The Best Book for this period is The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell! Also highly recommended is Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout!
Best of Ten!
Reading Thirkell’s Barsetshire Series in Order: #26 A Double Affair + #25 Never Too Late Wrap-Up
We’re nearing the end of the series, here. There are only four more books to go. I enjoyed the surprise at the end of Never Too Late, even though it was understated. Thanks for anyone who joined me by commenting, and I appreciate the efforts of people to find the books.
- Liz Dexter of Adventures in reading
Our next book is A Double Affair, and I’ll be posting my review on Friday, July 28. I hope someone can read along with me.
And here’s our badge.
Review 2200: Near Neighbours
The last book I read before this one was This Mournable Body, and after reading that, I felt in need of something light. So I skipped through my queue until I found this book, and it answered the purpose very well.
Unlike the other Clavering works I’ve read, which were set in small towns or villages in the Scottish borderlands, Near Neighbours is set in Edinburgh, in a once-exclusive neighborhood where stately homes are being split up into flats. The two surviving single-family homes are next to each other.
In one, elderly Miss Dorothea Balfour has been dominated all her life, first by her father and then by her older sister. But now her sister is dead, and Miss Balfour has just begun to realize that her life is her own. Still, she is lonely, as her sister considered them to be socially above their neighbors. However, she has always been interested in the activities next door, where the Lenox family, a widow with five grown or nearly grow children, live.
Young Rowan Lenox notices Miss Balfour at the window one day and decides to call on her to offer condolences. She finds the house gloomy but gets along with Miss Balfour well and invites her to tea. Everyone likes her and soon there are friendly visits back and forth.
The three oldest Lenox girls have a romantic concern. Willow is married, but because her husband is in the navy and is often away, she still lives at home. Her mother wishes they would get their own place, and Rowan is disturbed to notice Willow spending a lot of time with Mickey Grant while Archie is away.
Hazel Lenox is a level-headed nurse who is surprised to learn that the hospital heartthrob, Adam Ferrier, approves of her. He even asks her out a few times but then informs her he needs to concentrate on his career as a surgeon. Hazel hadn’t realized until then that she cares for him.
Rowan’s new Highland Dance partner is a brooding Byronic type but the best dancer in the class, Angus Todd. He is sensitive about his lack of background, being adopted, but shows an alarming tendency to be possessive of her, while she thinks of him as a friend.
Miss Balfour is surprised to receive a call from a strange man, who turns out to be the brother-in-law her sister split from six months after she married him. Mr. Milner seems not quite reputable, and Charles Frasier, Miss Balfour’s solicitor, is alarmed because the sister left her entire estate in such a way that Mr. Milner could lay claim to all of it. Through Miss Balfour, Charles meets the Lenoxes and is struck by Rowan.
The novel is a pleasant story about nice people with few real surprises, but the characters are interesting and you want to know what happens to them.
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Review 2199: This Mournable Body
I have already complained about the tendency of Walter Scott Prize judges to pick novels for their shortlist that are in the middle of a series. Now I find the Booker Prize judges selecting the third book in a series. I understand that reading the first two books would have helped me understand this one, but I am not sure my spirit could stand up to two more.
Set in 1990s Zimbabwe during the Mugabe dictatorship, This Mournable Body follows the struggles of Tambudzai, an embittered and sometimes unstable woman. At the beginning of the novel, she is unemployed and living in a youth hostel that she’s too old for, having quit her job as a copywriter for an advertizing agency because credit for her work was going to white employees. Right away, after a disturbing incident where she is turned away from an interview for lodging by a servant, we see an unpleasant side of her when she joins a mob attacking one of her hostel mates because of her short skirt.
Tambodzai makes two moves hoping to improve her lot. She takes a room in the crumbling compound of a rich widow, and she takes a job as a teacher in a girls’ school. Because of her education, she feels she deserves a better position in life, and that’s all she thinks about. She is embarrassed and depressed by her surroundings and sees her teaching job as a comedown. Finally, she has a breakdown in class.
