Review 2744: Classics Club Spin Result! Our Mutual Friend

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One of the pleasures for me in rereading some of Dickens’s more massive works is the plethora of characters and plots and the author’s skill in linking them all up. Our Mutual Friend is one of those books, and it was chosen from my list by the latest Classics Club spin.

The novel begins when Jesse Hexam, a waterman, and his daughter Lizzie fish a body out of the Thames. A sequel to this incident is related by Mortimer Lightwood, a man of law, at a party. He tells the story of a man named Harmon who became fabulously wealthy dealing in dust. He had two children. He threw off his daughter for marrying a man with no money, and when his son came from school to defend his sister, he threw him off, too. When Harmon dies, he leaves the lowest mound of dust to an old family servant, Mr. Boffin, and the rest to his son, John Harmon, as long as John marries the girl his father has chosen for him. The son is located after an absence of twelve years, but then he is drowned after returning, a body of a gentleman having been found with only Harmon’s card on his person.

Brought to identify the victim is a young man named Julian Handford, but he is unable to identify the body. When next we see this mysterious young man, he is called John Rokesmith and has soon offered himself as secretary to Mr. Boffin, the residual legatee to Harmon’s estate, now wealthy.

The Boffins are honest and unsuspecting people who, we learn, were the only comfort for John Harmon in his younger years. Since they have inherited John Harmon’s estate, they decide to offer a home to Bella Wilfer, the girl that the elder Harmon had picked out to be wife for his son, reasoning that they have deprived her of wealth. Our first meeting with Bella is not the best. She is both angry at being parceled out to be a wife for a man she never met without her consent and yet determined to marry money, because she is sick of being poor. The ubiquitous Mr. Rokesmith has taken a room at her parents’ house.

The Wilfer family comprise Mr. Wilfer, described as a cherub, with a generous and pleasant disposition; Mrs. Wilfer, a grand, bitter lady who terrifies her husband; Bella, a beautiful spoiled girl; and Lavinia, a little shrew. To her credit, though, Bella likes the unsophisticated Boffins and accepts their invitation.

This is just the beginning of a complex story that features a character with a secret identity; a murder; a man consumed by jealousy; the pursuit of a beautiful but socially inferior girl by an idle member of society; an attempted murder; betrayal by an employee; a selfish brother; an unselfish sister; a kind old Jewish man who suffers many insults; a doll’s dressmaker; and much more. This novel is so complex, but it features characters that you care about, characters that you hate, passages that make you laugh, others that bring a tear. In short—everything you expect from Dickens. Although not as well known as some of his novels, this is one of my favorites—after Bleak House and maybe tied with David Copperfield.

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If I Gave the Award

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With my review of These Days, I’ve finished the shortlist for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. So, it’s time for my feature in which I decide whether the judges got it right.

This time, the decision is difficult, because there are no books that stood out for me and also because it has been several years since I read some of the books. With the Walter Scott Prize, in particular, I often have to wait a while before the books become available in my library, if that ever happens. In this case, I finally was able to check out the last hold-out just recently.

Let’s start with the books I liked least. I am really not a fan of Simon Mawer. I always feel a great distance from his characters, plus I do not appreciate his apparent compulsion to mention certain female parts in every single book. This time, I found Ancestry, about his own ancestors, a little more interesting in subject matter, but I still noticed those same issues.

As for Adrian Duncan’s The Geometer Lobachevsky, about a Russian surveyor in 1950s Ireland who decides not to return to the Soviet Union, I acknowledged the book’s descriptive passages but said I felt meh about it. It doesn’t really have much of a plot but is more about day-to-day existence and the details of work.

I really didn’t like any of the characters in Robert Harris’s Act of Oblivion, about the hunt that begins after the Restoration for two men who signed the death warrant for Charles I. Harris’s recounting of brutal acts of war on both sides made me lose my usual preference for the Royalists. This book was interesting in its portrayal of the wildness of New England in the 17th century, though, as that’s where the two men go, with their pursuer behind them.

I found it hard to follow which narrator was speaking in I Am Not Your Eve by Devika Ponnanbalam. This book was about one of Paul Gauguin’s teenage Polynesian wives, not a very willing partner. Yes, I said one. Although I found some things in this book confusing and the viewpoint really foreign to me, it was more interesting to me than some of the others.

I think I liked the next two books about the same. They were both interesting and beautifully written. The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane is about a community searching for a lost boy in the 19th century Australian Outback. These Days by Lucy Caldwell is about a family caught up in the Belfast Blitz. It is the actual winner for 2023, and it’s a compelling read.

Although again, I didn’t think there were any stand-outs this year, the novel I liked best was The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry, about the grief and guilt of Thomas Hardy after the death of his wife. Hardy has been oblivious to his wife’s unhappiness until he discovers her diary after her death.

