Tag: 20th century

Review 2198: #ThirkellBar! Never Too Late

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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 2191: Sally on the Rocks

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Sally Lunton has been living in Paris as it waits for a German invasion in 1915, and she is at her wit’s end. Her sketchy career as an artist has been finished by the war, and she is stone broke. She has changed from a blithe Bohemian to a woman nearly middle-aged (by the standards of 1915—she’s 29) who thinks her only hope is to marry someone well off.

Then Sally gets an apparently friendly letter from Miss Maggie Hopkins telling her that there is a new bachelor in her home town of Little Crampton, a bank manager, and he will soon be snapped up by a young widow with a daughter. Sally thinks Mr. Bingley will be horrible, but she goes home prepared to fight for him. She returns to the home of her guardian, the mild-mannered and affectionate Reverend Adam Lovelady.

Mr. Bingley turns out to be worse than Sally expected. He is plump and unattractive but full of himself for his lofty position in town. He is also religious and judgmental and is looking for a wife who is above reproach. He is guided by a book left by his deceased mother telling him what to look for in a wife—or rather what to avoid (hint—everyone).

Unfortunately, Sally has a skeleton in her closet. Six years ago, madly in love, she went off to Italy with Jimmy Thompkins. But after a summer in Italy, he left her. Sally has never really recovered, but it is vital that Mr. Bingley not learn of this escapade. Unfortunately, Jimmy is living in the village with his wife and two children, and he thinks Sally should not marry Mr. Bingley without telling him.

Another peril is Miss Maggie, who senses there is something between Jimmy and Sally and is determined to ferret it out.

Despite these complications, Sally’s appearance and pretenses of admiration are getting her ahead of her rival, Mrs. Dalton. However, soon there is another problem. Up on the moors, Sally meets Robert Kantyre, a disgraced former officer on the point of suicide. Sally is determined to save him from himself and from alcoholism.

This is a complex little book considering when it was written. Not only is it a satire of village life, but it makes some surprising observations about the differences in how men and women in the same circumstances are viewed and treated. Although Mr. Bingley is usually a figure of fun, he shows another side, even though his feelings for Sally fight with his yearning for his dinner at times. The only real villain is Miss Maggie, whose idea of fun is mischief making at the expense of others’ lives.

Except for tiring a little bit of Mr. Bingley’s internal battles, I found this novel very enjoyable and insightful.

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

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Review 2186: Eyes of the Rigel

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This third novel in Jacobsen’s Barrøy trilogy has Ingrid Barrøy leaving remote Barrøy Island at the end of World War II to find the father of her daughter. Alexander was a Russian prisoner of war whom she rescued after the prison ship, Rigel, sank.

Ingrid only has faint leads as she rows, walks, takes the train, and rides the bus from one place to another in Norway, bringing her infant daughter with her. She starts with the people she left Alexander with after she smuggled him off the island and follows the trail from one person or location to another. None of the people she meets seem eager to help her, and she continually feels that they are lying. Ingrid is surprised to learn that not all people are happy the war is over, and she is naïve about lingering resentments and distrust.

I have been completely entranced by these books and felt that this was a fitting ending to the series. Ingrid is brave and determined, the writing is beautifully spare, the journey difficult and unpredictable.

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Review 2177: Fortune

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Fortune, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Historical Fiction Prize, is set in late 1920’s Trinidad. People have been jumping out of windows in New York, but there is an oil boom in Texas, and Eddie Wade foresees another one in Trinidad.

Sonny Chatterjee has oil seeping into the soil of his cocoa plantation, and his plants are dying. Charles Macleod of Apex Industries has been trying to get an oil lease from him, but he has seen the destruction caused by the large oil companies and refuses to let that happen to the land his father worked so hard to buy. However, Eddie convinces him that his smaller company will take more care and give Sonny a better deal, so Sonny agrees that if Eddie can come up with the $10K to get started, he can. The trouble is, Eddie has no money.

Eddie’s truck breaks down on the way into town, so he walks. Local businessman Tito Fernandes picks him up and trusts him instantly. Even though Tito is in serious difficulties because of his stock market investments, he finds the money Eddie needs.

The back cover of the novel makes clear that the fly in the ointment will be provided by Tito’s much younger wife Ada, and the affair that begins between her and Eddie. This novel is based on a real event—a fire in 1928. Smyth has changed the name of one historical person from Bobbie to Eddie, but it’s not clear just how much else is fictional. Certainly, I found the love triangle aspect uninteresting and unimaginative, but I guess if it really happened . . . .

The fact is that I didn’t actually care about any of these characters. Further, the writing is close to being spare, but it lacks the specificity and vividness of most spare writing, so I can only call it trimmed. It’s more mundane in nature. The setting itself occasionally comes to life but more often does not. I didn’t feel like I knew what it was like to be in Trinidad at this supposedly exciting time.

