Review 1999: Edith Trilogy Read-Along: Dark Palace

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The Edith Trilogy Read-Along calls for the second book to be read during July. This second book, Dark Palace follows Edith and the fate of the League of Nations from 1931 through the end of World War II. Although most of it is set in Geneva, Edith also visits Australia and the United States.

This novel begins roughly one year after the close of Grand Days. Edith and Robert have been married about a year, but Edith feels she has misunderstood Robert’s character. For one thing, he is not really dedicated to the success of the League, and she sometimes finds him crass. She takes the opportunity of Ambrose Westwood’s return to Geneva and Robert’s departure to cover the Spanish Civil War to rekindle her unusual affair with Ambrose.

At the League, she is considered an expert on protocol but still does not have an official title. At the beginning of the novel, she and other League officers are excitedly preparing for the conference on disarmament they are hosting.

This novel, like many middle novels in a trilogy, has a less focused plot than the first. Edith, at one point, considers moving back to Australia and visits the newly founded Canberra to fish for a job. But Canberra barely exists, and her fellow Australians don’t seem impressed by her accomplishments. The novel skips in an episodic way through several events during the war.

There are times in the novel when Edith’s didacticism is really annoying. What the novel does have, however, is a deeply affecting conclusion.

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Review 1998: The Glass Hotel

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A woman, Vincent, falls into the sea at the beginning of The Glass Hotel. Then the narrative returns to the past, covering about 20 years in time.

As a young woman, Vincent works as a bartender in an expensive hotel in Caiette, a small, isolated village on Vancouver Island. One day a strange message is painted on one of the lobby windows. Vincent is sure that her brother Paul, also employed by the hotel, did it because of his behavior and because she pulled a similar prank in high school. However, she doesn’t discuss it with him because shortly thereafter she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, the wealthy owner of the hotel, and leaves with him.

To get away from Caiette, Vincent has become Alkaitis’s much younger trophy wife. At least, she is pretending to be his wife. They aren’t actually married. Although there are other plot lines in this novel, most of the action centers around the discovery that Alkaitis has been running a Ponzi scheme.

There are a lot of characters in this novel, but Mandel doesn’t do much to make readers interested in them. In fact, I was struck about halfway through the novel when Alkaitis remarks that Vincent is interesting. There is very little dialogue in the novel, and frankly, Mandel hasn’t done much to show that she nor, really, anyone else is interesting.

Frankly, most of the characters in this novel are morally bankrupt. I was going to say excluding the investors, but actually they had to be either clueless or greedy, because most people would know the returns Alkaitis was paying were unlikely.

The last few pages of the book were really good, but do they make the rest worth reading? All I can say is I found the novel slow moving, and I kept putting it down. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t much like it, either.

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Review 1897: The Metal Heart

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On the Orkney Islands in 1942, a German U-boat attack on Scapa Flow leads the British to fortify the seaway’s defenses using Italian prisoners of war as labor. The Italians are located on the small island of Selkie Holm, one avoided by the islanders because of its evil reputation. However, twin young women, Con and Dot, also live there, having moved to a ruined bothy after events on Kirkwell that are not at first explained. Con is afraid, though, of Angus MacLeod.

When the Italians arrive, one falls overboard, and Dot dives in to save him. His name is Cesare, and he begins working in the camp commander’s office and trying to find ways to help the girls. However, he is stopped by the brutality of guard Angus MacLeod.

I liked Lea’s The Glass Woman, and I also like her apparent preference for placing novels in remote northern locations. However, I just wasn’t feeling it here. I felt as if the characters were being put through their paces, not as if the story evolved naturally. I also felt a certain sense of manipulation. Although I was interested to find out why the girls’ parents had vanished, I wasn’t very interested in the love story. I read about half the book, then stopped.

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Review 1896: Sense and Sensibility

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When I was making up my current Classics Club list, I realized I hadn’t reread any Austen for a while. So, I picked Sense and Sensibility.

When Mr. Dashwood was dying, he made his son John promise to take care of his second wife and daughters, since he was unable to leave them anything due to an entail. John makes this promise with good intentions and tells his wife he will give each of them £1000, but she talks him out of each of his suggestions until he gives them nothing.

