineering. So the fascinating history of these special places, often so extraordinarily battered by the elements, is taken up from those points of view. The first of them, Eddystone, was originally a late 17th century ornate wooden tower with extending wrought-ironwork, including a weathervane, designed by the infamously impractical Henry Winstanley, and, in a sense anyway, lionised in the Victorian period through Jean Ingelow's epic poem. Of course, it was blown to smithereens within a few winter gales, and Winstanley with it. Subsequently, the keystone design went through various revolutions, ending with the tapering shape we know so well today, and the stone construction. What interests me is the perfected design having the stone sections all purpose-created with interlocking shapes, both vertically and horizontally, to make as sure as we can of steadfastness - no square mortared blocks here. Nancollas even managed to visit a couple of the remaining ones - all automated now of course - with permission to go inside, and came across the vestiges of the interior style of prior times: specially-designed curved bunks and dressers, ornate mouldings, mosaic floors and so on. Sad to think of all that beauty, now cut through of course with the wiring conduits and suchlike of automation, sitting way out at sea and not appreciated often by human eyes, as was intended. As a writer, he's an unusual mixture. Every now and then will come a really strong piece of beautiful phrasing. Most of the time, his style is reasonably straightforward, though there is a somewhat overused tendency toward the symbolic - lighthouses becoming markers of all sorts of things, their significance toyed with to outline any point currently to hand, which feels a little heavy-handed. And the recent curse of hyperbolization does creep in from time to time: calling a lighthouse finished in the 1880s "barely two centuries old" is a bit much. But, as a revelation of the otherworldly romance of these places, and the contrasting practical exigencies of keeping them standing strong, this little book is a pleasurable excursion.

Commonplace Book

 '...Others tried to avert personal attacks by discussing war and peace in the abstract, adducing uncertain historical parallels and wondering academically whether it was wise to aim at humiliating a great country too much; were we not sowing the seeds of future wars?'

from Sonia Married by Stephen McKenna (Chapter Five, part III)

Browse: Love Letters to Bookshops Around the World edited by Henry Hitchings (2016)

 This is a collection of essays around the idea of the importance of bookshops in the lives of writers. Some of them have taken this to mean their part in their childhood and development, others their part in their lives as writers later on. While none of them are dull, I can't say I was wildly inspired, either. This is one of those books that has 'also-ran' written all over it, part of the 'books on books' efflorescence of recent times. I'm not sure what the problem is: the feeling is somehow the same as when someone tells you in great detail about a dream they've had. The content of dreams is fascinating, so why is it dull to hear them? This has the same quality of "ooooh, this shop was significant for me, and this book bought in it changed everything" but the reader has that sinking sense of searedness, trying to care and not quite succeeding. What occasionally changes this prescription is originality of viewpoint. So, Saša Stanišić playing with drug concepts, with books as matter for dealers, is more fun than most. Writing style also does it, so Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor speaking about a very plain but significant Nairobi shop in stark terms somehow lifts its head above the parapet. And the pyrotechnics of Iain Sinclair's prose make his piece about a St Leonards bookshop slightly beyond standard, though the matter isn't. This book as a whole is something for the 'just OK' basket.

Commonplace Book

 '"Efficiency is the gravest menace that the war holds over us," said O'Rane reflectively. "Whenever I've met it, it means being unkind一with Government sanction一to someone weaker than yourself; Jesus Christ would not have been tolerated by the Charity Organization Society, all the bourgeois press would have said that He was pampering the incompetent and maintaining the survival of the unfit. Efficiency frightens me."'

from Sonia Married by Stephen McKenna (Chapter Two, Part II)

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell (2016)

 I could air the usual complaints about the overzealous critical hailing of this book, but am in danger of becoming boring about the current reviewing world's acritical lack of penetration. It is the story of a young American gay man teaching English in Bulgaria, and of a hookup which meant a lot in his life. He takes the opportunity to taste the variety on offer through casual trysts when he can, and in one popular spot at the National Palaces of Culture in Sofia meets a slender, handsome and seemingly streetwise young fellow called Mitko, who gets under his skin. They have a couple of subsequent encounters and develop a connection, with Mitko tapping him for cash and help on occasion. These he is happy to provide, balancing in his mind the cash-relationship and the far less usual one of growing interpersonal empathy, backed by his own feelings of loneliness and isolation resulting in part from a troubled and slightly loveless family history. His sense of blankness and sometime inadequacy for life's brighter story, which has always seemed a little out of reach, is broadly emotionally convincing. He goes through a relatively brief honeymoon period with Mitko under these mild shadows, and then they start to come apart. He finally puts an end to it, knowing it's going nowhere. But somehow Mitko keeps re-emerging into his life - arriving at the door of his block of flats, needing to come in, because he just wants to see him, needs some money, has nowhere to sleep that night, and so on. And our narrator gives in, still quite attracted physically, also registering Mitko's charm, and the delimited power of the special bond between them. In one of their breaks his father falls mortally ill in the States, and we follow him, loosed into the Sofia suburbs during the day after the news has been delivered, wandering through waste places in an anguished musing state, still holding the note which brought the news at his school, it slowly turning to sweaty mush in his hand. The memories and questions of a childhood which started out as bright as might be expected, and gradually dulled as his parents separated, he lost emotional contact with others, realised his homosexuality, withdrew into a diminished and nervous personal state, obsess him. After a couple of other rapprochements between he and Mitko, where he notices Mitko getting thinner, and more dishevelled, his constant drinking and dangerous lifestyle clearly taking a toll, we reach the most effective part of this by far. A precursive section of a visit by his emotionally grasping mother, which develops with maturing sweetness on a train journey into something more positive, is followed by a stilly sad last meeting between them. Mitko arrives, vulnerable and weeping, banging at the door again in terrible condition, with the news that the condition of the liver which has plagued him since his childhood in Varna has become terminal, not of course helped by his alcoholism. What follows is a really clear evocation of the pain of compassion, as the narrator realises, in a troubled few hours with him, what it looks like when someone who hasn't been given many chances, and has manipulated like hell in more blooming times to survive, finding response in others through personal charms both genuine and affected, becomes small in the face of the great blackness about to engulf them, and in the decrease brought on by the wear and tear of want. All of the above is really good material for fiction, and the last couple of sections are indeed very affecting in their unclouded reach for truths of emotion. But prior to these final stages, this work suffers. The problem is mainly in the 'voice' of the prose. It is a voice which feels incredibly well-trained. It reaches for profundity with really fine modulation. But it does so anonymously. There is such carefulness here that the reader feels they are witnessing a highly emulatory 'exercise in good writing'. But of course only part of what makes writing good is being addressed: the technical part. There is a potential reason for this - that it was an attempt on Greenwell's part to express the carefulness and blankness of his narrator. I'll wait to see if his next novel booms off the page with great personality, then, as he exemplifies a different sort of character, or allows his own much more arresting authorial voice to be heard? But my instinct tells me that's not the case. This guarded and dulled conscientiousness is his authorial voice for the moment. The word that keeps coming when considering the style here is dutiful. A feeling of meticulous care taken to reach one particular mark, but another vital care of his art ignored. This is a first novel, though - there could be a lot further to go, where that voice will be found. Given how skilled he is technically, the hope would be that that happens.

