Review 2306: The Midnight News

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Is The Midnight News a love story? a murder mystery? an espionage tale? a story about a dysfunctional family? an exploration of how the stress of war affects people psychologically? I’m not telling.

Charlotte is the daughter of privilege. Her father is a peer and a member of Parliament with an important war job. But Charlotte has chosen to work as a typist in a government office and live in a respectable but middle class boarding house.

It is the Blitz, and Charlotte’s home is in a dangerous area south of the Thames. She and the other residents of the house have been spending their nights on the lowest level of the house.

The novel starts slowly. Charlotte spends a day with her best friend, El, who has been elusive lately. Then El is killed in the Blitz. Charlotte goes to visit her godmother, Saskia, after she hears that a well-known actress, a schoolmate, has also been killed. Then Saskia dies, too. Charlotte has noticed a square gray man in several different places and comes to believe he is following her and killing people she is close to. This may seem like a wild idea, and since Charlotte has begun hearing the voices of her dead friends and has a history of mental illness, we begin to worry about her.

Then there is Tom, the son of an undertaker whom Charlotte has noticed feeding the birds. He is waiting to hear about a scholarship and a place at King’s College, but notifications are delayed because King’s has been hit in the Blitz. He is in love with Charlotte but thinks she is above him.

Is Charlotte being followed or is she paranoid? Is there something else going on? This novel eventually because a fast-moving, tightly plotted, and satisfying tale.

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Review 2305: The Fawn

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The Fawn is an unusual novel, narrated as it is by Eszter, who through the entire novel is speaking to another person. Eventually, we understand this is her lover, whose identity is not confirmed until the last half of the book.

The novel moves among scenes from the present and the past, sometimes with no transition, so that I was briefly confused about the when. Eszter grows up very poor. Her parents are from more prosperous roots, her father’s perhaps aristocratic, but his family has thrown them off. Her father is a lawyer but he takes few cases. He is more interested in horticulture and in fact is ailing for most of her life. So, her mother teaches endless piano lessons to support them, and Eszter earns money by tutoring other students and sometimes by stealing. Her life is made harder by her parents’ sufficiency for each other. She feels that they pay no attention to her.

Although Eszter becomes a famous actress with a good income and a nice flat in Budapest, she never forgets or forgives the slights of her childhood. In particular, she hates Angéla, a schoolmate who is beautiful and kind, but whose way is made easy by everyone because she is rich and beautiful. Her bad grades are corrected by the school after visits from her parents. Eszter is happy to see her family leave town after it is disgraced, but Angéla re-emerges after the war, married to the man who becomes Eszter’s lover.

Eszter is a complex character, not likable but someone who still keeps our sympathy. This novel explores the complexity of human relationships. Eszter laments that no one has ever loved her for herself, but she has turned herself into a chameleon—a famous actress who so submerges herself in her roles that on the street no one recognizes her. The Party members refuse to believe her true story when she submits her CV for approval to work at the theater, so she has to reinvent her life to make herself into a reformed aristocrat. Her lover loves her but doesn’t understand her at all.

I found this novel a little difficult at first because it just seemed to be rambling, but the narrative is compelling. Once I really got going, I just wanted to see how it ended.

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Review 2304: Midwinter Murder

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Even though I don’t always get on with mystery short stories, I’ve observed Midwinter Murder going around and thought it sounded like good winter reading. And so it proved to be.

For one thing, with Christie’s stories I didn’t feel that lack of characterization that I often feel with other mystery short stories, since Christie is so deft at depicting characters with just a few strokes. Not all of these stories involved murders, and some are quite benign. Poirot appears in several, Miss Marple in one, Tommy and Tuppence in one, and in two, a Mr. Satterthwaite and his mysterious friend, Mr. Quin.

“The Clergyman’s Daughter,” about a woman who inherits a house only to find odd things happening in it, was unfortunately already included in Partners in Crime, which I read last year. Similarly, the Miss Marple story, “A Christmas Tragedy,” was included in The Tuesday Club Murders.