On a very small budget, then, Mrs. Dashwood must find a new home for herself and her three daughters, Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret. Just as things are getting unbearable at the shared home, a relative of Mrs. Dashwood, Sir John Middleton, offers the women a cottage in Devonshire at a low rate.

Elinor regrets leaving her home all the more because she has developed what she believes is a shared attachment with her brother-in-law, Edward Ferrars. But Mrs. John Dashwood wants her brother as far away from Elinor as possible. Both she and her mother plan for him to marry well.

Relocated to their new home, the Dashwoods find their neighbors, the Middletons, and Mrs. Jennings, Mrs. Middleton’s mother, to be almost overly friendly.

One day Marianne and Margaret are caught out in a rainstorm and Marianne sprains her ankle skidding down a grassy hill. A gentleman rescues her, and he, Mr. Willoughby, becomes a frequent visitor. It is clear he is attracted to Marianne, and she, having fully adopted the ideals of Romanticism, shows plainly that she’s in love with him. Meanwhile, Elinor wonders why she isn’t hearing from Edward.

This novel is about two sisters who deal with unhappy love affairs in opposite ways and the result. It has vividly believable characters, some funny, and in its own way constitutes a sharp social satire. This novel is one of my favorites by Austen.

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Review 1895: The Magician

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Although I’ve only read one work by Thomas Mann, I still found The Magician, based on Mann’s life and writings, interesting. Although Mann himself often seems inert in this novel, he lived in interesting times, during both world wars.

The novel covers Mann’s life from a young man who is dispossessed by his father to his relocation from California to Switzerland in his 70’s. It examines the thinking behind his greatest works and although fairly meditative in tone, has some excitement during the Mann’s flight from Nazi Germany.

In some ways The Magician is reminiscent of The Master, Tóibín’s novel about Henry James, with Mann fantasizing about young men but never acting on those fantasies after a couple of abortive encounters. The difference is that James seemed almost unaware of his own proclivities. Mann still managed to have a long, successful marriage with his wife Katia.

Tóibín’s biographical fiction always seems intuitive and thoughtful to me. I enjoyed this one despite my lack of knowledge about its subject. I read this novel for my Walter Scott Prize project.

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Review 1894: Jumping Jenny

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When amateur detective Roger Sheringham attends a murder party at the home of mystery writer Ronald Stratton, he is impressed by the gallows with three hanging dummies that Stratton has erected on the roof as a decoration. Little does anyone expect what use it will be put to.

During the party, everyone observes the behavior of Ena Stratton, the wife of Ronald’s brother David. She behaves wildly, always trying to draw attention to herself. She is a deeply unpleasant person, who at one point tries to seduce Roger, and when he doesn’t respond, tells others that he attacked her. She also says several times that she is going to kill herself and threatens the happiness of a couple who are waiting for the woman’s divorce to get married, saying she will write to the magistrate about them having an affair, which of course would negate the divorce in those times. (The book was published in 1933.)

It is this threat that gets her killed. She is up on the roof trying to get sympathy from a party-goer by again threatening suicide and actually putting her head in the noose when her companion removes the chair under her feet.

It’s hard for me to know what to say about this book, for on the one hand, it’s unusual and also more witty than many a detective story. On the other hand, well, wait.

We think we know all along who killed Ena, and it looks like the death will be accepted as a suicide. However, Roger has noticed one piece of evidence that convinces him it’s a murder. Instead of helping the police, he spends the entire novel trying to cover up the murder, thinking he knows who the killer is, but he does not.

This novel was acclaimed for its originality, but the undertones are not so pleasant. Ena is quite despicable, but nothing she does deserves her fate, and in fact she seems mentally ill. That’s one of the problems. Everyone dismisses her as being insane, and almost everyone conspires to help the murderer. I hope I’m not judging this novel by modern standards, but it’s clear that no one feels the least regret at either her death or their own attempts to pervert the course of justice.

So, mixed feelings about this one although a desire to read more by Berkeley. By the way, his hero is exceedingly arrogant, and I got a lot of pleasure out of his getting the crime so wrong and then muddling the evidence so badly that it was almost disastrous.