Gillespie by J. MacDougall Hay (1914)

 My new domicile in Shetland has brought on the wish to look further into Scotland's literature. The reading of this extraordinary novel forms the first fruits of that intention. What a first step. It is a moral tale, expressed poetically. Many novels can be described in this way, so I need a likening which will bring further focus, and the one I feel impelled to choose is Moby-Dick. There is grandness here, the wrack and twist of human greed, the impulses of fate swinging humanity around by whichever failing they leave exposed. There is something of that drench of negativity here too, like a wash applied which seeps into all the corners of the portrait, making the shadows a little darker, the fearful grey of the sea a bit more impending, the flailing of the characters under their instincts and whims a little more misdirected. It's set in a coastal town of western Scotland in the late 19th century, early 20th. It is the time when the herring trade became industrialized, or at least a lot more organized and mechanized. Gillespie himself is a grasping sort who has an unending wish to rise above the work of fishing or shop-keeping which is the usual lot of people of his class. He wants to control the fishers, command all the trade, inveigle himself into various positions of authority in the town. His attention is solely with this, and anyone who either gets in his way, or takes too much of his attention away from the core task, gets short shrift. So his wife and sons are sorely neglected in all ways except perhaps the material, but even there his growing wealth is severely protected, and enjoyment stinted. His emotional neglect though is perhaps the key arena - his wife quickly develops a reliance on alcohol, his sons' dislike of him curdles their personalities to varying extents. His exploitative career begins with the takeover of the farm of a widow after her husband's death, in league with a greedy farmer whom he eventually double-crosses. The widow realizes his perfidy too late to save her home, and Gillespie makes an enemy for life. Mrs Galbraith is a talisman figure through the whole novel, her soul soured and made duplicitous as she manipulates quietly to expose Gillespie, playing the long game. Of course, all that Gillespie does in these cases is completely within the law, and incontestable - a matter of gaining the agreement of the unaware, and then pressing his advantage home. But as he does it, again and again, the roster of those calling themselves 'enemy' grows. He has a showdown with desperate fishermen at a time of drought and plague, driving several to virtual madness. His control of ostensibly the entire fleet is confirmed, and then the desperate ones connive, against their own interests, to burn the boats that used to be theirs as they wait in the harbour, at least hoping to ruin Gillespie, echoing their own downfall, engineered by him. He is indeed seemingly laid low, and wanders the streets of Brieston disconsolately, but he finds a way to survive, and rubs their foolishness in their faces. As the novel matures we hear more of his sons as they grow up. Iain, the older and more genial of the two, becomes a fisherman and drowns in a boat which has been poorly fitted out by his father, just at the entrance of the harbour, nearly home in a storm. Eoghan, the younger, is a nervous, intelligent and somewhat religiously-obsessed boy. We see a lot from his point of view. He vacillates, torn between his growing horror of his mother's alcoholism, his wish to head to university, and his love of a cousin, Barbara, who has been tricked by Gillespie into handing over her fortune. His mind has been soured by his upbringing, unstrung between these parents. As his mother's shame turns into madness, entirely traceable to his father's baleful effect, he begins to have thoughts of killing her, to lance the family boil. In the end, in a truly horrifying scene, instead it is his mother who, unrecognizingly taking him for an enemy who will take away her beloved drink, and addled utterly, grabs a razor and slits his throat in a struggle in the dark of the house. She is killed in the process, hitting her head on the fender as he thrashes around and knocks her flying in his death throes. So Gillespie is finally undone. His entire family is gone, and his culpability in their accursed ends is manifest. Broken, he goes to visit his father, who is dying from the effects of a stroke in the family pub, around the other side of the harbour. A long-unpaid debt, which caused the rift which has separated them for many years, starts to torment him. Unable to engender a response from his father, and starting to feel the effects of lockjaw brought on by stepping in the dark on a shard of one of his wife's broken bottles, he collapses, and over the period of a couple of days, his skin going black in patches as the infection takes him over, he breathes his last in agony, tended by a somewhat chastened Mrs Galbraith, who has been caring for his father. This chronicle of single-minded greed, and its laying waste of many lives, is written with almost toppling fervour, the agitated intensity and rolling poetics recalling the grandness of Melville's restless vehemence. Some parts, particularly where Eoghan's story starts to take shape, feel episodic, almost as though this was originally a much larger opus which Constable asked Hay to cut down for its initial publication. Certainly one of the ringleaders of the fishermen's revolt is Barnacles, who forms the centre of Hay's only other novel. Was Barnacles an expansion of an excised portion of this book? There seems so little published information about Hay - I wonder if much remains of his papers. Perhaps a reader's report in Constable's archives? Correspondence there also? Now there's a flavoursome arena of research calling.

The War-Workers by EM Delafield (1918)

 This is enormously different to her debut a year earlier. That was a standard novel, in a sense anyway, of a young girl of established means starting on the journey of adult life, albeit with a nice comic conceit of her self-storytelling giving it swing. This is a troupe-novel. The crew are the female clerical workers of the Midland Supply Depot in 1915-16. The Depot is run by Charmian 'Char' Vivian, a forceful high-up, the daughter of one of the local country-houses. The majority of the office staff are in awe of her, idolizing her huge attention to the work, and of course, true to the times, her social status. She has a free ride with them therefore, and the fact that some of her attitudes are much more to do with self-aggrandisement than belief in the importance of their work (despite her great protestations to the contrary), is one they miss in their adoration. The main purpose of the piece is comedy, though there are the obvious moral undertones. So we get the snotty and devoted secretary, the bumbling but loveable stats-keeper, the salt-of-the-earth general staffers locked in a tart mesh of status and posturing. The main part of the action aside from the office is set in the hostel over the street where they live. There, the slightly inefficient but delightful Irish superintendent tries to keep them all alive and rested under the phenomenal wallop of Char's regimen. The focus comes when an under-secretary is recruited to help snotty with her duties. Grace Jones is a young Welsh woman of great straightforwardness, and an ability to get on with most people despite her honesty. Char finds her skill and lack of nonsense irritating almost subconsciously - the sublimated knowledge of her less altruistic motivations playing in her quite freshly. Grace just gets on with it. The key comes when Char's father has a stroke, and she is drawn away from the Depot for a while. Grace is deputized to go out to Plessing, the family home, to keep up the work pace. But there she furthers her friendship with Lady Vivian, Char's mother, who sees very clearly what a gem she is, and respects her. The tension between daughter and mother is never very far from the surface - Lady Vivian is clear-sighted about her daughter's failings and not afraid to enumerate them. Grace keeps clear of this of course, but can't help confirming Lady Vivian's prejudices. Various contretemps play out, as Char's father experiences another stroke, and her unwillingness to leave her work at the Depot to be there for her father in his last days is revealed inadvertently to the staff back at the hostel. Though the bursting of this bubble is one of the main centres of the climax, and the much more realistic view of Char held by all the staff bar the snotty secretary is the result, in Delafield's hands it doesn't turn into a pantomime, and the resolution is realistically muted. Some staff resign, their delusions blasted, but they're still friends with those who remain. Lady Vivian's plan to turn Plessing into a convalescent home for badly wounded soldiers comes to pass with the help of a local doctor. They manage to keep it from Char's empire of control with some deft moves, and the hostel superintendent, who has been summarily dismissed by Char for no good reason, goes to work there independent of her arbitrary influence. The friendship between Lady Vivian and Grace has developed to such an extent that Grace also heads there to work, extricated from Char's dominion. But Char carries on with the Depot, and is still the centre of her own small world of orders, the same old work carrying on at the same cracking pace. The fact that this one has that muted denouement, where someone of great energy and effectiveness is nevertheless a very faulty character, and still contrastingly quite successful, and yet taken by those who know her well with an enormous grain of salt, gives it the edge of modernity. These nuances show that Delafield was wanting to embrace, I think, modern psychological tropes, whilst showing a lot of evidence of the traditional expected in her times. A very interesting balancing act.

