Tag: classics

Review 2279: The Fox in the Attic

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My only other exposure to Richard Hughes was his A High Wind in Jamaica, the reading of which was certainly a different experience than that of The Fox in the Attic. Readers may find the structure of the latter unusual, but Hughes meant it to be the first part of a huge novel called The Human Predicament, for which he finished the second part but not the third.

The main character is a young man in his early 20s named Augustine. In her introduction to the NYRB edition, Hilary Mantel says that he doesn’t notice things. But it’s more than that. He has formed ideas about what things are like and seems incapable of understanding they are not as he believes.

He has inherited a remote property in Wales and has been living there recently like a hermit. When the novel opens, he is carrying the body of a little girl whom he and his hunting companion found drowned in a marsh. He brings her home instead of leaving her at the scene because the marsh is full of rats. But nasty ideas begin floating around, so he decides to go visit his sister Mary.

Mary suggests he stay with some German relatives she spent time with just before World War I. It is 1923, and Augustine firmly believes the Germans are peace-loving, cultured intellectuals, and there will never be another war. In fact, as soon as he arrives, his relative Walther begins telling him about an incident that happened after the war in which he and others were held prisoner in a hotel, and Augustine finds it so hard to believe him that he stops listening although he has seen the proof of the incident written on the wall of his hotel room in Munich. In fact, the political situation in Bavaria is completely unstable, and inflation is so bad that an educated boy is working in the hotel as a bellman because a professional salary would not pay for his pair of shoes.

The first night Augustine stays with his family, in fact, is the night of the famous Bierhall Putsch, and we see a detailed description of Adolf Hitler as a character. But Augustine has decided he is in love with Mitzi, Walther’s oldest daughter, and doesn’t pay any attention to the political discussion. Although he realizes with a shock that she is Catholic, he’s sure he can easily convince her there is no god. In fact, he doesn’t even know she’s devout.

All the while, Augustine dithers in his romance, thinking everyone is expecting him to propose when no one has noticed he’s in love and Mitzi barely knows he exists, the political situation is worsening and there is real danger from the upper floors of the house.

I liked this novel when it stuck to everyday events, even the political ones, but when it a few times broke off into philosophical asides, I couldn’t really follow it or maybe didn’t try. The political events are somewhat elliptically covered for someone like me who isn’t familiar with them, at least insomuch as some key figures are assumed to be familiar to his audience and to me some of them are not.

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Review 2276: Classics Club Spin! The Tree of Heaven

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Although the Preface states that the tree of heaven in this novel is stripped of its false identity in the end and shows itself as merely an ash—to symbolize the stripping away of Victorian sentimentality to realism—I have to say that depicting men’s deaths in World War I as glorious isn’t a bit realistic. But never mind. The book was written in 1917, so it pretty much had to.

The novel begins in the late 19th century when Anthony and Frances Harrison are young parents and have recently bought their house. One of the things Frances loves about it is the tree of heaven, which Anthony, a timber importer, states is nothing but an ash tree. The couple have four children, Dorothy, Michael, Nicky, and John. Frances is obsessed with her children, really the boys, to the point where Anthony feels left out.

This novel is about daily life in pre-war England through the microcosm of one family. Early on, as early as the first day depicted in the novel, when Michael refuses to go to a children’s birthday party, he demonstrates a fear of what he later calls the Vortex, which seems to be giving up his individuality because of the pressure of others’ excitements. As they grow, the children encounter situations which show and determine their personalities. The family takes in Veronica, the daughter of Anthony’s brother Barty and Frances’s best friend, Vera. Although Barty is family, he has become unbearable, and Vera leaves him for her long-time friend Ferdie Cameron. But Barty refuses to give her a divorce. Nicky, by then a schoolboy, becomes close to the lonely little Veronica, and it is thinking of her situation as a young man that makes him decide to marry a woman who is pregnant by another man, not for the woman but for the sake of the child.

As a young woman, Dorothy becomes involved in the suffrage movement, but doesn’t approve of some of their tactics. She too eventually backs off from the movement because of fear of the Vortex, while Michael joins a group of avant garde poets who renounce all previous poetry.

All of this leads up to World War I and the effect it has on the family and its friends. It is an interesting and well-written novel that provides a look at an ordinary (although well-off) family in the first couple of decades of the 20th century.

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Review 2274: The Misses Mallett

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When I read that five years before she wrote this book, E. H. Young ran off with a married man, I had to wonder how much of it was autobiographical. Not that that’s exactly what happens in The Misses Mallett, but you’ll understand why I say this if you read it.