This novel just runs better with my own interests as an admirer of Hardy’s work. So, I pick The Chosen. Nevertheless, These Days was my second-to-best choice, so the judges were at least in the ballpark.

Review 2743: These Days

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These Days is the last book I had to read for the 2023 Walter Scott prize shortlist, and boy, it made me feel uninformed. Of course, I knew about the bombing of England during World War II, but I had no idea that Belfast suffered similar bombings. But of course, I realized, that’s where they built the ships.

The book blurb makes it sound like this book is only about two sisters, Emma and Audrey, but it also spends time with their mother Florence and their younger brother Philip. Audrey is engaged to be married, to Richard Graham, a doctor who works at the hospital with her doctor father. Emma has volunteered to serve in a first aid station. Florence has been somewhat detached as a wife and mother, still grieving her first love, who died during World War I. Philip is just being 13.

It’s April 1941, and so far, things have been quiet. Emma has befriended an older woman named Sylvia, and they fall into an affair. For her part, Audrey doesn’t seem particularly excited about Richard or being married, more like she’s trying to convince herself.

Then one night when Richard and Audrey are at a dance, the attack comes full force. Richard has to go to the hospital, so Audrey finds herself in a shelter all night. Emma has been with Sylvia and has just turned back toward the first aid station when she is knocked unconscious by a blast. Florence and Philip spend the night huddled in a shelter.

The devastation is terrific. Whole neighborhoods are gone and hundreds of people are injured, killed, or missing. And this is the first of four major attacks.

This was certainly an eye-opening book for me. We have long associated Belfast with sectarian violence, but there was none of that in this novel, just a common fear of the Belfast Blitz. Earlier in the book, a transfer to Audrey’s job from England remarks at how much easier it is there to get decent food and goods. Well, that changes.

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Review 2742: Precipice

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It’s the eve of the First World War, and Venetia Stanley (sharing the name of her famous ancestor, subject of the novel Viper Wine) is having an affair with Prime Minister Asquith, more than twice her age. Perhaps it’s not a sexual affair, but it is certainly an emotional one. Asquith is known for his relationships with young women, but this one seems to be more serious.

In an incident that seems unrelated to the rest of the novel for a while, Venetia decides to meet Asquith at a party instead of going on a pleasure cruise with the set she hangs out with. During the cruise, two young men drown as part of a bet. The investigation brings in the character Detective Sergeant Paul Deemer, who notices Venetia’s name on the guest list and calls on her to take her statement.

Periodically, we check in on Deemer as he is recruited into Intelligence after the war starts, his job to find German spies. But most of the time, the book follows the relationship between Venetia and Asquith, leaving me wondering when and how the characters would link up.

Asquith’s behavior is frankly shocking, especially during war. Riding around in his limo with Venetia, he shows her a confidential message and then wads it up and throws it out the window. He encloses confidential and even secret telegrams in his letters to her and asks her opinion. Some of these actions make her uncomfortable, and she doesn’t know what to do with his letters, locking them in a box. He writes her several times a day.

The stories finally begin to link up when Deemer is assigned to find out about several messages turned in by the public. The conclusions of the initial investigation end with Deemer assigned to intercept Venetia’s correspondence.

This is not the taut thriller that Harris often produces. I found it interesting but got a little tired of reading especially Asquith’s letters, which are cringingly romantic. As the affair continues, Asquith writes Venetia letters during cabinet meetings and seems more obsessed by her than concerned about the war. Venetia in turn begins trying to find a way to escape the relationship.

I had very little sympathy with him, although I began slowly to sympathize with Venetia. It was interesting to learn about politics of this period and this odd relationship, but this wasn’t one of my favorite Harris novels.

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Review 2741: Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish

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I’m not sure what possessed me to read two biographies about Margaret Cavendish so close together. I think I moved Pure Wit up in the pile without really looking to see what it was about, just remembering I had wanted to read it.

While Katie Whitaker’s Mad Madge is more of a biography for the general public, Peacock’s biography is the more scholarly and more concerned with Cavendish’s ideas and legacy.

Certainly, it traces Cavendish’s own concern with her legacy and her difficulties in being taken seriously in her own time. Although Cavendish was not the first woman writer to publish her work, she was pretty much the first to publish not only poetry and plays but her ideas on science and philosophy. Of her earlier work, some claimed that her husband, William, had written it, but by the last decade of her life, she had been invited to attend the Royal Society to see their experiments despite a reputation for eccentricity.

Peacock explores how Cavendish’s work, which made her famous during her lifetime, after her death quickly began to be denigrated and made hard to find so that scholars couldn’t make up their own minds about it. Biographers and critics began to fasten on a few contemporary remarks to claim she was unstable and to discuss only her poems about fairies and her biography of her husband, whereas she wrote widely on a multitude of subjects. For a while, she was depicted as a dutiful wife—which she probably wasn’t—and then the Mad Madge badge was pinned on her. Even Virginia Woolf made her the butt of jokes instead of trying to understand what she had done.