Commonplace Book

 '"Every animal on this globe, down to the amoeba, has got hands enough for its survival. Man is the only one with hands enough for more than that - hands to make what he doesn't need, as much as what he does. And it isn't until you've got six times what's necessary you begin muddling your mind what is necessary, and why, and how it's come by. A man upsets the jungle order with a half a dozen trinkets that've got no use, and then - then, mind you, not before - it strikes him that there is an order to things, and he's got to make it out. Only, make it out in such a way that he can keep his trinkets..."'

from The Dancer from the Dance by Janet Burroway (Part One)

Commonplace Book

 '...he stood watching a splendid ladder of flame in the heart of the fleet. It had a rhythmic movement which fascinated the eye. Its flat, jagged head oscillated backwards and forwards slowly, like the head of a snake. This was the main sheet of flame, whose splendour and terror mesmerised. It took a hundred fantastic shapes - now like the chain mail of warriors tearing at each other with bloody hands in a cauldron; now like witches with streaming hair of flame; like ghosts in winding-sheets of Tophet; and again like a wall of beaten gold. In greater gusts of the wind the wall swayed, bellied, and broke, and great golden balloons hovered in the air. At the foot of this wall vicious tongues leapt out everywhere, seized the cordage, writhed about the masts, licking everything in their path; united and fanned upwards, they swooped across the golden wall as if fighting for life. The anchor chains were red hot; spars crackled like musketry and hissed in the sea. Stars seemed falling from heaven. The wall of flame swayed and bent, and fell across the boats like gigantic flowers...'

from Gillespie by J. MacDougall Hay (Book II, Chapter 30)

Dumb-Animal by Osbert Sitwell (1930)

 This was the author's second volume of stories and novellas, following his debut, Triple Fugue, six years earlier. The title story is a sad and horrifying glimpse into the inhumanity that stretches between people and animals, and the thoughtlessness. That Flesh is Heir To is in Sitwell's pyrotechnic mode, as are most of the works in this volume, where he bitingly explores some societal flabbiness or vulnerability. In this case, the novella follows a nondescript but piercing woman's continuing odd proximity to instances of plague and fatal illness. Of course, it is she all along, with her terribly decent concern for the health of those with whom she interacts, who is carrying the devastating bacillus. It's occasionally very funny, but just misses finishing well. Echoes is short and prescient, detailing a visit to a Mediterranean seaside town, and the growing fascism with which it's being infected, realised in its people's savage treatment of someone who is intellectually disabled. The Love-Bird tells the story of an eccentric dilettante, who divests himself of the family fortune once it has been inherited, leaving only his favourite things, often automata and strange moving toys, many of which are birds, amongst which he loses himself. On a visit to the Zoo, a little love-bird takes a decided liking to him, the charm of a living thing enchanting him for the first time. When one flutters in through his window one afternoon later on, he catches it, and places it in a cage he owns with an automaton fellow of its own kind. The real bird goes mad with jealousy of its mechanical rival, and is found dead next to it, both of them plucked and ragged. Another example of the author's more high-concept mode. Charles and Charlemagne speaks of the glittering career of an American in London, when such women were in the midst of conquering British society. Adèle is first inconspicuous, but slowly grows less concerned by what all around her think. Finally she is quite notorious, and Sitwell delights in enumerating all her changes of decor with each lover that she takes on, these being her particular eccentricity. She has a most unusual and chilling end in the South Seas. Alive-Alive Oh! is a throwback to the literary satires of his earlier volume. A middling and largely dreary poet gains the most extravagant praise, and just as his career shows signs of waning, it is saved by his war poetry. He has always been fashionably ill, and the public and all the critics are waiting for him to die early, so as to set the proverbial seal to his reputation. He disappears to Italy at what is thought to be the final stages of his life, and his death is duly reported. Much, much later, Sitwell is astonished, as a visitor to Italy, to discover that he is still alive and living in absolute secrecy, the death stage-managed to make sure of his literary survival. Happy Endings is not even a novella, it is a short novel. This final piece takes the tone down a few notches from the conceptual spinnings of most of the longer works in this volume. It is an example of Sitwell engaging on a more low-key and moving level with material which is familiar to him. It is a story which uses, as he often does, himself as the main character. In this instance, he is a young man, sent to military college in Aldershot before the war. This is his opportunity to send up the stupidity and dense-headedness of the 'scholars' and masters, in his usual satiric vein. But he creates a moving portrait of one of the masters who befriends him, Mr Windrell, who is a devotee of 'the Circle' and is fascinated by past lives and future ones, wizardry, and occult sciences - no doubt influenced by the notoriety of Crowley and company at the time. He is racked with consumption, and Sitwell takes time to present him somewhat sympathetically, as well as exploding mercilessly all his silly superstitions. It ends with something unexpected - scenes on the battleground at Loos, and quite harsh depictions of corpses and the stench of death. Most of his contemporaries at the college are done away with through the course of the war, and there is, amongst his tart celebration of their dunderheadedness, also elegiac wonder at how pointless and grotesque were their deaths. The very end is a feeling exploration of Mr Windrell after the war, dying in 'Newborough' (Scarborough), whose experiences in witnessing the horror of the conflict have finally disabused him of his crazy obsessions, though he can't quite admit it. This is a very fine piece of work, completing a volume of widely varying colours, which is by turns hilariously funny and profoundly erudite.

Commonplace Book

 '...I began to understand only too well the frame of mind that had facilitated the spread of religions of compassion, such as Christianity, and could easily comprehend how the slaves had longed to accept the doctrines, however improbable they sounded. At first, no doubt, they had been sceptical, and to cover their longing, had mocked at them: and then, as their misery had become more and more confirmed, they were forced to take to some form of spiritual drugging. Besides, they may have said to themselves, if this creed is fantastic, yet nothing in the world, no superstition of any sort, is more fantastic than the actual existence I am obliged to lead, and the misery it affords me...'

from Happy Endings, a piece in Dumb-Animal by Osbert Sitwell

Commonplace Book

 '...how was one to foresee that all these peaceful lands of Europe, with their progressive thought, were to be ruined by being placed in the grasp of their stupidest citizens for four whole years?'

from Happy Endings, a piece in Dumb-Animal by Osbert Sitwell

Commonplace Book

 'Then, sometimes, if there was a holiday, Mr Windrell, very romantically but elegantly dressed under his old overcoat, would journey up to London for a meeting of the Brethren (they all bore names in the "Circle," such as Brother Aloysius or Brother Merlin). It always seemed somewhat incongruous that, instead of travelling up to this gathering of fellow-warlocks by broomstick at midnight, or on the tail of a shooting star, he should thus be conveyed to it in full daylight by such very matter-of-fact methods of locomotion as trains and tubes: a blasted heath, one felt too, or some horrid glade in a tangled forest, would have been a more suitable setting for it than a stuffy, mid-Victorian sitting-room in a lodging-house near Paddington Station...'

from Happy Endings, a piece in Dumb-Animal by Osbert Sitwell

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut (1952)