Permeating this novel are references to the recent war, with war veterans complaining that the country, which is poor and struggling, and of course led by a corrupt government, is not what they fought for. But to me many things just seemed vicious. Women are assaulted by strangers, mobs, their husbands and basically told to get over it. The success of one businesswoman who opens a popular store is rewarded by a mob trying to threaten her. Later, when our heroine gets a new opportunity and is enjoying her work in ecotourism, the farm where they lodge tourists is taken over by war veterans with government approval, presumably because it is owned by a white family but perhaps not.
Tambudzai herself is not a nice person for most of the novel, until she experiences some self-revelation. More, though, is that there is a lot of this book I didn’t understand, about people’s attitudes and about the oblique references to the government. The ending provides a small lift; otherwise, I found the novel depressing and hard to stick with.
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Review 2198: #ThirkellBar! Never Too Late
Purely by error, I read most of the next book in the series before this one (apparently my stack got rearranged), which spoiled a key surprise of this book. So I will not spoil it for you.
Much of this book deals with young Edith Graham, who can’t decide what to do with herself. As, in fact, did the last book and as does the next one. It’s unusual for Thirkell to spend so much time with one character, although she certainly revisits characters time and again. To a certain extent, though, she also did this with Clarissa Graham, who was also a little spoiled. Edith is clearly discontented, especially when she feels she is not getting enough male attention.
But the novel also deals with the problems of George Halliday and his mother. George has been working hard to keep his father’s farm going and to keep his patience with his father’s advice. But now Mr. Halliday is failing in mind and body. George is too busy with the farm to help his mother care for his father, and both of them are exhausted. So, Agnes Graham, working with friends, takes a hand in the situation.
Aside from George’s problems there are newcomers to meet—the Carters, cousins of Everard Carter, the headmaster of Southbridge School—and two very understated romances of the middle-aged variety. So, I found Never Too Late to be as delightful as usual.
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Review 2197: The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios
I think how much you enjoy The Shakespeare Thefts depends a lot on your expectations going into it. If you depend on the quotes on the back of the book, which call it “a literary detective story” or put it in the true crime genre, you’ll be misled (although I’ll be listing it under “True Crime” on my blog because I can’t think of another place to put it). What it is, is an entertaining set of essays on a very specific subject—the Shakespeare First Folios.
In 1996, noted Shakespearean researcher Eric Rasmussen and his colleague Anthony James West put together a team to continue a project that West began 10 years earlier—to find and make a thorough catalog of the distinguishing characteristics of all of the existing Shakespeare First Folios. An important impetus for this catalog was the prevalence of thefts of valuable books. Being able to readily identify a copy makes it much harder for a thief to pass it off as a recent discovery and therefore to sell it legally.
In this book, Rasmussen tells anecdotes about the fate of some of the copies, some of the thefts, experiences finding and accessing copies (a bunch are owned by the Japanese, who will not allow access to them), information about the owners, or just about the folios in general. The book is light, easy and entertaining to read, and it is especially notable for its author’s enthusiasm for the subject.
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Review 2196: Lucy by the Sea
Lucy by the Sea is the latest in Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton novels. As usual, it references all the others, including her books that are not about Lucy. It is also a Covid chronicle.
The beginning recaps a bit of her previous novel, Oh, William! Lucy is still grieving the death of her second husband, David, when her first husband, William, calls to tell her the virus is coming and he’s taking her away from New York City. Lucy is oddly oblivious to what’s happening and only packs for a few days. William has to take her laptop himself.
Lucy finds them in a house in Maine all by itself at the end of a point above the sea. Bob Burgess (of The Burgess Boys) has arranged this home for them. William has also talked their daughters, Chrissy and Becka, into leaving Brooklyn for Connecticut.
From this distance, William and Lucy experience all of the dislocating effects of the pandemic—the worry about others, the isolation, the shock of hearing about friends’ deaths, the yearning for contact. Lucy is as always naïve but wise, full of anxiety and affection. She finds she cannot write.
I always love the Lucy books, which have a deepness to them that lies beneath an almost childlike storytelling style, but this one seems even more lovely.
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Review 2195: Catriona
I was unaware until recently that there is a sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, but there is, Catriona, and it begins right where the previous novel left off. (Note that apparently this novel is sometimes called David Balfour.) David Balfour has been confirmed in his estate and is ready to learn to be a gentleman, but first, he has some old business to take care of. He must arrange a ship to take his friend Alan Breck Stewart to France, and he must appear as a witness in the Appin murder case, for which he himself is wanted, to free James More, who is innocent.