Just for a change, I believe I preferred some of the more benign stories. For example, in “The Problem at Pollensa Bay,” Mr. Parker Pine receives a plea from an overprotective mother to find a way to get her poor son Basil away from a girl she deems unsuitable. But Mr. Pine doesn’t see anything wrong with the girl.

I also liked “The World’s End,” in which the mysterious Mr. Quin appears in a desolate location in Corsica to right a wrong.

And in “The Manhood of Edward Robinson,” Edward is a clerk who yearns for romance but his too-practical fianceé Maud thinks he’s a spendthrift and chides him when he tries to make a romantic gesture. Edward wins £500 in a contest and decides to spend it all on a sportscar then take it away for a day before Maud ruins his fun. And he has an unexpected adventure.

There are lots of stories with clever puzzles, for example, “Christmas Adventure,” in which Poirot figures out why there is a jewel in the plum pudding. But I thought I’d point out some of the more unusual stories.

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12th Anniversary! Top Ten Books of the Year!

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Today I’ve been blogging for twelve years, which means it’s time for my anniversary post, where I list my top 10 books of this year of blogging. This year I found it much more difficult to pick this list than in previous years. Working from my Best of Ten list, I had several cases of more than one book by the same author that I had to choose between. I also didn’t have as many books that I was absolutely sure would end up in my top ten for the year as I usually do. (When I’m sure, I mark them in purple on my list.)

Of the books I’ve chosen, six are historical novels, three are vague as to time, and only one is clearly contemporary, but harks back to the 1970s (which some of us can remember). Eight are by women. This is an international group of novels. I’ve chosen books set in far northern Canada, islands off the coast of Denmark and in the Moluccas, France, Iceland, Michigan, Texas, and Ireland. My choices are by Canadian, Danish, American, Icelandic, Indo-European, French, and Irish authors. Seven of the books were written relatively recently, while three are older books. This year, all are novels.

So, in the order in which they appeared on my blog, here are my top ten books of the year:

  1. The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson
  2. The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen
  3. The Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer
  4. Miss Iceland by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
  5. The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermoût
  6. News of the World by Paulette Jiles
  7. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
  8. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
  9. The Child and the River by Henri Bosco
  10. Foster by Claire Keegan

Review 2303: Alice

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Margaret admires her best friend, Alice, even from their days at school. She thinks Alice is beautiful and elegant and envies her her siblings. However, Alice’s sister Sonia disillusions Alice early by leaving home with a man and turning up at school to demand Alice give her her monthly allowance.

As the two naïve and protected girls emerge into womanhood, Margaret comes to understand that Alice is afraid of life and has no confidence in its success. After Sonia steals the boy that’s been courting Alice, she tries to commit suicide and then incautiously marries Cassius, the man who saves her, when she hardly knows him.

Although the marriage is clearly ill-advised, to Margaret Alice lives a much more exciting life than her own. Still, Margaret notices how suggestible Alice is to those giving bad advice, even people she used to avoid.

Although this novel, about young women in the upper echelons of society, works as a social satire, it also has a serious message about what happens to unprepared young women thrown into society, especially in the years between the wars, when mores where changing.

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Review 2302: Trespasses

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I read somewhere that Kennedy inserted the romance into Trespasses to make the political and social environment of her childhood palatable to readers. If that is so, I personally found the political and social parts more interesting, although the romance seems to take over the novel. However, the addition of the romance helped create the extremely touching ending.

Cushla is a Catholic schoolteacher who helps out at her brother’s pub in 1970’s Northern Ireland. One day Michael Agnew comes into the pub. He is nearly twice as old as she is, a Protestant, married, and a lawyer. She is immediately attracted to him even after she finds out he’s known as a womanizer. Soon he invites her to teach a group of his friends Irish, which leads to an affair.

At school, the children pick on one of her students, an eight-year-old named Davy McGeown, who is poor and who has a Catholic father and a Protestant mother. The family is threatened at home, and soon after Davy’s father finally gets a job, he is beaten mercilessly and left a cripple. Even the principal of the school treats Davy and the family badly, and there are hints of potential child abuse in the attentions toward Davy from the local priest. Cushla begins trying to help out Davy and his family, including his sullen older brother, Tommy.