The key with this one is to imagine oneself back in 1952, when satire of this kind was relatively new, that is the kind that has science fiction-ish overtones. And the essential thing, it seems to me, is to look at Vonnegut's conceptualisation of what went wrong, and the panache with which he handles it. This I think would have seemed an incredibly fresh and audacious novel back then, predating by quite a bit all of the dark post-modern dystopian satire that was to give its imprimatur to the 60s and 70s. Obviously, without the benefit of all that hindsight, and as a pioneer in the field, this one has some 'backward' elements: the talk of and within love relationships has an uncomfortably Mad Men feel to it, a sultry 50s retrograde snuff. But there's no doubting the beginnings of Vonnegut's unique verve, which came to such powerful fruition a decade or so later. There is an undercut to that also, though: the feel of this first attempt is that it is an addressing of frustration and fear in the face of hyper-mechanization, where this element gets way too much of the airtime. The USA is supposed, by the early 50s, to have got itself through the Second World War, and then flopped into an internal revolution on the basis of what it had learned of efficiency in production therefrom. The means of production taken over by government and centralized, and as well almost fully automated, so as to provide the populace with lulling and quiescence-inducing torpor of material wealth. The civil war fought over it is never deeply explained - but the target is clear and prescient: the suburban materialism and industrial automation that Vonnegut saw approaching, hand in hand. The fact that such a conflict is not very believable, and sociologically speaking likely to be much more a result of peaceful change, is not examined - these things are not really the ones that we fight wars over. Also the fact that there was no consideration given to what people would do once their jobs were cast into the bin is an odd one. Just automation, that's it. Vonnegut's concept of what people needed in terms of being valued and making a contribution is a strange mixture. On the one hand he gets completely that there is a need to feel part of making things happen, on the other his far too retarded concept of that is that "men need to work with their hands". It's like he's looked at some of the story, had some fantastic ideas about that, but not thought laterally enough to see how other elements might impinge on his concept. A really interesting prediction of an America that came to be, and yet didn't, this one's vigour and elan saves it.

Commonplace Book

'...She had watched that wood in all seasons. Sometimes it had appeared to her in leafless winter like an army with spears watching upon the hill over against the sea; when stiff with frost it was a giant foreland, upon whose forehead had frozen the foam of the ocean. In summer Pan drove stallions through it, shaking multitudinous bells. In autumn it was an army bivouacked in blood. To-day it was beaten, slain, broken; the light of the babe eyes of spring had been quenched upon its face...'

from Gillespie by J. MacDougall Hay (Chapter 15)

Commonplace Book

'But if Beauty is Truth (which, incidentally, it is not), certainly the results of beauty culture are a lie, and should therefore be recognized as ugly. To all those who can afford the best advice, false youth, when attained, imparts an identical appearance: the same corn-gold hair, the same angular, fashion-plate eyes, raised upward at the corner, the same straight nose and lips carved into a double curve, the same strained mouth, slightly open like the mouth of a Roman Mask of Tragedy, that the knife of the plastic surgeon dictates. They have the same figures, the same hands and finger-nails, more or less the same dresses, and the same impersonal, cosmopolitan accent, with, rising and falling smoothly within it, the concealed sound of an American elevator. They do not look young, except by convention, but, instead, they all look the same age: almost, indeed, the same person. . .'

from Charles and Charlemagne, a piece in Dumb-Animal by Osbert Sitwell

Commonplace Book

'...the wicked man, no one will ever know why, is inevitably recorded by a better artist than the righteous man. Perhaps, Robert suggested, this might be because the profligate never considers expense or his heirs, and therefore pays the best artist of his time to paint his portrait: whereas the good man, ever mindful of future generations, at the time saves money on their behalf by commissioning a fifth-rate artist, recommended by a country neighbour, instead of a first-rate one, to execute his likeness, and through this act of thrift fines them an enormous fortune in subsequent years. It could not be too much stressed that in buying or ordering contemporary works there is nothing that pays in the end like "wanton extravagance."'

from The Love-Bird, a piece in Dumb-Animal by Osbert Sitwell

Commonplace Book

'...As the sea without droned the antiphon, and the homeless wind upon the hill cried the antistrophe, he thought it was a wilding elphin thing he loved who was one with the witch-wind upon the waste, and with the changeling brumous sea.'

from Gillespie by J. MacDougall Hay (Chapter 3)

The Unlucky Family by Mrs. Henry de la Pasture (1907)

The author's earlier two children's books, right back at the beginning of her career, don't quite prepare you for this. The determinedness of the comedy and the lightness of touch are marked. It's the story of a fairly typical middle class family, the Chubbs, of late Victorian or Edwardian values, with bumbling but dear parents, a nervous aunt, and eleven children. They inherit the fortune of Mrs Chubb's barely-known cousin unexpectedly, and find themselves in a country house, Finch Hall, with all the resources they could want, and a growing list of obligations. They must entertain the local notables, they feel they ought to provide garden parties (for the well-to-do) sandwiched with fetes (for the hoi-polloi), and so on. A tutor is engaged for their eldest sons, who is revealed as a camply nervous type, who 'takes a liking' to James, one of the footmen - surely a very early outing for such almost-directness. All of these enhanced horizons seem attended with minor disasters, and in a brilliantly slapstick way quite often. People get drenched, rolled, dirtied, injured, offended; a mixup means the poor people at the fete get the teeny sandwiches intended for the nice, whilst the nice are astonished and somewhat miffed by the enormous meal of rustic fare which confronts them. The children are all named by a personality characteristic, in addition to their Christian name - Greedy George, Clumsy Caroline, Sharp Little Emily, Dreamy Dorothea, and so forth. The nature of their mishaps tends to follow these epithets, and invariably they are sent to bed for their troubles, having stolen food not meant for them, broken something priceless, answered back, or whatever. Essentially it's a delightful comedy of haplessness, where if anything can go wrong, it does. It would make a truly brilliant Christmas special for the BBC, especially as it's now out of copyright, and filming wouldn't be conspicuously expensive, I feel. The through-thread of the second half is the search for the Finch family treasure, which search intensifies in the last chapter. They don't find it, but Pasture hints in the last sentence that the search is likely to go on, in a way that suggests she had planned a sequel. Sadly it never came, in print at least. Perhaps it (or its start, or notes for it) is among her papers, but where are they? 

Commonplace Book

'"Strange business," said Lasher. "This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn't in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon."' 

from Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut (Chapter 9)

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller (2018)

