Review 2321: Classics Club Spin Result! Weatherley Parade

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Note: the name on this cover image is misspelled. The cover on the book I have looks the same but is spelled correctly.

In Weatherley Parade, Richmal Crompton takes a look at changes in society through the lens of one upper-class family, the Weatherleys. Her novel begins with the return of Arthur Weatherley from the Boer War in 1902 and ends in the midst of World War II in 1940.

The novel is written in vignettes, chapters that take up a few hours, a few days, or a few months. What with children, grandchildren, and other relatives, there are many characters. No one is completely lovable or unlikeable. They are shown with their good points and flaws.

During the years, there are many events—happy and unhappy marriages, separations, a divorce, and deaths. Among these events, there is one treatment of a child that is hard to forgive.

Among some of the characters is Aunt Lilian, a young woman in 1902 of whom her brother Arthur despairs. He can’t understand why she keeps jilting one fiancé after another. She runs with a fast crowd and seems restless and bored. At first, I thought she was just ahead of her time, dissatisfied with traditional women’s roles, but I liked her less as time went on, and she eventually turns to alcoholism.

Arthur’s two children are Clive and Anthea. Clive is a boy who thinks everything should be done properly and by the rules, which doesn’t make him a popular schoolboy or, later, schoolmaster or father, even though his intentions are good. Anthea likes to have people’s attention, which works well when she is the mother of many children but isn’t so successful when they begin leaving the nest.

The novel stops in to visit these characters and their descendants at key periods of their lives. The scope here is broad rather than particular, so we don’t get to know any characters extremely well. I thought the depiction of changing times and attitudes was interesting, but I felt fairly neutral about most of the characters.

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A Century of Books: How Am I Doing? February Report

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In January, I foolishly decided to join Simon Thomas’s Century of Book Challenge, even though I knew that reading 100 books, one for each year in a century, from 1925-2024, would be tough because last year I only read 169. So, how am I doing?

I decided that the method I chose last month to keep track was meaningless to anyone but me, so it makes more sense if I list the years for which I don’t yet have entries. If you want to see the details, see my Century of Books page.

  • 1925-1934: entries needed for 1926-31
  • 1935-1944: entries needed for all years except 1941 and 1943
  • 1945-1954: entries needed for all years except 1947
  • 1955-1964: entries needed for all years except 1958 and 1959
  • 1965-1974: entries needed for all years except 1965, 1972, and 1974
  • 1975-1984: entries needed for all years except 1976
  • 1985-1994: entries needed for all years
  • 1995–2004: entries needed for all years
  • 2005-2014: entries needed for all years except 2009, 2010, and 2012
  • 2015-2024: entries needed for 2015 and 2024

Read in February (up to today):

  • Fear Stalks the Village by Ethel Lina White from 1932
  • The Warrielaw Jewel by Winifred Peck from 1933
  • Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom from 1934
  • Tom Tiddler’s Ground by Ursula Orange from 1941
  • Weatherley Parade by Richmal Crompton from 1943
  • Skeletons in the Closet by Jean-Patrick Manchette from 1976
  • Murder at the Residence by Stella Blómkvist from 2012
  • Mrs, March by Virginia Feito from 2021
  • Chenneville by Paulette Jiles, The Bookbinder by Pip Williams, and Somebody’s Fool by Richard Russo from 2023

Review 2320: The Haunting of Alma Fielding

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The two previous books I’ve read by Kate Summerscale were Victorian true crime stories. In The Haunting of Alma Fielding she changes genres (slightly) and periods to write about the spate of supernatural cases, and one in particular, that hit England when World War II was threatening in 1938.

The principal figure in the book is Nandor Fodor, a Hungarian emigré who studied the supernatural but also had an interest in Freudian psychology. When the Fielding case cropped up, he was in a difficult position, because although his mission was to prove whether there were legitimate supernatural occurrences, when he tried to use somewhat scientific methods of observation, he was accused of being unfriendly to mediums. His role at the Society for Psychical Research was contradictory at best and his notion of the scientific not very well developed.

The Fielding case began with a frightened family haunted by a poltergeist that hurled dishes and toppled furniture. Fairly quickly, it became clear that the activity centered around Alma, who lived in the house with her husband and lodger, and the spirits began to branch out by producing objects from her clothes at séances.

Fodor seemed so happy to have found what looked like legitimate supernatural activity that he believed everything he was told and actually encouraged the “spirits.” When later he found evidence that Alma deceived him, he still believed that some of the events were real and continued his investigation.