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Review 2175: White Shadow

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In this second book of Roy Jacobsen’s Barrøy trilogy, it is World War II and the Nazi’s have invaded Norway. The small island of Barrøy, the home of Ingrid’s family, has been evacuated. Ingrid has been living on the main island working in the canning factory, and her family is dispersed.

One day Ingrid defies the Germans and gets on a boat to row back to Barrøy. She goes into her family home without paying much attention to signs that someone has been in it, and it’s as if her brain refuses to see at first that there are dead bodies on the shore. A German ship carrying Russian prisoners has been bombed. She spends a day covering and burying bodies but eventually finds one man alive—a Russian, badly injured, up in the loft of the house.

Ingrid takes care of him but also must keep him safe from the Germans, who are observing her from the main island. She also is trying to bring the farm back into shape and fish to feed them.

The novel takes us to the end of the war, during which Ingrid has a difficult time.

Jacobsen tells this story with his usual pure, spare prose, a moving novel about human transcendence over great difficulty. I just love this series.

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Review 2166: In Place of Fear

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It’s 1948 Edinburgh, and it’s Helen Downie’s first day in her job as almoner for the brand new National Health Service. Her bosses are young Dr. Strasser and Dr. Deuchar—previously the partner of Dr. Strasser’s father—who share a house and a practice. Although Dr. Deuchar is friendly and humorous, Dr. Strasser is abrupt and sometimes rude. However, Dr. Strasser unexpectedly gives Helen and her husband Sandy a place to live—a flat in a house that was used as a fever hospital during the war. That’s good, because just that morning Helen’s quarrelsome mother threw them out.

Helen completes her first busy day and is delighted with the upstairs flat, which is clean, bright, and has an inside bathroom. When she and Sandy are trying to pull together a few odds and ends to make the flat minimally habitable, Helen finds the body of a young woman out back in the Anderson shelter. She thinks the woman is Fiona Sinclair, the daughter of her benefactor, Mrs. Sinclair.

After she alerts the police, Dr. Deuchar says the woman died from poisoning herself. He and Helen go to notify Mrs. Sinclair, but Fiona is okay. Then Helen thinks the body might be her other daughter, Caroline. She and Dr. Deuchar try to find the misidentified body but are told it was sent to Glasgow because it was the body of a notorious Glasgow criminal. However, on a second visit to the morgue, Helen learns that the girl was hanged, not poisoned, and a famous criminal by the name she was given is unknown in Glasgow.

Persistent Helen begins to uncover widespread corruption involving leading citizens in the city. Something is going on very close to home.

It wasn’t clear to me whether this book marks the start to another series by McPherson, but it has hallmarks of it. Helen is a feisty and likable heroine, and although I thought she was blind to the identity of the killer, what was actually going on in the city was harder to figure out. If this is a series, I’m looking forward to seeing more of Helen.

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Review 2165: #ThirkellBar! What Did It Mean?

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The focus of What Did It Mean? is on Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. The novel deals principally with Lydia Merton, who has been asked to chair the committee for the Northbridge coronation pageant. This gives Thirkell the opportunity to poke fun at village committee meetings, during which very little seems to get done.

Lydia also gets acquainted with the Earl and Lady Pomfret and takes an interest in their oldest son, Lord Mellings, who at 16 is too tall for his strength, sensitive, and shy. Lydia arranges for him to meet the actress Jessica Dean and her husband Aubrey Clover, the playwright, and they enlist him in a part for their short play for the coronation, which promises to do much for his confidence.

For a while when reading this book, I thought Thirkell was starting to phone it in or that she needed a better editor. For example, there is a scene in which Lydia telephones to the Clovers to ask them to participate in the pageant. Then immediately following that, she takes Lord Mellings to the Deans to ask the Clovers the same question. Similarly, she reminds us several times of the little romance that took place between Noel Merton and Mrs. Arbuthnot when Lydia became so sick. There are also too many meetings described and no apparent romance until quite late in the novel.

However, the novel picked up as it went on, and the romance, once it emerged, was understated and touching. I finally ended up liking this one almost as well as the others.

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Review 2162: Shrines of Gaiety

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It’s 1926. Ma Coker is being released from jail, and it’s like a circus in front of the prison. Nellie Coker is the head of a crime family in London, the owner of five clubs that Frobisher, the new broom at the police station, thinks are responsible for the disappearance of quite a few girls.

Miss Gwendolyn Kelling has unexpectedly inherited some money, so she quits her job in York as a librarian and decides to search for her friend’s sister, Florence Ingram, and Freda Murgatroyd, both 14, who have gone to London to make their fortunes, Freda being positive that she is going to be a star. When she goes to the police station, Frobisher asks her to visit one of the Coker clubs to report what she can observe.