If I didn't have the evidence before me in the preliminary pages, I would have said that this was a first novel. The writer clearly has a strong capability with wordsmithing in its technical aspect, at least in one respect. He is able to mould phrasing, particularly that which is descriptive of emotion, often into elegant and succinctly poetic shapes. But what gives it the feel of a first novel is everything else. He is obviously somewhat uncomfortable working with historical materials. His work in the area of dialogue is quite stilted and repetitively flat. Just two examples. OK, so where to start. Perhaps a likening which will lend the flavour of it as a whole? Two images occurred to me while reading: one of that slightly dampened and functional impression that one gets after reading what is identifiable as 'popular' fiction: the characters essay through their lives with the sense that the engineering, the construction which surrounds them, acts like blinkers do to a horse. They're obediently following the path made for them - they are functions, ultimately. I wonder what Miller makes of authors, whom he must presumably have come across, whose bright belief in the action carries all with it; the engineering of whose pieces is swamped in a flood of their imaginative quicksilver, its presence deep down somewhere, invisible to the lit imagination of the reader. Conversely, Miller's manipulations are so near the surface as to be indistinguishable from being fully in view. So this novel drags its feet, the reader hampered by the obviousness of the contrivances. The second image really I think says the same thing,  but perhaps it will illustrate it better. It's as though a novel were a performance in a theatre. In the reading of any good novel, we're concentrated on the stage because the strength of the author's voice makes it so. Their belief carries us. We become far less aware of the everyday world around us, and occupy the golden space of fascination. With this novel, we have been invited to partake in the expected way, turn up, occupy our seat, and then, on the stage, a lot less grabs us. Instead, we're distracted by how the scenery lowers and lifts, the back and forward in the wings of how the thing is done, the prop-room under the stage busy with concocting the action. All of which is a long way round of saying that that essential thing, the suspension of disbelief in the reader, accessed via the assertive belief of the writer, is distinctly absent in this case. In an eighth novel, that is worrying. OK, so - mentioned earlier was the fact that he also seems to be uncomfortable with historical detail. Consistently here one gets the unmistakable feeling of "display hands", a bit like "jazz hands"! Hands turning from palms down to palms up in a long curl of reveal. Curl, here is this historical item discussed. Curl, we'll include one of these to lend verisimilitude. Curl, I'll have this character use this archaic word to remind you of when this is set. Curl, I'll just explain this attitude so as to illustrate the difference between then and now. All of these things do need doing, but of course they need doing invisibly, as 'natural' consequences of the forward thrust of the piece. The corollary of this is anti-historical manipulation; the above historical insertions are all the more 'necessary' because there is a strong feeling of the modern in how these characters relate to one another and think. Grim attempt at 'relatability'? It's a pervasive foolishness at the moment, so disquietingly possible.   I also mentioned the dialogue earlier - not a lot else to say than that it's occasionally flat. "No?" "No." "Really?" "Yes." is illustrative of a few odd conversations in our lives, but not great as a template for a lot of exchanges. I think the intention may have been the 'incantatory' - and it might theoretically have had that effect if the casing for it had been more lustrous and intriguing, but this novel misses that by a way. Worth mentioning are a few very strange factual assertions: that anywhere in Somerset could be anything like a hundred miles from the sea is deeply odd; that the Mersey was ever called the Mercy I can't find a reference for, but am willing to be gainsaid; the consistent, supposedly poetic, reference to sea-mist at one juncture as 'smoke' is very......loose; and calling a taxman instead a 'tacksman' is again not something I've come across, but it's possible, I guess. Every now and then the still intact dignity of this novel is surprised by a little steam-spike of camp: two of the military men in a hot room in Spain silently following a fly around the room with their eyes at a tense moment is......well, funny. Counter to these criticisms: there is a sequence in the pp 170s where this came alive for a short moment, where the main character has been left on a Hebridean island under the influence of some drops of opium - it really caught me up (hopefully not the result of a passing mood). The conclusion: perhaps Miller needs setting free. He needs to throw off the cloak of what must be his lack of confidence when it comes to the historical, and, thus disrobed, plunge into the contemporary with the energy he has saved. Perhaps there's plenty of this in the seven novels prior to this one. If so, this one may just be an aberration, and I wish him well for a return to home territory.

Men Dislike Women by Michael Arlen (1931)

I go on fairly consistently about the under-reading of Arlen, and shall do so again here. Of course, he is an exemplar of the slick, dramatic, deco-perspectived, dashing twenties, as they are conceived in the popular imagination - he is Britain's Fitzgerald...in a way. The racing Deusenberg, the Brooks-bobbed fatal heroine with eyes that one sinks into, the top-hatted gentleman in tow, wryly self-deprecating and of impeccable coolness - could he be a cad? It's all lovely - of course it is. But these leading players are also seamed through with nerves, or a deadness because of a lost love, or a deluded vision of themselves as martyred to.....whatever. That's the first layer of ensubtlement - I'll take the blame for the invented word. Then under this again, we have philosophical drawing out, and not too hampered by the stylishness, either. Arlen is most definitely not silly. And then there are set pieces of psychology attached to the philosophy, where he manages to very concisely draw us into a state of mind, all its weighings and oppositions adding to a revelation which is familiar enough to be recognizable, and yet original enough of exposition to be a concentrated moment of joy. Here he emerges into the thirties with his first novel set anywhere other than Britain. It's the New York of the period just after the financial shock of 1929. His wish to be up-to-date is very evident: a lot of the cultural references are to things of the prior couple of years, like the Cole Porter song What is This Thing Called Love?, the just built skyscaper called the New York Central Building (now the Helmsley), the mention of the young Hemingway as the prophet of the in-crowd, and Barrymore, Chaplin and Keaton as the leading lights of film. The other change here comes with the territory. He utilizes the alteration of scene not only to discuss with some derogation American society and the American character, but also to investigate the reach of crime in NYC. The father and suitor of his wealthy American lead are crims, but in the untouchable way of the times. They're slick, never mention their nefarious activities, are 'prominent businessmen'. They have corrupt police in tow, and speak often in code, or with considerable camouflage. They too have psychological tics, little maimednesses which underscore their reactions. I hope it is needless to say that all these wounds of the mind have an origin only a decade or so back - perhaps emblematically, perhaps more directly. The action here is set off by the arrival on the Berengaria of a young Anglophile Frenchman, Andre Saint-Cloud, along with a Paris-based English friend with whom he has journeyed, Sheila Hepburn. Sheila has had many lovers, and has a reputation in Europe. She is the kind of woman most men fall for pretty well immediately, so has had lots of opportunities. The story eventually revolves around Sheila falling for one of the wealthy businessmen in a way she hasn't before, and he for her. Andre is early enmeshed with a young Long Island heiress (of the aforesaid less than squeaky prominence), Marilyn Fox, who is hopelessly in love with Sheila's conquest. It all becomes desperately tangled, not only of direct emotions, but of self-delusions, undercurrent urges, workarounds of delicate sensibilities. In amongst all this are the egos of the criminal types, playing by sideways allusion, under the surface. And then through it all also are pedestalled ideals, destroyed illusions - the territory of dreams and their danger. The fact that Arlen can marshal all this into a muster which is stripped, elegant and poetic is a tribute to the man. It will be interesting to see what he does in his next steps, as I believe he begins the move away from this home territory, and into crime more pointedly, and to the dystopian. Should be thought-provoking.

Commonplace Book

'I said: "Well, it's scarcely my place to teach a laundryman anything, but how about this? Chastity isn't everything, MacRae. And you've got confounded impudence to insist on it. Galahads like you put such a high value on your respect for women that a poor mortal woman has to be a liar to win you. What business is it of yours that Sheila has had lovers? Do you think an ordinary normal woman of thirty-five is going to live in a stained-glass window because she's one day going to meet a man mean enough to want 'all' of her? You are so selfish, MacRae, that you make me sick."'

from Men Dislike Women by Michael Arlen (Chapter XIX)

The Bible in Spain by George Borrow (1842)

I typified Borrow on summing up his first book as a 'Baby Byron'. He seemed somehow to have the quality of braggadocio, and continent-traversing vigour, which lent that mood. If anything, that feeling has intensified with this book. But the issue of where his heart is has now to take up some of the story. Where Byron was a delighted debunker of convention and flab, Borrow was not. Or rather, Borrow expends his Byronic energy on chasing down evil Papism and 'superstition', while he undertakes the main task recorded here - spreading the good word via selling copies of a Spanish translation of the New Testament. The Catholic system regarded the Bible as a priestly book, which needed the interpretation of the clergy to have its 'true' intentions made clear. Thus the laity were not allowed access, and copies of it were banned. The idea of making a translation into their own language, in order to popularise it even further, was tantamount to sacrilege. To Borrow's 'enlightened' Protestantism, of course, this was not to be countenanced, and his warrior missionary-spirit was thoroughly engaged. He entered Spain in 1837 under the auspices of the Bible Society with an edition, the aim to spread it far and wide. The country he encountered was in a parlous state, riven with vying factions according to whom one supported as monarch, and with national governments and local regimes coming and going with extraordinary regularity. The atmosphere of civil war obtained. So, dangerous political quagmire, religious maelstrom invited - what could go wrong? And much does; the main part of this book is the story of shipments of New Testaments being quarantined through the actions of clergy on petty officials, traipsing through all sorts of country with retainers ranging from the saintly to the satanic, discussion of spiritual and temporal architecture, of nationality through language and custom. But there's no way of avoiding the tone of the great majority of Borrow's extemporizing (it often has that quality): it's jingoistic, prejudiced, and nakedly self-inflating. Races or regionalities are 'known' to have certain negative qualities, both physical and spiritual; these are reflected in their dirty homes, dull minds, evil propensities; the English, exemplified in their soldiers, are somehow all apple-cheeked, beautiful young bucks who couldn't be more admirable, et cetera ad infinitum. It's stupefyingly grim, and belies his superior tone all too readily. And it was 'par for the course' at the time, undoubtedly - it's not special to Borrow. This drabness is counterbalanced to a degree by a modicum of colour in relating adventures battling banditti, rangy discussions with vociferous hotel-keepers, exotic locales illustrated, and some interesting background information on language and customs tucked amongst all the bigotry. The strange mixture in him of warrior evangelist and attenuated mentality is quite a bilious concoction. That this is housed in an unvarnished braggart pretty well does it in.

