Review 2252: #1962 Club! A Murder of Quality

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The second book I chose for the 1962 Club is A Murder of Quality, the second George Smiley novel. I found it surprising because all the other George Smiley novels I’ve read have been espionage novels, and this one is a straight mystery.

George Smiley is retired when he is summoned by his old colleague, Miss Brimley, now the editor of a Christian magazine. She tells Smiley she would like him to investigate a letter the magazine received from Mrs. Rode, whose family are great supporters of the magazine. In the letter, Mrs. Rode claims her husband is trying to kill her. Smiley agrees to look into it, but the next day they learn that Mrs. Rode has been brutally murdered.

Mr. Rode is a tutor at a prestigious boys’ school, Carne, with a high church atmosphere. Smiley attends Mrs. Rode’s funeral pretending to be a journalist from the magazine. He finds out that though both Rodes belonged to a Baptist chapel when they arrived, Mr. Rode has converted to the English church and has been trying to fit in with the school staff, while Mrs. Rode did not. Mrs. Rode appears to have been deeply involved in chapel charitable activities.

The police are searching for a homeless woman named Jane. When Smiley goes to look at the crime scene, he meets Jane, who tells him she saw the devil fly away on silver wings.

The solution to the murder relies heavily on Smiley’s ability to understand his suspects’ characters. The novel is an interesting character study and a plunge into the school’s secrets.

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Review 2251: #1962 Club! We Have Always Lived in the Castle

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Twice a year, Simon of Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings sponsor a Read the Year club, for which they randomly pick a year in the first three-quarters of the 20th century, and participants select books published during that year to read. This time, the year is 1962, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle is my first selection for the club.

However, as usual, I have already posted reviews for three other books published in 1962:

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a true modern gothic novel (or maybe novella—it’s very short), moving gradually but compellingly to reveal its secrets. Mary Catherine Blackwood lives with her sister Constance and their Uncle Julian in the family home, isolated from the rest of the village. We first meet Mary Catherine on one of her biweekly trips to the village for food, where she carefully plots her course to try to avoid people. However, she is mocked by the villagers, both young and old.

Slowly, we learn the first secret—that six years ago when Mary Catherine was twelve, most of her family was poisoned. Mary Catherine survived because she had been sent to bed without supper, Constance because she seldom used sugar, which had arsenic in it; Uncle Julian ate very little, so he survived but has since been feeble and muddled. Constance was tried for the crime but found not guilty. Ever since then, the girls have avoided other people.

Mary Catherine’s narrative hints that things are going to change. First, Helen Clarke arrives for tea, as she does once a week, but she brings along a friend, and Constance seems to be responding to her suggestion that she get out more. Mary Catherine worries about this, for she is very protective of Constance. Then Cousin Charles arrives. Naïve Constance accepts him, but Mary Catherine thinks he’s a bad one.

Mary Catherine is a dreamy girl who has strange compulsions and rituals, but one by one, Charles dismantles her protections around their property. We can see that the sisters are soon to be shaken from their oddly comfortable existence.

Jackson was a master at evoking an atmosphere. I think only her The Haunting of Hill House surpasses this one in power.

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Review 2250: The Wheel Spins

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The Wheel Spins is the novel upon which the many versions of the movie The Lady Vanishes are based. Although I am familiar with the story in all its incarnations, I still found the book exciting.

Iris Carr is on holiday with a group of her friends in a Balkan country, possibly Romania. Rich and spoiled, the friends have been cheerfully disrupting their small hotel, leading the other English guests to dislike them. The last day, she finds she is tired of them herself, so she decides to stay a day longer than the others. When she does leave, she has a touch of sunstroke and has to be helped. The train is crowded, so the porter crams her into a compartment for six as the seventh person.

In the compartment are a commanding woman in black who turns out to be a baroness, a family of three, a cold blonde lady, and a nondescript middle-aged woman in tweeds. Iris isn’t feeling well because of her sunstroke, but the nondescript woman turns out to be English, Miss Froy, and takes her to the dining car for lunch. There she prattles about returning to England to her elderly parents and dog, her job as governess for the baroness, and her next job for the baron’s political opponent.

Back in the train compartment, Iris falls asleep. When she wakes up, Miss Froy is gone. When she doesn’t appear, Iris searches the train for her, but she doesn’t seem to be on it. In growing alarm, she finds her compartment companions denying that Miss Froy ever was there. On her way to the dining room, Miss Froy met some of the English people from the hotel, but when Iris speaks to them, some have not seen her and others lie for their own reasons. So, even though a young man named Hare and the professor with him try to help her, Hare believes she has hallucinated because of her sun stroke, and the professor thinks she is hysterical.

As the train nears Trieste, Iris begins to fear Miss Froy is in danger, but what can she do about it? This all makes an thrilling novel.

Missing from the movie adaptations are passages that visit Miss Froy’s elderly parents and dog as they await her coming. In a way, they are unnecessary, but they make the ending much more touching, especially the dog.

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

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Classics Club Spin #35

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It’s time for another Classics Club spin. For the spin, members select 20 titles from their Classics Club lists and post them in a numbered list on their blogs. On Sunday, October 15, the club selects a number, and that determines which book to read for the spin. The goal this time is to read that book by Sunday, December 3, and post your review.

So, with no further ado, here is my list of 20 books:

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

Since I have exactly 20 books left on my list, this will be the last spin that I can participate in for a while that doesn’t require repeating some of my entries. I’m interested to see how it turns out.

If I Gave the Award

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As I just posted my review for the last short-listed book for the 2019 James Tait Black Award for Fiction, it is now time for my feature where I decide whether the judges got it right. This time the choice is difficult for me, because I didn’t really like any of the shortlisted books. Most of them share a strong intellectualism, although that’s not why I felt so-so about them.