But actually, Cavendish was very much an early feminist and a ground-breaking writer. She was self-contradictory, but Peacock points out that other philosophers and poets of her time with the same faults—if it is a fault to change your mind about your ideas as you reconsider them—were not being criticized for them.

It’s pretty clear that the reputation Cavendish accumulated over time is a matter of misogyny.

If you want an easier-to-read biography, I’d recommend Whitaker’s, but if you are interested also in an in-depth analysis of Cavendish’s works and legacy, this is the book for you.

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Review 2740: The Mighty Red

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Louise Erdrich has written some fantastic books but also some that I didn’t like as well. Still, she is usually a good choice for something thoughtful and insightful. However, with this novel I had to have patience for the first hundred pages as it centered on a teenage love triangle, something I had zero interest in.

It’s 2008. Kismet Poe is an eighteen-year-old part-Ojibwe girl living in a farming community in North Dakota in the valley of the Red River of the North. Her mother, Crystal, is hard working and frugal, and Kismet is working as a waiter in a restaurant. Both of them are careful with money to make up for the extravagance of Martin, Kismet’s father, who brings in little money working in theater and spends most of it on expensive clothing and extravagances.

During the last year, Gary Geist, the son of Crystal’s well-off boss, has changed from making fun of Kismet to deciding he’s in love with her. They are sort of dating. Even though he was a big high-school football player and extremely popular and she was considered a geek, he’s decided he has to marry her. I found this courtship, in which he continually tries to wear her down, so wrong, especially because Gary bores Kismet.

In fact, Kismet prefers and is having sex with Hugo, whom she finds soft and comforting. But Hugo is just a kid at 16. Gary has his reasons for wanting to marry Kismet, and his mother Winnie does, too, and he finally manages to wear her down enough to sort of say yes. Then, as Winnie takes over the wedding completely, Kismet can’t find a way to get out of it.

Crystal knows she shouldn’t let Kismet marry Gary, but she’s having her own issues besides being totally exhausted. Martin has been handling the church renovation fund and doing well. But in 2008 there’s the huge downturn and the church fund starts losing money. Then Martin disappears, and Crystal learns that her house—her own house, which has been paid off—now has a mortgage fraudulently obtained and the church fund is gone.

Surrounding all of what’s going on is something that is not being discussed but has to do with an accident the year before, in which two of Gary’s posse were killed.

The book got more interesting after the wedding, but I never really was that involved with the characters. And frankly, I didn’t like either of Kismet’s love interests that much. I liked Gary’s friend Eric, who also cares about Kismet, a lot better.

The novel has themes about the treatment of the environment and the damage modern farming techniques have done to the soil. Hugo goes to work for oil frackers at one point and sees the countryside being turned into a moonscape.

I think maybe there was too much going on in this book, too many characters, too many themes, too many directions, to have it really grab me. And some of the revelations that come out at the very end of the book would have involved me more if I’d learned about them earlier.

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Review 2739: The Crime at Diana’s Pool

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Victor L. Whitechurch explains in the Foreword of this novel that he wrote it using an unusual technique. Instead of planning it out beforehand, he started it not knowing himself who the murderer would be. Now, I figured out who the murderer was at about page 50, and nothing made me doubt it, so I don’t know how that statement could be true.

Felix Nayland is relatively new to the neighborhood when he and his sister throw a big party. Part of the entertainment is the Green Albanian Band, all dressed in green jackets.

The observant young vicar, Harry Westerham, and Major Challow, the Chief Constable, are walking around the property where there’s a water feature when they spot a man in a green coat face down in the pool. They pull him out, thinking he’s a member of the band who went missing. Instead, it’s Felix Nayland stabbed in the back and wearing the performer’s green jacket.

The police think this is going to be easy—just find the performer, apparently a foreigner, and clearly the murderer. But figuring out who he is turns out to be more difficult than expected, because he was a substitute for a regular band member, and that man has no idea who he is. Also, how did Nayland end up wearing the other man’s jacket?

It seems clear that the mystery man stole a wooden box from the Nayland’s house because they find pieces of it at the crime scene. But there are other clues that make no sense.

It gradually becomes clear that the murder has something to do with an obscure South American country and its politics, but when they find Garcia, the substitute, he claims to have only come for the box, to have been caught by Nayland, and to have explained what he was doing. Then Nayland helped him leave the grounds, because Garcia saw someone he was afraid of.

Although the plot becomes complicated very quickly, I figured out the murderer almost immediately. There were some other issues with the book as well. Characterization wasn’t a big consideration, except a little bit with the vicar, who is in love with a girl who is clearly hiding something—something obvious, I thought, but he can’t figure out what it is.