Niven Coker, Nellie’s oldest son, by coincidence comes upon Miss Kelling on the street after she has been mugged. He gives her a ride to her ladies hotel, and afterwards she receives her purse.

Frobisher has been asking at the office for Maddox, one of the inspectors, but he has been on sick leave. Frobisher is sure Maddox is corrupt, but what he doesn’t know is that Maddox is putting the final pieces in place to take over Nellie Coker’s clubs. To start with, there is arson.

Maddox isn’t the only one after the Coker empire. There’s also Mr. Azzopardi, who begins by trying to exploit the weaknesses of Nellie’s youngest son, Ramsey.

There are some dark deeds in this novel, but it is written with a lightness that conveys more the fevered fun seeking of the time. For a crime family, the Cokers are curiously benign, and Nellie Coker seems to be three steps ahead of everyone else. The novel is more of an ensemble piece and doesn’t have a main character, although we admire Miss Kelling and also the plucky but naïve Freda. Although ostensibly a crime novel, I found it more a portrait of a particular period and enjoyed it very much. Atkinson has based some of it on the life of Kate Mayrick, the owner of clubs in Soho.

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Transcription

A God in Ruins

Review 2161: The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare

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After the death of her father toward the end of World War II, Alice Young finds out that Evertell, the farm that has been in her family for generations, was not sold as she thought but is waiting for her to decide what to do with it. She has not been there since her mother died under painful circumstances, and she doesn’t want to keep it. However, her thirteen-year-old daughter Penn has been depressed since her own father’s death three years before, and she hopes the trip to evaluate the farm will perk her up. She also hopes the money will help pay for Penn to attend the private school she expressed interest in several years ago.

When Alice and Penn arrive at the large but dilapidated farm, Penn is enchanted. She is also enchanted by the stories Alice tells her about the family’s descent from Eleanor Dare, an original settler of the doomed Roanoke colony. Unfortunately, it was the theft of a stone, said to be engraved by Eleanor Dare to explain where the survivors of the colony went, that finally drove Alice’s mother over the edge of sanity. Penn is also fascinated by the commonplace book, written in by the female descendants of Eleanor over the centuries.

As Alice tries to improve her relationship with Penn, she is forced to face memories of her mother’s death and find the truth of family secrets.

It’s interesting to learn that this book was inspired by Brock’s fascination with the stone alleged to be engraved by Eleanor Dare, because the story of Dare, as imagined by Alice’s mother, was the least interesting part of this novel. Possibly, this is because of the matter-of-fact way it is told, with few details. The more modern story is told in alternating chapters from Alice’s or Penn’s point of view, and I found it extremely interesting and engaging. Brock proves to be an effective storyteller. I only thought it took Alice a long time to make the decision that seemed obvious from the beginning.

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Review 2149: #ThirkellBar! Jutland Cottage

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Jutland Cottage, published in 1953, begins with John and Mary Leslie, whom we have seen little of since Wild Strawberries. However, the purpose of this first chapter is to describe the death of George VI, or rather the characters’ reactions to it.

Then we go to Greshamsbury, where Father Fewling, now a canon, is the new rector and is moving into the rectory. Canon Fewling becomes aware of the plight of the Phelps’s. Admiral Phelps is ill and his wife not much better, both cared for by their daughter Margot, who is 40. Since they mix little in society, no one knows them, but it is Rose Fairweather who realizes that Margot needs help. She has been doing all the work around the house, including gardening and caring for chickens, and her parents are too ill to be left alone. She is tired, stressed, poorly dressed, with no amusements. She is also worried that if her father dies first, the navy pension will be too small for her mother to live on. As it is, they are very poor.

Rose makes a plan with her friends and neighbors to stop by to visit the Phelps’s frequently and to at least once a week get Margot out of the house while someone is visiting her parents. Rose goes further by giving Margot a length of tweed and taking her shopping. A great deal of attention is spent on her undergarments, particularly her “belt,” which is apparently a corset or girdle. (Thank goodness we don’t wear those anymore.) And she gets her hair cut.

While all this kindness is going on, Margot gains confidence and eventually draws the attention of some of the older bachelors.

In the meantime, Swan, who you may remember was in love with Grace Grantly until he realized her heart lay elsewhere, has found someone else to care for. But one of the things I like about Thirkell is her subtle romances, which are so downplayed that it’s often not clear who might end up with whom.

I don’t care what people say about Thirkell’s post-war novels, I am finding them just as interesting as ever, perhaps because I’ve come to know so many characters and want to know what happens to them.

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