The problem with this second plan, he finds when he visits the Lord Advocate’s office in Edinburgh, is that no one wants James More, who may not be guilty of Appin’s murder but is guilty of a lot else, to go free. David’s challenges are further complicated when, in the approach to the Lord Advocate’s house, he meets Catriona Macgregor, James More’s daughter, and falls instantly in love with her.
Conscientious David will not agree to any of the compromises proposed by the various lawyers as alternatives to his testimony, so David finds himself kidnapped again in an attempt to prevent him from testifying. So begins another set of adventures for our hero as well as for the innocent but feisty Catriona.
Kidnapped has long been my favorite Stevenson adventure but I liked Catriona very much.
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Review 2194: The Marriage Portrait
Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel is loosely based on the life of Lucrezia di Cosimo de Medici, who in 1560 at the age of 15 went to Ferrara to take up her married life with Alfonso II d’Este and was dead within a year, rumored to have been murdered by her husband. None of this is spoiler information. It’s explained before the novel begins.
At the beginning of the novel Lucrezia arrives at a remote country fortress with only her husband and some of his men. Her personal maids have been left behind. Lucrezia is sure her husband is going to murder her.
Then the novel returns to trace her childhood and young womanhood in the Medici family. There, she and her sisters are brought up entirely confined to a few rooms of the house and occasionally allowed outside. On the other hand, she has the example of her parents’ marriage, still loving, with both parents collaborating even in political decisions.
Lucrezia is not a favorite child. She has a core of resistance in her, and she prefers painting small, detailed pictures from nature to social pursuits. Fatefully, when she is ten, she briefly meets her older sister Maria’s fiancé, Alfonso II, heir to the Ferrara dukedom. When Maria dies before her marriage, Alfonso says he is open to taking Lucrezia instead, although she is only thirteen.
At fifteen, she marries Alfonso and travels with him to Ferrara to begin her marriage. At first, all seems well. His initial encounter with her was reassuring and he seems kind. Of course, she has to deal with knowing no one except her maid and not even understanding the servants’ dialect. Clothing and hair styles are different. And although she has much more freedom, she begins to learn that Alfonso’s ideas of marriage aren’t like her parents’. He wants her to obey him immediately no matter what he asks, and he doesn’t tell her what’s going on or want her to know anything. She appears to have no responsibilities, so she spends her time painting or socializing with his two sisters.
But slowly she learns that she only has one role in the family—to produce an heir. And Alfonso is known never to have fathered a child. Also, Alfonso is not as benign as he first appeared.
I found this novel absolutely fascinating with its convincing portrait of life in Renaissance Italy. The descriptions are detailed, and although Lucrezia is naïve, she is also a person who notices things. With growing dread, we observe her trying to make sense of this new world, with almost no preparation from her parents. As usual, O’Farrell is a deft writer who knows how to keep readers pinned to the page. I loved this one.
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Review 2193: A Children’s Bible
The children are a group of mostly young teenagers, but they are aged from nine to seventeen. They have been brought along by their parents on a reunion vacation to a mansion on a lake by the seashore, but they are mostly let alone while their parents drink, do drugs, and generally misbehave. Evie, the narrator, does her best to take care of her brother Jack, a sensitive nine-year-old.
The children, who have never met before, disdain their parents, and they have a game going in which the winner is the last child to be matched with a parent. The kids all sleep together in an attic and at first their vacation is idyllic because they can do what they want.
Things begin to go wrong, though, when a huge storm rolls in that wreaks a lot of damage and disrupts services. The story begins to move away from reality after the house is partially destroyed and the parents insist that they can’t leave because they signed a lease. The kids do leave, though. Burl, the caretaker for the property, is worried about possible disease from the mosquitos on the now unsanitary property, so he takes them to a compound that has clearly been prepared for Armageddon.
From here, the novel slides in dystopia, fantasy, and even fable as civilization begins to break down.
This novel is fast moving and well written. Although I certainly found it interesting, it ultimately evolved into something that was not quite my thing, especially the religious overtones injected when one of the parents gives Jack a book of Bible stories, which he, having no religious upbringing at all, struggles to understand.
I read this book for my James Tait Black Prize project.
What? Me Read? 