Commonplace Book

'"I've read," I said recklessly, "that the future of American civilization is in the hands of the mothers. Do you think that is true?"

He said: "They are the best influence we have."

I could see that he believed it and that it made him happy to believe it. It consoled him and it gratified him and it exalted him and it humbled him to believe it. He felt better for believing it. Well, good luck to him. To me it seemed as fat-headed a generalisation as saying that the future of American civilization depended on the growth of banana-eating. But maybe it does. One needs to be a little light in the head to feel at home in this world. So maybe it is the light-headed generalisations that are the truest ones.'

from Men Dislike Women by Michael Arlen (Chapter VIII)

Commonplace Book

'...The fact that I could knock spots off most of her friends at golf and tennis surprised, delighted and encouraged Isabella. She considered this not as a sign of a misspent youth but as a Good Sign. This Good Sign illusion is peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon peoples. If a Frenchman is a world's champion at tennis, as even Frenchmen sometimes are, his compatriots are delighted but are not therefore convinced that he wears wings beneath his tennis shirt. In England and America it is taken for granted that a man whose eye for a ball commands respect must necessarily have more Good in him than the other fellow. Why? But this illusion persists in face of the fact that there is a great deal more humbug, conceit, caddishness and corruption among the well-known sportsmen of the world than among the politicians, whom it is convenient and human to blame for everything.'

from Men Dislike Women by Michael Arlen (Chapter V)

The Far Horizon by Lucas Malet (1906)

The aspects which most mark this one out are in what it's about. The depiction of a male-female friendship, a stumbled-upon one between a cultured retired clerk and a 'resting' young actress, is way off piste in terms of the expected. And the clerk also goes through a religious re-discovery in the midst of it, which seems significant, as it's not a subject Malet has touched upon hitherto. London is presented as the eternal and dirty 'great mother', forming a background to the life of Dominic Iglesias, the clerk, in his little world of a rooming house in a semi-genteel, but slightly grubby, corner of the city. There are various other lodgers, and a landlady and her female best friend, who somehow prefigure 1930s movie-depictions for me; a domain of jokey messing about in a couple of the younger ones, and the dregs of unsatisfied, unfulfilled lives working out tragically in others. Dominic is seen as quite lordly and cool and elegant and successful by comparison, in the way that defined the gentlemanly in that period, even if he has never risen beyond his lowly station. He has a long-established friend, in another house which surrounds Trimmer's Green, whom he has known since his schooldays, but who is lower middle class and looks up to him. The friend, George Lovegrove, lives with his wife Rhoda under the permanent shadowing threat of visits from his sister, Serena. Serena Lovegrove is most conspicuously intended as comic relief. She's thin, nervous, obstinate, class-obsessed, and terribly, terribly mistaken in all the things about which she furiously and waspishly expatiates. Early on, Dominic forms a centre of confusion, as both Serena and Dominic's landlady are under the impression that this somewhat romantic elegant older man might have intentions as far as they are concerned. He is blissfully unaware of their misreadings, the bitchy sessions around Rhoda Lovegrove's tea-table that have veiledly addressed the issue in his absence, and the resulting social distancing and snobbish cooled relations. Dominic's obliviousness can largely be put down to the eruption into his private life of young Poppy St John, real name Poppy Smith. She is an actress, has some less cultured inflections which betray her lower class origins, but is a bit of an original. They meet in a park over her two little snappish dogs, and something clicks between them, despite the disparity of age. She is beautiful in a painted way, and often wears striking clothes. Dominic looks beyond this in his usual enlightened fashion, and sees the person of originality and heart beneath the paintwork and chattels. It becomes clear that she's married and has left her husband, who was cruel to her. It is hinted that she may have 'gentlemen sponsors' who see that she doesn't go without. Despite his reservations about these things, Dominic is fascinated by her, and indeed she by him. She sees in him someone who doesn't operate by the venal standards she has been exposed to, and he forms in her mind a separate place of respect and peace. The revelation that one of the other lodgers in Dominic's rooming house is in fact her husband comes much later, through a tortured process of hints and reverses in the fortunes of their growing, but hesitance-filled relationship. The husband, De Courcy Smith, is a wreck of a man, totally convinced of his own brilliance as a playwright, and utterly frustrated by the world's seeming indifference to it. In the procession of his miseries he has become embittered to the point of paranoid mania. Drinking a lot, savaging viciously even those who may try to help, becoming sly and unprincipled in his devious schemes of furtherment, and in his endless twisting of events to retain his victimhood, he has something of the feel of the addict about him. Dominic has promised financial assistance to him for one last push to get a play off the ground, and has to deal with Smith's insinuations about he and Poppy's relationship and a clumsy attempt at blackmail. Malet's construction of this character had the potential to be a brilliant portrayal of the grotesque misery of the artist unfulfilled, but sadly misses that in pursuing a lesser trajectory. Dominic's change of life to one of retirement and all the stresses of not only that, but what is happening with Poppy, as well as presentiments of oncoming age and mortality, cause in him a piercing self-reflection which results in a re-embracing of his revolutionary Spanish parents' derided religion. No idea if Malet was herself a Catholic convert, but it seems likely from the tenor of her treatment here. This ends with Dominic having left his Trimmer's Green rooming house and returned to the old family home in a quiet street nearby, which happened to be empty. Poppy leaves behind several of her less salubrious connections and returns triumphantly to the stage. De Courcy Smith suicides in abject grief after the play which Dominic has partly financed is laughed off the stage. After having returned to work at the particular request of his old pompous boss, in order to save the company from financial ruin brought on by the pillaging of the boss' wastrel son, Dominic is worn out. His success at that task has come at the expense of much vital energy. The last chapter details his peaceful acceptance of the coming end within the ambit of his newly discovered religion, a last tender meeting with Poppy before she goes off to give her most emotionally resounding performance, and her rushed return to find him dead. Their ambivalent relationship has been brought forward to the point where it is acknowledged that he loves her, but has never included any of the usual trappings of romance. In its pursuit of this subtle picturing, this is an intriguingly different novel. Underlying that depiction is Malet's usual conservative lineation. A good example of what an Edwardian novel can do when it ventures into less obvious climes.