As a young woman, Rose Mallett rejects the proposal of Francis Sales. He is handsome, but she thinks he is sulky and boyish. And he is. Rose lives with her much older half sisters, whom she remembers thinking as a girl were like princesses. Now perhaps they are a little comic, but Rose doesn’t see them that way. Both are meticulously dressed in a style of twenty years before. Caroline, who likes to present a roguish effect but knows nothing about what she suggests, can be magnificent, while Sophia still looks girlish. Rose herself is beautiful in a cool, collected way, and dresses with a stylish severity.

Francis Sales goes away to Canada to learn farming and in a few years comes home with a wife, Christabel. Although Christabel says she wants to be friends, it’s clear she has some idea of Rose that is mistaken. Soon Christabel, in trying to prove her gameness at horse riding when she is actually afraid of horses, is badly injured so that she is a permanent invalid. For this incident she believes Rose had a part she did not play. Still, Rose begins a relationship with Francis that is not an affair but is more than a friendship.

When Rose is about thirty, the sisters’ niece Henrietta comes to live with them. Although the sisters never saw their brother Reginald unless he needed money, they still loved him. He has died, followed shortly by his widow, who rejected their money even though she and Henrietta were living in poverty, Henrietta having kept their lodgings by taking up the cooking for the whole house. When her mother dies, the sisters send for her.

Unfortunately, one of the first people Henrietta sees when she arrives is Francis Sales, who presents a romantic exterior riding his horse. She soon divines that Rose has a relationship with him even though they have lately broken up, and decides she will have him herself. As can be predicted, he’s not hard to get.

Because Henrietta sees Rose as a rival, she doesn’t understand the things Rose does for her. Rose has her flaws, but she isn’t the woman Christabel or Henrietta think she is. It is this misunderstanding that powers the plot of the novel.

I find Young fascinating. Her novels are not at all what I expect for her time, so early in the 20th century (this one is from 1922). Her heroines are complex and interesting. I have no idea what either of the heroines in this book see in Francis Sales, though.

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Review 2273: The Man in the High Castle

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I wanted to read The Man in the High Castle for the 1962 Club, but it didn’t arrive from the library in time. Although speculative fiction is generally not my genre, this book is so well known that I was curious about it.

The novel postulates that the Axis powers won World War II. As a result, the United States was divided between Germany and Japan except for the Rocky Mountain states, which were deemed unimportant. Germany has the Eastern states and Europe and Japan has the Pacific states and Asia.

The action of most of the novel takes place in San Francisco, where a lot is going on. Frank Frink has quit his job at the factory and been convinced by his coworker to make jewelry, which his coworker is trying to sell. Mr. Cheldan, an antique dealer who specializes in pre-war American goods, very popular with Japanese businessmen, who are the only people with any money, finds out that some of his goods are counterfeit. A mysterious Swede named Mr. Beyner is coming to visit Mr. Tagomi at the Japanese Trade Mission. In the Rocky Mountain states, Julia Frink, Frank’s ex-wife, has met a young man. All of these characters incessantly consult the I Ching.

The fortunes of all these characters are going to be affected by the death of the head of Germany and the resulting factional struggle for power. A shocking book is circulating that posits that the Allies won the war. It’s banned in German areas, but in San Francisco everyone is reading it.

Almost 100 pages into this novel, I was profoundly uninterested in what was going on with all these characters. I only continued with the book because it began to be obvious who the person referred to by the title was, and I was mildly interested in that.

One of my problems with the book was the writing style, which is often very telegraphic, especially when reporting characters’ thoughts, leaving out parts of speech and using a lot of sentence fragments. I’m not familiar with Dick’s writing style, but at first I thought this was a device to show a sort of stereotyped Japanese influence, but then he used the same style for the thoughts of characters from the German-controlled areas.

I won’t tell what it is, but this is a novel with a twist. For me, novels with twists generally make everything fall into place, just a new place. However, in this case I felt the twist made the whole rest of the novel meaningless.

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Review 2271: The Child and the River

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Here is my lone contribution for Novellas in November, but it’s a great one!

Pascalet grows up free on a farm in southern France, but his parents always tell him to stay away from the river. Of course, that means he is drawn to it, so while his parents are away and he’s in the charge of his aunt, he sneaks down to the river early in the morning.