And a murder has been committed at a party, but the police think it’s not necessary to question the guests—just the servants. There are a couple of instances of this, where suspects are clearly divided by class.

Altogether, I found this mystery easy to predict and a little hard to pay attention to.

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Review 2738: Ebby the Magnificent

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I occasionally review children’s books, and I especially enjoy ones with beautiful illustrations. I have also reread a few classics and found some of them just as enjoyable for an adult as for myself as a child. I received this book for Christmas a few years ago, and it has taken this long to work its way to the top of my pile.

First, let me say that although this book is self-published, it is expensively produced in hardback with lots of colored pictures. The pictures are beautiful, and the book is attractive. J. W. Julian wrote and illustrated it, and she is certainly a good children’s book artist.

Ebby is a baby bunny who discovers she is a rare thing—an Elusive Baby Bunny who is destined to travel widely and do wonderful things instead of staying home, like most baby bunnies. With almost no further ado, she sets off on her travels and begins to do wonderful things, mostly to make friends, it seems.

My first impression had to do with the book’s audience. It is advertised for middle grades, but its tone and subject matter seem more appropriate for younger children—to be read to. Frankly, it is precious, in the too sweet meaning of the word.

I wanted to try to finish this book, but I stopped reading at about page 50. For one thing, the writing is only workmanlike—grammatical but not very interesting. And the pacing, especially for a children’s book, is very slow. Julian seems to have adopted very simple sentence structure for early readers, but the book doesn’t read like a well-written children’s book. It is too choppy. Opportunities are missed. For example, Ebby goes to a village for the first time, but instead of describing it like someone would who has never seen a village before, it is described like someone would who is familiar with villages but immediately picks out what is different—that the houses have water wheels. Having never seen a village, how would Ebby know that was unusual?

I wanted to read this book, but reading it was tedious, and I felt that children as old as 10 would be used to plots that zipped along. Little kids might find it cute, though (I know a bunny on the cover of a book was enough for me to want to read it when I was five), and parents could then find an opportunity to discuss some of the vocabulary.

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Review 2737: Author Unknown

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Horrie Pedlar is the first and only woman publisher in 1930s London, and this novel opens with the announcement of a party she’s giving for the re-emergence from exile of the writer Marmion Poole. His romantic peccadillos years before resulted in his leaving London, but Horrie thinks it’s about time he returned. At the party, he announces he has written his memoirs, always an issue with a mystery novel.

Horrie is pretty much beloved. Although a good businesswoman, she is generous and kind and has collected a lot of grateful and sincere friends and employees. But at the very beginning of the novel, she has a conversation with Gilda Bedenham, a recent employee, to tell her she’s not doing well at her job and she wants to reassign her. Gilda already feels an obligation to her and is prickly about it, so she quits, in fact walks off the job. Horrie then sends her young, bright PR man, Koko Fry, to check on her and maybe get her to come back.

Marmion Poole is attractive and dramatic. He is full of charisma and full of himself. The reaction to his announcement of a memoir upsets a lot of people, especially the husbands of the many women with whom he’s had affairs.

Horrie is thinking of retiring, going out while she’s still doing well. She wants to leave the company to be led by her right-hand man, James Savory, Koko, and Marmion Poole, a fact she tells Savory but not the others.

However, there are problems with Marmion. The office is receiving calls from society people who want to read the manuscript. Horrie has read it, though, and tells Marmion she won’t publish it. She thinks it’s vengeful and says he should take the high road or rewrite it as fiction.

This is an unusual mystery novel. No one is actually killed until almost 200 pages in, for one thing, and then it is Horrie, whom we have come to like. She is found in the courtyard below her apartment, and the inquest decides that she fell from the fire escape late at night coming in through the unlocked door there because she forgot her house key.

Another oddity is the presence of Sir John Saumarez, who solved the previous mystery by Dane and Simpson. He’s at the party and is around at the denoument, but does nothing to solve the crime, if there was one.

So, what is the novel doing in the first 200 pages? It’s taking its time introducing the characters and portraying the London literary scene and doing it masterfully. Dane and Simpson’s characters are complex and believable, and we like almost all of them.

Well, of course, Horrie was murdered, but who killed her? Was it someone who wanted her out of the company immediately? Was it someone she caught destroying Marmion Poole’s manuscript, the ashes of which were found nearby? Was it Gilda, who lost her job and is now engaged in a romance with Koko? Marmion sets a trap to find out.

I am really enjoying these books by Dane and Simpson. They are good writers with a flair for characterization and dialogue. It’s too bad there’s only one more. I hope I can find a copy. (Update: right now, the cheapest copy I can find of the third book is priced at more than $400. Yikes!)

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