Smile Please by Jean Rhys (1979)

 I haven't read Rhys since the 90s. Then it was her short stories, and I now have almost no memory of them, apart from the feeling of being stirred. This is her unfinished autobiography, presented here in three parts: an almost finished early section (volume?) about her childhood on Dominica - the title piece. A much more 'imperfect' section on her time in London and Paris in the Edwardian period and through the First World War - It Began to Grow Cold. And then a diary excerpt, which she had hoped to either include or make use of, from the 40s, called At the Ropemakers' Arms. The early part is quietly luminous, and gives a fine impress of her sensitivity and feeling of ill-fittedness for the ordinary expectations of late Victorian (and indeed colonial) middle class life - she exhibits the classic mixture of understanding of indebtedness and resentment at it which is common to children who don't 'fit' well. The less finished second part, though, is where it really catches fire - somehow it has a more immediate quality, a riffle of more recognisable tension and what seems her typically contrary shelteredness and worldly self-deprecation winning out by turns. The last section is an attempt, which could well have become brilliant if she'd had time to work on it, to form a philosophical conversation with herself, question and answer, outlining her take on her life and love and death, with all of their contrarieties, and the unsayable far reaches positioned carefully and honed in on in their exact spaces. Through these all, she mentions exercise books and notebooks in which she has been writing, and from which some of the material here has been mined. Here's hoping that that matter has been preserved, as it also apparently includes early fictional work, alongside personal journals of various shades.

The Swoop! by PG Wodehouse (1909)

 An early jeu d'esprit. It's quite skeletal, but what there is is packed full of colour. A Boy Scout, a relatively new phenomenon when this was written, is the central character, who somehow also works at one of the London papers! I'm wondering if this journalistic element echoes Wodehouse's life at this time - know nothing of his biography. A lot of the jokes are based around the world of newspaper journalism and the music halls. The plot is a crazed one about an invasion of Britain, which reflects the sense that will already have been building about the European powers and their hunger for conflict. The author delights in the cracked notion of several different foreign armies deciding to invade Britain at the same time, their manner of doing so showing how their nationalities were perceived currently. Of course these invasions are more of a fictional device than a forceful reality, and life goes on much as usual, with armies camped in various parts of the country - very much a feeling of a boy's play-idea. He then seems to have lost steam with the original scheme and sends most of them off home for one reason or another. But Germany and Russia remain, and it is up to Boy Scout-hero Clarence Chugwater to devise a cunning plan based around their generals' rival turns at the most popular music halls! Competition over salary is Clarence's activating factor, and he succeeds in engendering such a conflict between these two boors on Hampstead Heath and its surrounds that the battle ends up decimating both armies almost to oblivion. And so pugnacious Clarence becomes "The Boy of Destiny". It's slim, occasionally mildly funny, shows what the author may become capable of in the way of conceptual hijinks. It's also occasionally xenophobic and racist, which is par for the time. 

Petrified Wood by Mary Scott (2018)

 This is part of a series called Lost Rocks, which is apparently a group of forty books produced in tranches over the last few years by a small Tasmanian publisher, and celebrating "mineralogical, metaphysical and metallurgical telling". The tenor of that kind of language tells the reader a bit about the 'artsy' nature of the project. As does the fact that, for some reason, they've decided to call the whole oeuvre a group of 'fictionellas' - there's seemingly no fiction in this one, so that for me at the moment is opaque. Horrible word, too. But that's all context, and if it is stripped away, and we look at what Scott has written, pure and simple, then there's something quietly interesting here. She has an ancestor who was a famous microscopist, who did a lot of groundbreaking work in understanding Tasmania's botanic history through the study of fossils, mainly the petrified wood of the title. This is a short record of her discoveries about him, and the thoughts they bring up. She's an artist, so these thoughts exhibit some of that bent. She takes a musing journey through his history, language and reputation. The best way to typify it is through colour. Imagine a pale colour that looks very slightly green in some lights, and very slightly bluer in others, but predominantly white. One of those colours that ostensibly doesn't yell for attention. But it has a peculiar atmosphere of its own, and radiance within a small field of observation. That is this book, for me. It has the same delicacy and subcurrent, and minor specialness. The only thing I will say agin it is that a colour of that kind has for me a vibrance and glowing tang that is overt and lasting, whereas this book doesn't leave a huge mark in the memory beyond the moment of reading. 