I found this book less interesting than the true crime books because I became so impatient with the gullibility of the investigators. And the medium tricks! After all, even if a spirit could produce small objects (called apports) from a person’s body, why would it want to? Obviously, because it’s an effect that can be faked.

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Review 2319: Trust

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Trust is like a stack of nesting dolls. It is the story of a fabulously wealthy couple set in New York of the 1920s and 30s. First, it is written in the form of a novel published in 1937, Bonds by Harold Vanner, in which the couple are called Benjamin and Helen Rask. While the husband makes money, the wife is a patroness of the arts who dies in an insane asylum.

The second section of the novel consists of chapters and notes from Andrew Bevel’s unfinished “autobiography.” Bevel is the actual tycoon depicted in Bonds, and his biography reveals a controlling and almost megalomaniacal personality. In this section, the biggest difference is how unequal the couple are, with Mildred Bevel being treated as the little wife who has the harmless hobby of loving music and encouraging a few musicians. There are also sections about what a financial genius the husband is. This section was so overbearing that I could barely stand to read it.

Patience is needed for this novel, because more is revealed at each level. In the third section, we meet Ida Partenza, the ghost writer of Bevel’s biography. Her narrative is split between two time frames, the “present” of 1985 in which she is an older lady who has just heard of Mildred Bevel’s papers being available for study at Bevel House, and her memoir of working with Bevel on his book as a 20-year-old woman just after World War II. Bevel’s main concern seems to be to refute the novel Bonds, especially in regard to how it depicts his wife, and it’s true that it depicts her as dying in an insane asylum instead of a health clinic. However, to Ida’s confusion, instead of sharing with her memories of his wife or letting her interview Mildred’s friends, he seems to want her to invent things. It is in this section that the novel begins to be really interesting. Who was Mildred Bevel? What are Bevel’s secrets?

The final section is Mildred Bevel’s journal, brief passages written when she was dying in Switzerland.

This is the kind of novel that unfolds more in each succeeding section. It is about money, power, and control but especially about control. It is like glimpsing an image in a sliver of mirror that reflects differently as it moves.

I read this novel for my Pulitzer project. Trust was a cowinner for 2023 with Demon Copperhead.

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Review 2318: Elegy for April

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This third of Benjamin Black’s Quirke series begins with Quirke drying out in a clinic. In the city, his daughter, Phoebe Griffin, is worried about her friend, April Latimer, a doctor and the daughter of a powerful family. No one has seen April for some time, and although she has gone away before, Phoebe thinks she would have told her.

Phoebe first goes to Dr. Oscar Latimer, April’s brother, even though she knows April is estranged from her family. Oscar doesn’t seem interested and says April probably ran off.

Phoebe is beginning to believe that April is dead. After Quirke gets out of the clinic, Phoebe turns to him. He talks to his friend Inspector Hackett, and the police eventually find a cleaned up pool of blood next to April’s bed.

The Latimers seem to be more concerned about their family reputation than they are about April and use their connections to get the investigation shut down. In the meantime, Phoebe is falling for Patrick Ojukuru, a Nigerian student in the small group of friends that included April. When Quirke tells her a Black man was seen visiting April, Phoebe denies knowing of any Black man.

Quirke is falling off the wagon with a vengeance, but he continues looking into the case.

An investigator with a drinking problem is such a cliché, but otherwise I find this series set in 1950s Dublin to be well written and interesting.

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Review 2317: William

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William Nesbitt is a successful ship builder and owner, and at the beginning of this novel, he is contemplating the successes of his life. The only thing he feels he has missed is some romance in life, his wife Kate being a very practical woman. But he experiences romance vicariously, through his favorite daughter, Lydia, whom he views as a source of light.

Kate Nesbitt is a worrier, and she has a sense of impending doom. She also is extremely conventional and I think old-fashioned, even for the time (1925). For example, she disapproves of her daughter Dora going to visit Lydia in London without her husband. Kate has a sense that something is going to go wrong with what she sees as her family’s happy and content existence.

Of course, she is being almost willfully blind. Their son Walter and his wife Violet are content, but their daughter Dora is increasingly discontented with her husband Herbert. Their daughter Mabel and her husband John are self-righteous, and Mabel likes to complain and pretend they are poor when John’s business is going well. Janet, the youngest, unmarried daughter is silent and unhappy. Later, it becomes obvious that she thinks she’s in love with Oliver, Lydia’s husband.

Then, something bad does happen: Lydia leaves Oliver for Henry Wyatt, a writer. William is still accepting of Lydia, thinking she is trying to live her life honestly, but he begins to see that Kate is more rigid and unaccepting than he realized.