Commonplace Book

'Her eyes held her until the whole reflection swam and faded but for the little universe of her iris. It had been this way sometimes as a little girl; she watched her face until it was neither her face nor another face, but Face, and she had said, neither quite believing it nor caring, "That is me. That is me." This is now, Millie thought, but her face faded around the fulcrum of her eyes, and she seemed to know everything that she was yet to learn; she seemed to see her life laid out in the foreknown pattern of a life, through which she must proceed, attached by the second-hand of days to the flyspeck of herself.'

from Descend Again by Janet Burroway (Chapter XVI)

The Challenge of Things by AC Grayling (2015)

I've just emerged from an undergraduate philosophy degree, which lends a particular flavour to this. I'm very aware of the difference between academic philosophy writing and its populist correlate - Grayling is noted in both of these shades. I haven't read any of his academic material, though he covers here subjects which were grist to our student mill, like optimism versus pessimism, nature and nurture, the place of science and the notion of scientific method, brain science and its discoveries, arguments about what constitutes the well-lived life, and so on. In a book of this popular nature, he is obliged to cover them in what might be called slightly 'reduced' terms - the broad brushstrokes of newspaper and journal pieces. He manages to include some gems (for me at least) within the more basic materials here, little neat revelatory points tucked away: one I particularly remember was about the notion of 'the soul', and how it was an early Christian construction to serve the needs of a certain stage of argument about believers "not seeing corruption", and imported from Plato. At the same time, this need for the clarity of populist prose sometimes leads him to overly clunky oppositions and blanket pronouncements. The voice in my head at these moments is that inspired by, for lack of a better term, punkish sentiments, where love of rigour meets a readiness to identify waffling middle class comfortability! His heart is almost universally in the right place, but nevertheless colourlessness is engendered. In the piece near the end entitled Optimism, he contrasts the 'bar-room talk' of so-called pessimism, and the cheery 'seeing opportunity in difficulty' of so-called optimism, where the terms of discussion have become somehow so leached of severity that blandness is the only conclusion possible. This trope is repeated relatively regularly, as is its opposite of the tang of pointed discovery. Ultimately I respect him, and see his fumblings of reduction as unfortunate dead ends on a journey (the retention of philosophically-tinted intellectual discussion as a deep value in popular culture) which is worth undertaking.

Commonplace Book

'"Children,' Millie said, 'are the world's great materialists. The great 'natural' market for tin and plastic. The great 'natural' cult of Epicureans." ... "we notice that they'd rather be outside than inside, and we attribute some glorious perception, some sixth sense to them because of it. It's not fair to them. We can't give them anything believing that. It's just that everything is new, and whatever is new is fascinating, like shoes and book-bags. If they'd rather live in the country than the city, it's not because they're ... closer to God! It's because country things are better toys than city things. And even that's pure in a way we don't quite understand; uncluttered, somehow, accepting the world at face value. I mean, look at the connoisseurs of wine, look at the perfume sniffers and the soup tasters, look at the diamond merchants, people who spend their lives dealing in the learned, subtle differences and still never get away from things. Because in a way it is a higher perception, don't you see, not to be able to tell the difference between a diamond and a piece of broken glass."'

from Descend Again by Janet Burroway (Chapter IV)

The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (2017)

This was a fun read, and in some ways very familiar. I have spent large swathes of my working life in the bookshop trade, both secondhand and new. This volume's recounting of the quirks (to put it kindly) of some bookshop customers is one of its main calling cards. But what is it about south-west Scotland in terms of attraction for the insane? Because the regularity of Shaun's teeth being set on edge, or his fulminating anger being inspired, is truly epic. Most of these oddnesses are very familiar, but usually happened, in my time, at decent distances from one another. For Shaun, it's every other day. Or is there something about Shaun which inspires the incipiently mad to suddenly flower into full certifiability? The humour, which is the other calling card of this one, tended to run in waves I found, but still gave it an entertaining twist. The best of it is Nicky, a second-in-command who has a predilection for skip-jumping for grossly mashed culinary delights, a sarcastic sourness in dealing with Shaun's dourness, a delightfully whacko sense of logic, peculiar dress sense, and Latter Day Saint convictions. If the rumbles are true that this one will be filmed, I hope the producers haven't overlooked the fact that the inescapable casting for this part is Siobhan Redmond. There were some less intentional revelations tucked away here. Shaun seems to have quite straightforwardly egalitarian political convictions, but also seems to be a little in awe of greatness and goodness, and very happy to give way to the occasional bout of middle-class aspiration. I loved his stories of heading out to look at collections for sale, and the consistent excitement of 'I wonder if there'll be something rare and amazing in this lot?'. And of course the other side of that coin, when the disappointment sets in at coming face to face with a pile of tat. A few of his pronoucements on the history of the trade, and how we got to the Amazon-squashed disaster we're currently navigating, were a little bit off in some of their details, but very much on the money in their diagnosis of the problem. Great fun - 'I look forward to the sequel', I say, in that worrying way that signifies the trashy serialised crud (thus revealing my partially insupportable prejudices) of modern new bookselling, and to which Shaun has given in - it was published last year. Of course there's more to sequels than their modern sludge-instantiation, and of course, I'm sure Shaun's fits that much more classic bill.

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881)

By way of admission, I now recognize more formally (this is my first James) that my writing style is 'Jamesian'. Should I be ashamed? I certainly echo him in being quite happy to chase down refinements of meaning with qualifying elaboration, 'till the cows come home'. Sometimes that works exhilaratingly, and one ventures way out onto a promontory of meaning, feeling like beautiful and heady precision is being approached. Sometimes, of course, one gets dumped in a bog on the isthmus, and can only clamber out and slug home, mud-spattered and shamefaced! I'm not sure how I feel about this recognition, mainly because of how I responded to this book. It was quite grasping of my attention, but not so much because of the writing style of the author, which varied between his much-vaunted old womanishness and a kind of somewhat gothic sensuous straightforwardness. It is a book which pleases without thrilling in its first few hundred pages - there is a sense, via Isabel Archer, the youthful main character, of a life embarked upon with spirit, having dark patches well sketched but not casting enough shadow to overcome her. Then comes the time when she marries, and it falls into a slough of despond, not because of the subject matter (her marriage going wrong, psychologically) but because the book itself droops. There's always the temptation to say that it feels this way because of the subject matter. I've said this before, but it's so apt here it needs saying again: there's a difference between detailing boredom or negativity in an involving way, and not doing so. James here falls into the latter grouping. The typical first year uni student yelp of "It's supposed to feel that way!" misses the point hugely. No reader should be bored reading about boredom, or feel drab reading about drabness. My guess is that this is where this book loses the majority of those who give up on it. It is a good three hundred pages where it wilts significantly. I will concede that it does, if you stick with it, figure the airless and blocked atmosphere with some fidelity. But it really does drag upon one's patience, becoming a disinspiration. When Isabel leaves Rome to see her cousin Ralph at the end, some of that fog lifts a little. I'm sure that, like many others, I'd have been well tempted to drop this once I reached Isabel's marriage and its aftermath, apart from a strange thing which kept it going, not of itself. For some reason, I think probably trying to imagine Nicole Kidman as Isabel in Campion's film (not having seen it), and registering the wither of her inappropriateness for the part, I began a process of 'recasting'. No idea why, but this soon metamorphosed into a full-fledged scenario. My version was filmed in 1952, with the actress who, at that time, was made for the role: Elizabeth Taylor. It was probably directed by someone quite controlling and intense - Otto Preminger, Orson Welles? Every time Ralph Touchett spoke, I could hear Cary Grant. Mrs Touchett would have been categorically filled out by Katharine Hepburn. Madame Merle would have been a film-stealing revelation of a performance by Greer Garson, as would that of a toxic Hurd Hatfield as Gilbert Osmond. And so on. Imagining this interpretation took on a lot of the life of the reading process, especially when the going got tough. Thinking about how an early 50s version would look, the stillness and formality of the conversations and the stiff silence in which they took place, the carefully undercurrent sexuality, the occasional touches of humour, the highly pushy orchestral score, the echoey metallic tonal element in all the sounds and colours, all added to the prodigality. And of course the camera loving Taylor at her most luxurious and sensual in her youthful glow. Would it have been a notorious shoot? Would it have been a troubled production? Would someone have missed out on an Oscar they ought to have won? All good fun, anyway, and not something that has ever taken on such hyper-reality before in a reading experience. Why? Was my mind providing savourful interest where I could subconsciously sense it was lacking? Maybe - I will say that I don't particularly look forward to another full-length James, looking at this one without the film scenario. Now his many, many novellas - maybe they are where he won't have an opportunity to fall into a hole?