The Libation by Edmund Keeley (1958)

 This is an interesting novel of family secrets, embellished by its locale in Greece, and its situation across a number of dates through the early twentieth century. It delves back and forth between these, in a game of risks and consequences, and fates. Chronologically, it begins with a doomed Christian mission to Turkey by a slightly obsessive American in the years before the declaration of the sultanate in 1922. He is killed in the revolution of that year, and his adoring son, infected with the same flame, gets out of the continuing danger and heads to Greece. There he appears as a wanderer, in rags, and preaching a little madly, obviously inspired with his father's beliefs, and led on by stories of the Apostles. In the town of Kastoria in northern Greece, a young woman hears him in the market place and falls not only for the power of his words, but also for his personality. Cassandra experiences the only feeling of overwhelming love of her life. But to Thomas Gammon, the wanderer, she is a temptation - that, ultimately, he can't resist. Cassandra is married to tough, worldly and abusive Achilles, and the daughter that is born to her a while later is presented as his. Only Cassandra and Gammon know that Helen is Gammon's daughter. Two complications arise at this time: Gammon undergoes a period of compunction which sees him regard Cassandra and his relation to her as sinful, and he also succumbs to a much less vividly outlined urge to set out in business, with Achilles as partner. They are both so primary that it is a fiery combination, and Gammon has a species of western lordliness which rankles Achilles a great deal - he would probably have left if his grasping qualities had not been so fulfilled by business being good. Gammon rejects Cassandra emotionally, and she and Achilles carry on living in a cottage on the large farm property Gammon has bought, as "helpers", with Helen as she grows up. Gammon leaves for America, still agitated by his "sin", and marries there, bringing his ill wife back to Greece with him some time later. He vacillates and is clearly troubled by Cassandra's presence. Finally, he can resist no more, once again, and, with significant sleight of events, Cassandra has yet another child by him, this time a boy, who is immediately adopted as her own by the wife. It is understood between Gammon and Cassandra that she is not to regard Timothy as in any way her own, to renounce him for ever, as the two of them go through another unnerved, and, on Gammon's part, ashamed cooling, this time for good. All this takes place with no other person having any knowledge of it, which stretches credibility a little. Then Gammon's wife dies, the thirties come, and the slide down to war. Timothy and Helen become playmates, and, with no knowledge of their relation to each other, start to explore, in a childish way, what sex is, alongside a growing emotional connection. Sensing danger, but not speaking the truth about it, Gammon sends Timothy to the US to be schooled, staying in Greece himself. When the war comes, Cassandra and Helen are sent to nearby Salonika, whereas Gammon stays on the now rundown property in Kastoria. It is occupied by German troops, to whom he is insolent and anathema, resulting in his deportation with local Jews in a boxcar of a transport train north. In a disastrous escape attempt, they are lined up and shot by the track - he is exempted as he is not Jewish. He finally makes it back toward the end of the war, and occupies the property again, in a state of semi-ruin, with Achilles as caretaker and vague business associate, leaving Cassandra and Helen in Salonika in impoverished times, as Greece stutters on, exhausted. In 1949, Gammon and Achilles are out hunting when, in a struggle so common to them, Gammon is shot by the gun they're fighting over. With them is another character who has been part of the tale from the beginning, an intellectually disabled refugee on whom Cassandra has taken pity as a boy, when he appeared with a group of gypsies from the east, and named Armenian because of his nationality. He wets himself often, boy and man, and doesn't speak. He fears the eye of the sun, and all manner of creatures whose beady eyes might be discovering his secret intentions, tracing important figures in the dust, or burying things. Keeley takes us into his head in really interesting ways in short sections. Armenian has always been a source of nag to Achilles, being a favourite of Cassandra, rivalling him for attention. Now, the long intensifying animosity between them becomes, on Achilles' part, fear, as he thinks that Armenian may try to somehow reveal how Gammon died. Then, a year later, Timothy arrives back from the US at the age of 21, having been in constant letter-contact with Helen, and looking to confirm their relationship, as is she. It is now that all these secrets bound up to the forefront, as Gammon's odd keeping of them apart is remarked on, Cassandra's disbelief that they could care for one another in that way made clear. Just after Armenian and Achilles have an altercation at the house which results in Achilles being stabbed, Cassandra realises that she can hold back no longer and spills to both of them their connection to one another. The fact that they had consummated their desire for one another the night before sends Timothy into a spin. He angrily and shamefacedly leaves, and Helen follows him, blindsided herself, but able to gain a better hold on the situation. She finds him aboard a boat in Salonika harbour, and convinces him to come 'home', and make the experiment of their new kin relationship. In this, she is depicted as being of a much more malleable, Mediterranean frame than Timothy's uptight Anglo-Saxon rigidity, following in his family's sin-bedazzled footsteps. The novel ends with Armenian carefully arranging himself in an open garden bed so that he can drop a treasure, the shell-tip from the gun which killed Gammon, into a small hole and cover it over without the sun seeing him do it, or indeed the vigil of three crows atop the roof. When he's essaying the psychology of these characters in description of the stages of their thinking, Keeley can often really hit the mark. Sometimes, the dialogue feels a little obviously testy, like he's had the thought that all these people are at irritated loggerheads through having forceful personalities, and pictures this in too similar ways, a kind of "why would you / how could you say that?" shuttling back and forth crossly. The other thing is that this rich mix is presented achronologically, so the reader needs to be thinking carefully about who knew what when, as the next set of revelations at a historical juncture are revealed. A satisfying book, all the same.