This novel is an insightful and nuanced study of how a crisis can affect a family. Since Young ran off with a married man, it’s interesting to speculate how autobiographical this novel may be. I found the novel deeply interesting, with complex characters.

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Review 2316: Undone

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Will Trent has taken his partner Faith Mitchell to the hospital because she passed out. While he is waiting, an ambulance brings in a woman who has been hit by a car. She is naked and has obviously been kept captive somewhere and been tortured. Even more horribly, her eleventh rib has been removed.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has to be invited into a case, but Will drives to the crime scene, which is only being investigated near the road. The police try to send him away, but he enters the nearby woods to try to find where the woman was escaping from. He finds a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of plywood. Inside the man-made cave, he finds indications that two women were there. Eventually, he finds a second woman hanging upside down from a tree, dead. This woman has been blinded.

Back at the hospital, the doctor, Sara Linton (who apparently is the heroine of a different series by Slaughter), tells Faith she is diabetic. This condition is complicated because Faith is also pregnant.

For his part, Will has married his lover Angie, but she took off almost immediately afterwards. To his dismay, Will finds Sara, a widow, attractive.

As Will and Faith try to identify the victims, with the local police withholding evidence, another woman disappears. Because she physically resembles both victims, Will and Faith think she might be another victim of the same person.

This is another fast moving and interesting entrant to this series about a dyslexic detective and his partner.

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Review 2315: #ReadingOrwell24: Burmese Days

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I picked out Burmese Days to read for Brona’s Reading Orwell event. It may be the only Orwell I read, though, unless one comes up in one of the biannual year reads hosted by Stuck in a Book.

There is nothing politically correct about Burmese Days, published in 1934 and probably set 10 years or so earlier. So, if bigotry bothers you, best stay away. Also, a warning for animal lovers—this book contains the murder of a dog.

John Flory is stationed in North Burma working for a timber concern. He hates most of the English people who live in Burma and spend their nights drinking and complaining about the natives. He wants to talk about books and more intellectual concerns, so his only friend is Dr. Veraswami, an educated Indian. However, when the subject of admitting an Asian to the European Club comes up, Flory doesn’t have the gumption to support the doctor’s admission.

He learns later that this admission is more important than he thinks, because Dr. Veraswami has offended U Po Kyin, a corrupt magistrate who is determined to ruin him. Membership in the club would make the doctor impregnable.

Flory doesn’t want to leave Burma, which he loves, but he is desperately lonely. He decides the only option is to find a woman who loves Burma too and is interested in intellectual discussion.

On the scene comes Elizabeth Lackersteen, a young woman who has been left penniless and has come to Burma to find a husband. Because she came from Paris, Flory immediately imagines her hanging out with artists and thinks he’s met his soulmate. He doesn’t even notice how she hates being among the Burmese and is exactly the type of woman he dislikes.

After Flory take Elizabeth on a hunting expedition, she seems inclined toward him, especially as her uncle has been approaching her inappropriately. But then the dashing Lieutenant Verrall appears, and Mrs. Lackersteen discovers he is an Honourable. In the meantime, U Po Kyin has expanded his efforts to disgrace the doctor to include his friend Flory.

This is a bitter satire against the British Raj with few likable characters and a dark ending. I’m sure it is meticulously observed, even though many of its characters seem like caricatures.

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Review 2314: Bolla

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Arsim is an Albanian literature student in Pristina, Kosovo, in 1995 when he meets Miloš, a Serbian medical student. They are immediately attracted to each other and soon begin a torrid affair. Although he is young, Arsim has already been married for four years to Ajshe, and on the day he consummates his relations with Miloš, she tells him she is pregnant.

The affair continues through Miloš’s graduation, but shortly thereafter, it becomes too dangerous for Albanians to stay in Kosovo, and Ajshe and her brother arrange for the family to leave the country. As soon as he learns Arsim is leaving, Miloš joins the Serbian army.

Arsim’s relatively linear narrative is broken by short sections narrated by Miloš that are harder to understand and move back and forth through time. He is the more fragile of the two and becomes damaged by his war experience.

This novel, which I read for my James Tait Black project, is beautifully written and ultimately haunting. However, I so disliked Arsim that it was hard for me to read. He is absolutely vile in his behavior to almost everyone in the book but especially to his wife and children, whom he periodically deserts and beats when he is there. When he thinks later that he did his best by them, he defines this as financial support. Really, he deserts anyone who poses any difficulties.

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