Although Cushla’s family has successfully stayed out of the internecine conflict and serves people of both religions at the pub, things begin to change for them.

For quite a while that I was reading this novel, I was only mildly interested in the main story line but fascinated with the other things that were going on. However, towards the end, I was completely drawn in and found the ending particularly touching.

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Review 2301: Someone from the Past

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I found Someone from the Past to be the best of the British Library Crime Classics I’ve read so far. It has a smart, feisty, occasionally indiscreet heroine, is fast moving, sometimes exciting, and presents an interesting, character-based mystery.

Nancy is at a restaurant about to receive a proposal from her boyfriend Donald when her estranged friend Sarah approaches the table. This approach creates some awkward moments, because Donald was the last in a string of Sarah’s lovers and didn’t take her departure well. Finally, he leaves the table so the women can talk.

Sarah tells Nancy she is about to marry a wealthy man, Charles. Then she says that someone has been writing her letters threatening her life. As Nancy is a reporter and knows all the suspects—Sarah’s discarded boyfriends—Sarah asks her to try to find out who is writing the letters. She says she’ll send her one of them in the morning.

Nancy’s evening ends poorly, with Donald stomping off. But the next morning, he arrives at her flat, confused and frightened. He tells her he went to see Sarah in the early hours of the morning and ended up falling asleep in the sitting room. When he awakened shortly after eight, he found Sarah murdered in her bed. He is sure the police will think he did it.

To protect Donald, Nancy lets herself into Sarah’s apartment and tries to remove all traces of his visit. In doing so, she notices some odd things about the scene. Unfortunately, when the cleaning lady arrives, Nancy puts the chain on the latch instead of hiding or going out another way so it was obvious someone was in the flat.

Shortly after she arrives home, the police are at her door. They think she killed Sarah, partly because she left her own fingerprint in the apartment and because the cleaning lady recognized her when Nancy met one of Sarah’s other lovers in a pub before going home. Nancy thinks the only way to clear herself and Donald is to figure out who did it herself. The list of suspects consists of Sarah’s last four lovers, including Donald.

Nancy finds she isn’t very good at lying to the police, keeping secrets, or fleeing the country, but she is good at figuring out clues. I’m not so sure she’s that good at picking future husbands, though.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Classics Club Spin #36!

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It’s time for another Classics Club Spin. What’s it all about? Members of the Classics Club select 20 books from their Classics Club lists (here’s mine) and list them by number on their blogs before Sunday, January 21. On that day, a spin number is selected by the club, and that number determines which book on the list the member will read by the spin deadline, which is Sunday, March 3. I am always ready to play, so here is my list:

  1. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
  2. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  3. The Prophet’s Mantle by E. Nesbit
  4. The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
  5. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  6. The Tavern Knight by Rafael Sabatini
  7. The Book of Dede Korkut by Anonymous
  8. Weatherley Parade by Richmal Crompton
  9. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de La Fayette
  10. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
  11. The Book of Lamentations by Rosario Castellanos
  12. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  13. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  14. Merkland, A Story of Scottish Life by Margaret Oliphant
  15. The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
  16. Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford
  17. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  18. Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe
  19. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862)
  20. Weatherley Parade by Richmal Crompton

Review 2300: So Late in the Day

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So Late in the Day is a collection of three of Claire Keegan’s short stories. Unfortunately for me, I had already read one of them, “Antarctica,” in her collection Antarctica. All three stories focus on relationships between men and women.

In “So Late in the Day,” we get to know Cathal. We follow him in the course of what was to be an important day for him, as he considers his relationship with his fiancée, referred to only as “she.”

In “The Long and Painful Death,” an unnamed writer starts a residency in the home once owned by a revered Nobel-Prize-winning author. On her first day, however, she has to deal with a visit from a man who claims he has permission to view the house but turns out to have a different agenda.

The story “Antarctica” was a reread for me. It’s about what happens when a married woman decides one time to have a fling.

As always with Keegan, the stories are written in lucid, precise prose. They reflect a good deal of cynicism about relations between the sexes.

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