There, he scrambles into a boat at the edge of the water and listens and looks, going into a sort of enraptured trance. Next thing he knows, his boat has drifted into the current. He is helpless, with no oars, until the boat comes aground on a small island.

On the island he spies on a gypsy camp, and there he sees a boy brought in and tied up. He waits for night, and when everyone is asleep, he cuts the boy free and they run away, stealing the gypsy’s boat. Pascalet and his new friend, Gatzo, begin living along the river.

This is a gorgeous, dreamy novella that fills your mind with the sights and even smells of the river. It is so evocative and beautifully written. The life along the river is minutely observed. It’s a lovely book.

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

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Review 2269: Fanfare for Tin Trumpets

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Young Alastair French is offered a place in his family’s stationers business, but he decides to take a room in northwest London with his friend Henry, who is going to be a student. Alastair has £100, and he figures he can support himself for a year while he becomes a writer.

Alastair and Henry move into an apartment building with an assortment of friendly neighbors, particularly Winnie Parker, who is always surrounded by young men. Although he starts a novel, Alastair decides to become a playwright mostly because plays are shorter. He doesn’t do much work but he does write up a scenario.

Then he meets Cressida Drury, an actress, and is immediately smitten. She returns some of his interest when she learns he is a playwright, but it’s hard to tell how much, and he didn’t think of dating when he made his budget.

This is a frothy, funny novel about youthful optimism and first love. It’s a lot of fun.

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Review 2267: House-Bound

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I read Mrs. Tim Carries On just before reading House-Bound, and they made an interesting contrast. They were written about the same time during World War II and both set in Scotland, House-Bound in a fictional city that stands in for Edinburgh and Mrs. Tim in the town base of her husband’s regiment. Both are social comedies, but whereas Mrs. Tim is busy raising her children and doing war work and remaining as upbeat as possible, Rose Fairlaw has raised her children, tends to the depressive, and fully realizes she is looking at the death of her way of life.

House-Bound begins with Rose at the registry hoping to get two servants to replace the two girls who are leaving to work in munitions. It’s clear to her that there are plenty of employers and no one to be employed. When someone remarks that millions of women do their own housework, she decides to try, even though she is fifty and has never done any housework or cooking.

The Laidlaws live in an ancient stone tower with a larger, comfortable Victorian addition. Aside from not exactly knowing how to do the work, Rose seems to have no idea that you might not clean every room every day or that one woman can’t be expected to do what three women used to. But almost immediately she meets Major Hosmer, an American who intrudes himself upon her to make domestic suggestions such as converting the small pantry on the main floor into a little kitchen so she doesn’t have to go up and down stairs to the basement kitchen.

Rose is struggling ineptly with the cleaning and serving her husband disgusting messes, but it appears to occur to no one else in the family to do any work. The family dynamics are important in this novel. Rose was a young mother and widow during World War I when she married Stuart Laidlaw, a widower with a frail only son, Mickey, whose mother died in childbirth. Rose became consumed with caring for Mickey, especially after he almost died, to the evident neglect of her own difficult daughter, Fiona, who has grown up ready to take offence and ready to blame everything on her mother. Major Hosmer is actually an acquaintance of Fiona, and his mistaken idea of her mother is straightened out almost immediately upon meeting her.

Luckily, the registry office comes up with Mrs. Childe, who is willing to teach Rose and work with her three hours a day, but her standards are so high that Rose is exhausted. She become house bound, with no time to do anything else, but Peck extends that idea to the lives of her class—that they are stuck in their ideas and habits.

At first, being someone who has always had to do my own housework (although admittedly not to their standards), I felt impatient of Rose and the others who seemed to thing she was taking on some momentous task. But later I feel I missed some of the comedy in my sympathy for her general conditions. There are some great comic characters here, who are as irritating as they are funny, although I was a little irked at the idea that an American major would push his way into Rose’s house not only to make home improvement suggestions but to make the dinner and do the dishes. I don’t believe that character at all. But Cousin Mary, who is always right, a single woman who keeps trying to force poor exhausted Rose into doing war work—and then there is Grannie Con-Berwick.

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Review 2265: Mrs. Tim Carries On

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Mrs. Tim Carries On is the second in the Mrs. Tim series, continued after a long break at the beginning of World War II. The narrator, Hester Christie, begins the novel as diary entries after her husband leaves for the front. Her husband’s Scottish regiment is stationed in a small Scottish town, and at first Hester feels she should leave but decides she is of more use there.