Commonplace Book

'...He peopled it with beings of his own fancy, lovely or terrific, according to his own passing humour. Granted a measure of imagination, the solitary child is often the happiest child, since the social element, with its inevitable materialism, is absent, and the dear spirit of romance is unquenched by vulgar comment.'

from The Far Horizon by Lucas Malet (Chapter I)

The Cardinal's Snuff-Box by Henry Harland (1900)

Never has a romance been a candidate for, yet in my experience, considering a reprint, literally a chocolate-box cover. Until now. This is the one. It could also take one of those hypercoloured, incredibly detailed cigar-box illustrations. That's the sort of book this is. Rich veins of deep atmosphere-accentuation, but also the sense of unreality and idealised simplicity. It's a plain-sailing story of a writer who has been captivated by a woman seen only fleetingly a few times - she has become the keystone of his imagination. His works appear under a pseudonym, Felix Wildmay, and he is so inspired by her that she becomes the central motif of one called A Man of Words, his most successful. He is a few years later holidaying in Italy and takes a cottage on a grand estate. To his astonishment, his woman is revealed as the owner. She is a widow and a duchessa. The landscape all around glows and hums in a phenomenally staged manner, mists employed to dull purple vistas, searing sunlight to sharpen intense greens, different points of the topography showing up, or dimming down, in a kind of poetic ecstasy. She reads his book, but doesn't know it's him of course. He thinks he's 'safe' from any interpretation she might put on it, and claims to be a friend of the author, explaining the background to the story as his friend's experience. She finds out secretly that he is the author, but doesn't realise that she is the main character. They try to artfully play each other, without realising what they're playing with. He feels he can never reveal that it's him and about her, because she's a 'high-up' and wouldn't have him (of course, he's a gentleman, but still well beneath her, he feels). She's also a Catholic, and he's not. She feels that he's just covering his personal skin in a game in which she's just an onlooker, and finds it amusing. Then a chance reference from a friend suggests that she may indeed be the subject, which gives her a serious jolt. So much so that she is cool with him at their next meeting, from uncertainty and apprehension, rather than dislike or surety. But he takes this badly, of course, and there is a frost, because he thinks that she may have become fond of him and then rejected the idea because he's not one of her Catholic fold. He still has no idea that she knows he is the author of the book, which she has found fascinating, so assumes her motivations are purely based on him aside from it. His comical, old-Italian-woman servant gets ill as an interlude at this time, and they are parted for a good while through the pressure of his being part of the team looking after her, and the feeling that maybe this frost is permanent. Of course, this is a romantic story, so they finally achieve a rapprochement in her garden, on a morning of suitably pointed dimmed hues and lush drama of terrain. The cardinal's snuff-box of the title is one owned by the duchessa's uncle, who stays in her castle for much of the story, on holiday from clerical duties in the Vatican. Once the cardinal loses it, and returning the lost item is an excuse for him to visit her. A second time she hides it in his garden when he's not there, in the hope that he might repeat the gesture. There is also a strain in it, not profoundly observed but patent, of 'love as a means of conversion', where his quite agnostic Protestantism is altered, through the power of the emotion, to a rich fulfilment of the Catholic right way - a clearing of the path. This is a bit awful, but not pressed. It is all decorously entertaining, with, as may be imagined, an almost fabular tincture. But one strange, caustic thing in the last chapter provides an extraordinary contrast. The duchessa utters some very strong anti-semitic statements when discussing how the castle could have been a hotel owned by Jewish people if she hadn't interceded and purchased. Now, Jew-suspecting / -accusing / -disliking statements are not that rare in literature of this time - one would need to read very carefully indeed not to come across them. So that's not surprising, or, really, unexpected in general. But to have Harland putting them into the mouths of his characters is strange indeed, given what I think was possibly his ethnicity, and his history of publishing, earlier in his life, under his pseudonym of Sidney Luska, works of particular Jewish content. I wonder whether he abjured his Jewishness? If indeed he was? And wow, it makes me wonder whether there was any self-loathing at the basis of all this. Would it have been a 'not to be discussed' subject with him? What is the history of this extraordinary turnaround? So, as a result, this chocolate-box fable can be seen as undercut radically from within, and perhaps keenly disturbed.

Lucius or, The Ass by Lucian (c125-180)

Another strange burst of oddness from long ago. A young Greek goes journeying with a letter of recommendation to a professor of rhetoric in Thessaly. When he arrives, the story is set up such that we think he is probably going to find out that the woman who seems to be the maid is actually the professor's wife. The wife is known for her 'black magic' skills, and it turns out that the maid is not unadept either! Push comes to shove, and the maid turns him into a donkey. Here we leave behind what I'm guessing was the original plan of a tale of deceptive identity, and swirl off into a picaresque story of a young man's ego being challenged by all he undergoes as a beast of burden. Robbers steal him and treat him dreadfully. He is rescued by a wealthy young girl, but her father hands him over to a groom who has an evil streak, and they trade blows. He narrowly escapes castration because his owners drown in a tidal wave, and the groom ends up appropriating him and selling him to a gay cult who worship the ancient Syrian goddess Atargatis. As Lucian was apparently Syrian, this seems a nod to his origins. The cult wander from village to village with the statue of the goddess tied up onto his back, and demand alms via dancing wildly, cutting themselves in nerved-up excitation to prove their devotion. But when they are discovered mid-pleasure with a new convert they are thrown into prison, and The Ass is sold to a baker who runs him to skin and bone servicing his mill. A market-gardener who buys him at this low ebb has a fight with a military officer and hides away with him in the house of a friend. The Ass gives them away by sticking his head out of the window of their hideout, Lucian claiming that this is the origin of the phrase 'don't stick your neck out!'. He then provides great amusement in the family of the chef that purchases him next, by eating all sorts of things that donkeys wouldn't normally like, drinking wine, and being trained to perform tricks, which of course he is only able to do because he is human inside and can understand all that's being said to him. His fame grows as a peculiar phenomenon. A foreign girl comes to see him and falls in love with him - and they are both quite happy to make love together, which is.....an interesting plot development! They are spied on by his owners, who decide THIS will be a good money-earner! Set up in a public spectacle to repeat these pleasures with a female slave for all to see, he sees an attendant walk by with yellow roses, which he has been told by the maid in the beginning are his key to transformation back into a human. He grabs them, munching them up, and duly returns to his original form. The young woman who introduced him to odd pleasures is cautious about him, but decides to give him a try as a human lover when he seeks her out, having grown 'attached' to her. But she is wildly disappointed in his little monkeyishness after his no doubt splendid asinine proportions of yore! So, he returns home thankful to the gods for surviving his strange adventure. What I haven't yet mentioned is the cruelty in this piece. Other animals' legs are hacked off and they are dumped over cliffs, he is beaten to a pulp by several of his owners, and so on. The perverse mixture of sexuality and savagery gives this short piece a sting alongside the humour. A clear window into how much has changed since the second century. Though there was novelty and a species of freedom in aberrance in this, I'm on the whole glad we don't live anymore in a world of this kind of ravening. Just have to cure ourselves of those of our times.