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

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Review 1893: The Sidmouth Letters

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I have a relatively uneasy relationship with short stories. They often leave me unsatisfied. However, I found most of the stories in The Sidmouth Letters fascinating. And, of course, since they’re written by Jane Gardam, they’re elegant.

Some of the stories are very satisfying:

  • In “The Tribute,” some women are trying to arrange a tribute for a deceased nanny who, their conversations reveal, was never paid, never left a pension, and not helped when her niece asked for assistance. One of her old charges has a surprise for them.
  • In “The Sidmouth Letters,” a woman gets a chance for revenge against her old professor who stole one of her papers to publish after granting her a poor degree.

Others provide unusual insight into relationships:

  • In “Hetty Sleeping,” Hetty finally wakes up from her infatuation with an old lover.
  • In “Transit Passengers,” a young man who thought he was in love loses interest.
  • The narrator in “For He Heard the Loud Bassoon,” a witness to a wedding, is left in an awkward situation.
  • “A Spot of Gothic” is an unexpected ghost story.

The only story I didn’t like very much was “The Great, Grand Soapwater Kick,” about a homeless woman who decides to take a bath.

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Review 1892: Rizzio

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The Scots mystery writer Denise Mina is still concerned with crime, but with this novel, she has turned to historical true crimes. Rizzio is a novella that deals with the 1566 murder of David Rizzio, a musician and favorite of Mary, Queen of Scots.

The murder has been engineered by Lord Lennox and Lord Ruthven, with the aid of Henry Darnley, Mary’s worthless husband. Darnley thinks the shock will cause his hugely pregnant wife to miscarry, most likely causing her to die. Then, he can be king. This is what came of their love match of the year before. To Lennox, Darnley’s father, this outcome would put him in power over his weak son. Lord Ruthven, almost dead already, is the tool of a group of aristocrats about to be dispossessed by parliament.

The novella is mostly description with little dialogue, but it has deep insight into the thoughts and personalities of its characters. It is mostly concerned with the activities of one night, March 9, 1566, in Edinburgh.

It is fast-paced and interesting. Mina has made no attempt to reflect the language of the time, and in fact wrote using modern idioms. Hence, perhaps, the lack of dialogue.

Note: At the time I reviewed this novel, I was unaware that it is one of the Darkland Tales, a series of re-imagined tales from Scotland’s history, written by well-regarded contemporary Scottish authors.

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Review 1891: Keeping Up Appearances

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I’m not sure if it was because I was on vacation while reading Keeping Up Appearances, but it took me much longer to read it than usual for a novel its size. I did notice I occasionally had a hard time paying attention to it while at other times felt I was reading a script for I Love Lucy.

Daphne and Daisy are opposites in personality, but they’re constantly together. Daphne is confident, witty, and brave, perhaps a higher class than Daisy, while Daisy is shy, unsure, and not always swift on the uptake. Daisy is ashamed of her class origins and the circumstances of her birth, even though she has been raised by higher class family members. Daphne could care less about all that.

At the opening of the novel, both young women are vacationing with the Folyot family on an island in the Mediterranean. Mrs. Folyot works against tyranny and reminds me of Mrs. Jellyby. She is obsessed by her causes and so later has a hilarious scene of talking at cross-purposes with Daisy’s mother.

Both girls care for Raymond, the Folyot’s oldest son, a biologist. Although Daisy doesn’t like to look at the little animals Raymond shows her as much as Daphne does, Daisy fears she cares for Raymond more than Daphne does, but he likes Daphne more than her. Unfortunately, an incident with a wild boar makes Daisy too embarrassed to stay, and Daphne goes, too.

Daisy doesn’t think the Folyots would approve of her profession. Not only is she a successful author of middlebrow novels, but she takes assignments from a newspaper to write silly articles about women that the paper assigns her. Daisy is a snob, and she is proud of neither activity even though we suspect she is a better novelist than she thinks.

Macaulay obviously had fun skewering the newspapers, because the ideas for articles are ridiculous and sexist, as is clearly the attitude toward Daisy’s novels.

Although this novel satirizes the publishing industry, it is really about identity and self-image. Most of the characters are not quite likable except Daisy’s mother, who is a hoot.

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

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