The diary is of everyday life that doesn’t seem to be that different from before the war except for war work and worry about loved ones. One of the young officers in her husband’s regiment asks her to invite Pinkie Bradshaw to stay, and Hester is confused by this because she remembers Pinkie as a girl with braces. But Pinkie turns out to be a tall and beautiful seventeen-year-old, practical, too, as she lets one young man after another know they’re just going to be friends. Pinkie stays, and Hester is happy to have her.

After Dunkirk, Tim’s regiment reappears, but without Tim, which leads to some anxiety. Otherwise, the book is calm, pushing the stiff upper lip approach with a few scares, sometimes funny, and entertaining.

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Review 2261: Jenny Wren

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This novel is called Jenny Wren after its main character, Jenny Randall, but I actually preferred her sister, Dahlia. The two sisters are the daughters of a mismatched couple, beautiful but lower-class Louisa and Randall, who is her social superior. Once her husband got over his infatuation, he criticized her actions and her manners and made himself responsible for their daughters’ education. Both have the right accents and manners, but Jenny cares more about what people think than Dahlia does and is ashamed of her mother, particularly because while their father was away at the war (WWI), Louisa had an affair with Thomas Grimshaw, a local farmer.

Now their father has died, and Louisa has sold the farm and purchased a large house in a fashionable neighborhood in Upper Radstowe to open a boarding house. The Dakins next door are friendly to the girls until they mistake Louisa for the cook. Miss Jewel, who also runs a boarding house, is hostile and on the look out for hints of scandal, such as that suggested by Thomas Grimshaw’s visits every Saturday. Louisa isn’t happy to see him, but she sold him the farm and borrowed money from him to buy the house. He’s hoping she will fail and be forced to marry him.

Jenny has dreams of meeting some young upper-class man and falling in love with him, but she sees the very existence of her mother as a threat to this “future.” She is disposed to like Edwin Cummings, their boarder, but looks down on him as worker in a shop. He is an expert on antique furniture and wants to have his own shop, and she is beginning to be friends with him when she meets the son of the local gentry, Cyril Merriman, and falls in love with him. After a misunderstanding, she lets him believe her name is Jenny Wren and is afraid to tell him who she actually is.

In the meantime, Dahlia goes from making fun of Mr. Sproat, the curate, to beginning to like him. However, the family’s second boarder, Miss Morrison, hopes to marry him.

Louisa, who makes several badly misjudged decisions based on wrong assumptions, invites her sister Sarah to stay with them. Sarah turns out to be an unpleasant woman who wants to take the boarding house over from Louisa. To do that, she decides both girls must leave the house and Louisa must marry Grimshaw, and she sets out to bring these outcomes to pass.

The novel concentrates on Jenny, because she undergoes the most personal growth. I found her to be quite foolish at times, and her attitude to her mother made it hard for me to relate to her, but she grows up in the end.

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Review 2260: #ThirkellBar! Three Score and Ten

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Three Score and Ten is the last novel of Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire series, finished by a friend after her death. Could I tell the difference? Maybe.

As I’ve commented before, Thirkell’s later books don’t really have plots, but this book works toward three events—Mrs. Morland’s 70th birthday, a romance for Lord Mellings, and another romance for Sylvia Gould, whom I don’t even remember meeting before.

As usual with the later works, the novel consists of a series of tea parties and dinners, with the Barsetshire Agricultural Show also taking place. Mrs. Morland entertains her grandson Robin because his siblings have the measles, and he is exactly as I remember his father, Tony, as a boy, including behaving several years younger than his age of ten or eleven.

The birthday party gives its author the opportunity to bring in almost everyone who has ever appeared in the series. Several characters who aren’t invited appear in an indignant meeting called because of the intentions of Lord Averfordbury to tear down Wiple Terrace, home of Miss Bent and Miss Hampton and several Southbridge school teachers, and put up a factory.

Could I tell that not all of the novel was written by Thirkell? Not so much, although maybe the conversations at the birthday party are not as clever. Twenty pages, by the way, are devoted to that party, which is about 18 more than were taken for any of the many weddings that appeared in the series (although admittedly most were only mentioned) and about 15 too many.

One more issue that has little to do with the original novel. I think I’ve had occasion to comment about the earlier Moyer Bell editions (all of the post-war novels) that they had a lot of typos. I haven’t mentioned that in a while because they got better, but this book had lots of them, including ones that show the text couldn’t have even been subjected to a spell checker.

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