It’s kind of a toss-up which of the books I liked least. I remarked in the review of Murmur by Will Eaves how much I dislike books with dreams in them. In this novel about an Alan Turing-like figure, the main character eventually experiences wakened dream states as a side-effect from chemical castration. It’s ironic that the other book I disliked, Crudo by Olivia Laing (the winning entry), is also a fictional character study of a real person, a woman very much like the poet Kathy Acker, with whom I was completely unfamiliar. In this case, I found Kathy really annoying in her neuroticism and use of crude language. Both of these books were extremely well written, but I had difficulties with them.

Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires was probably the least intellectually removed of the four books. It’s a collection of short stories linked by common characters that explores black identity in the California middle class. The stories are insightful and original, and some of them are bizarre.

That leaves me not quite knowing what to do with Sight by Jessie Greengrass. It’s about seeing below the surface, narrated by a woman who is conflicted about her own pregnancy. It combines her ruminations with stories about scientists whose discoveries also have to do with seeing below the surface. I found it to be written in meticulous prose but also to be distanced from the reader, and I didn’t like the main character’s neuroticism.

I guess I’m going with Sight, but this one was a tough choice.

Review 2249: Murmur

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When the cover of a book calls it “hallucinatory,” I know it’s not going to be a good fit for me. However, since Murmur is part of my James Tait Black project, I felt compelled to read it.

The novel aims to portray the mindset of an Alan Turing-like scientist named Alec Pryor after he is undergoing chemical castration because of a homosexual encounter. Aside from making his body more feminine, the chemical makes him dream and eventually induces wakened dream states, including ones where he fantasizes letters from his friend June, whom he hasn’t seen in years, and relives events of his boyhood.

Those who have been reading my reviews know how much I hate reading about dreams. Since it is difficult to know some of the time whether he is dreaming or remembering, this was a novel I found it hard to stick with, despite it being very short.

The rest of the novel is filled with philosophical musings about whether machines could have consciousness and other subjects. I felt that either I didn’t want to follow his thoughts or they were too hard for me to grasp. The journal section at the end is the most accessible part of the novel.

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Review 2248: Road Ends

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Mary Lawson’s subject is always dysfunctional families in distress living in the far north of Ontario. That sounds deadly, but her novels are absorbing and touching, and Road Ends is no exception.

The novel is told from three different perspectives at slightly different times. Megan Cartwright begins it in 1966, although there is a prologue set in 1967. In the prologue, the best friend of her brother Tom commits suicide where Tom will find him. This doesn’t at first seem to have much to do with Megan’s earlier section but informs Tom’s behavior throughout.

The Cartwrights is a large household of boys with only Megan and her mother the females. Megan’s mother Emily keeps having babies, and Megan is the only one keeping the household organized. Emily retreats to the bedroom with the baby, and Edward, her father, to his study after work. In 1967, baby Adam is a toddler, and Mary has overheard the doctor telling her parents he must be the last child, so she feels free to leave, having realized she will never have a life if she stays. She makes plans to go to Toronto in order to save money to go to London and stay with a friend, but when her father learns her plans, he pays for her to go to London.

Edward has withdrawn himself from the family. One reason is that he is terrified of becoming like his father, a drunkard who used to beat him. He has felt an overpowering anger at times, especially against his sons Peter and Corey, who are always fighting and breaking things. His section of the novel is set in 1969 in roughly the same timeframe as Tom’s, but because of his withdrawal, he hasn’t noticed the household descending into chaos.

For Tom, his friend’s suicide has sent him into a tailspin. He thinks he could have saved him if he had paid more attention. Tom was graduated from college and had job offers in engineering from two aircraft companies, but six months later, he is driving the snow plow at night and spending the day reading the newspaper. He can’t stand to be around people. But he starts noticing that Adam, now four, isn’t being cared for. His mother has had another baby and seems to only care for it. The house is filthy, the child is filthy, and there is no food in the house.

Mary, after a very rough start, has found her dream job in London running a small hotel. She was furious to hear her mother was pregnant again, and she is still homesick but determined not to go back.

I was extremely touched by the ending of this novel. Another really good book from Lawson. I can’t seem to go wrong with her.

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Review 2247: Girls Who Lie

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Boys discover a body hidden in a cave on a lava flow. It’s quickly established that it’s the body of Marianna, a woman who has been missing for seven months and has been presumed to have committed suicide. But Marianna was murdered.

When officers Elma and Sævar investigate, they find that Marianna has had periods when her daughter, Hekla, was removed from her care. Now, things seem to be going well, but 15-year-old Hekla spends a lot of time with her foster parents.

Interspersed in the novel is a narrative by a woman containing at times disturbing information. But we don’t know who this narrator is. Is it Marianna or someone else?

This is the second book in this series featuring Elma (last name? first name? Ægisdottir seems always to use just one for all her characters). I have mixed feelings about the series. The plotting is fairly good, and the novel ends in a chilling way. However, the dialogue seems unconvincing, and characterization is minimal. This is the same way I felt about Camilla Lackberg’s novels, so it’s hard to know whether it’s a translation problem (the dialogue, I mean) or the author’s writing ability. I don’t think I’ll be sticking with this series.

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Reading Thirkell’s Barsetshire Series in Order: #29 Three Score and Ten + #28 Love at All Ages Wrap-Up

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Thanks to everyone who is keeping up at least with comments for Love at All Ages. One more to go!

I see now why some of the lists of the Barsetshire series include Three Score and Ten, and some do not. It’s because Three Score and Ten was finished posthumously by a friend. It should be interesting to see what difference there is. I will be posting my review of this novel on Tuesday, October 31.