Tag: classics

Day 955: Family Roundabout

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Cover for Family RoundaboutBest Book of the Week!
It is 1920, and the Fowler and Willoughby families are about to be united by marriage. The Fowlers are an old county family, now getting a little shabby, while the Willoughbys are forces in the town, wealthy but not so genteel. Up until now, the families have held apart, but in this generation there are friendships between the children. Now, Max Willoughby, good-natured and charming, will marry the determined and managing Helen Fowler.

The two families are headed by widows. Ever since she married her husband, Mrs. Fowler has hid her true self, whom she wryly refers to as Millicent, behind a façade of vagueness and stupidity that she calls Millie. Although she never seems to make a decision or take charge of anything, everything seems to get done they way she wants it.

Mrs. Willoughby is made of sterner stuff. She manages everything, including the family business and the lives of her grown children. When she tries to manage Mrs. Fowler over the wedding, though, it’s like pushing jelly around. Everything gets done, just as Mrs. Fowler wishes it to. From the beginning of the marriage, Helen is more like Mrs. Willoughby’s daughter than Mrs. Fowler’s.

Endpaper
Endpaper for the Persephone edition

Other future partnerships seem foreseeable from the wedding. Anice Fowler gets engaged to Martin Newbolt, a poor but intellectual young man who works in his uncle’s book shop. We can see trouble ahead because of Anice’s unspoken rivalry with Helen. The youngest Willoughby, Oliver, finds himself attracted to his young sister Cynthia’s best friend, Judy Fowler, who is looking beautiful and grown up at the wedding. Then there is the already married couple, Peter and Belle Fowler. They have a young daughter, Gillian, but things are not looking good for them. Peter is sensitive and mild-mannered, but Belle is a self-centered, temperamental beauty.

Family Roundabout follows the fortunes of the Fowler family and some of the Willoughbys through almost 20 years, until just before the war. Although it has many characters, I found myself deeply interested in their lives and problems. This is a compelling novel about the everyday lives of ordinary people, with an ending that eerily contrasts what we know about the coming war with what the characters don’t know. Although I don’t usually lose this perspective with fictional characters, it made me wonder what happened to them next.

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Day 946: The Story of the Treasure Seekers

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Cover for The Story of the Treasure SeekersA while back, I read E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children. Although I liked it well enough, I did not find it as delightful as the book I’m reviewing today, The Story of the Treasure Seekers. This first novel of Nesbit’s is about the Bastable children, Alice, Dicky, Dora, Horace Octavius (known as H. O.), and Oswald. The narrator keeps his identity secret, but we can tell fairly soon that it’s Oswald.

The Bastable’s mother died not long ago, and the children are vaguely aware that their father is having financial problems. He has removed them from school, and the house isn’t nicely kept up. So, the children have a council, and they each come up with a plan for finding treasure.

The novel is about what happens as the children try to raise money, their plans ranging from holding up people on the common to dowsing for gold. The novel is very funny, I think even more for adults than for children. Children will enjoy the kid’s adventures, but adults can understand an entire additional layer of information that the children in the book don’t, for example, that the Robber they find in their father’s study is probably not a Robber.

The naivety of the narration lends this novel a charm and humor that a straightforward third-person narrative would not. This is a lovely, funny book.

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Day 943: The True Heart

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Cover for The True HeartThe True Heart is the book chosen for my Classics Club spin on Monday. I’m reviewing it this week because I have Literary Wives on the same day. It is the first book I’ve read by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and it is an interesting mix.

On the surface, it is a simple tale about the efforts of a naive young woman to win her love. But it has allegorical overtones and Warner admitted that it is her retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Let me just say that stories of women who labor long and hard to prove their love for men (and, actually, the other way around) have never been my favorite.

Sukey Bond, straight out of an orphanage school, is sent to work on a farm as a servant girl. Her escort part of the way is Mrs. Seabourn, a clergyman’s wife, and even though Sukey is afraid of the unknown, she is sure that Mrs. Seabourn would not take her anywhere bad.

On the Noman’s farm, she meets Eric, who appears to be another farm worker, but no one seems to mind if he doesn’t work. Sukey is very naive and inexperienced, and she is surprised when Eric seems to like her. She doesn’t notice how he is different than the other workers. They begin meeting each other away from the farm and decide they are in love.

But one day Eric has an epileptic fit after he sees Sukey kill a chicken. It is not until then that Sukey learns Eric is considered an “idiot.” (He is odd, certainly, but doesn’t really seem mentally lacking so much as on another plane of existence.) It is also not until then that Sukey learns Eric is Mrs. Seabourn’s son. This puts him well above her in social station, but she thinks Mrs. Seabourn would be happy that Eric has her to take care of him. So, when Mrs. Seabourn comes to take Eric away, Sukey quits her job and follows.

But Mrs. Seabourn is not the person Sukey thinks she is. She is ashamed of Eric and horrified and angry when Sukey presents herself. She sends Sukey away, and the girl is penniless and friendless until she finds work at another farm.

At the home of her new employer, she hears a garbled account of Mrs. Seabourn being snubbed by a “princess” at some event. She decides that if she were to go to Queen Victoria and get Mrs. Seabourn a bible from her, Mrs. Seabourn might be grateful and relent. So, she quits her job again and is off to London.

I hardly know what to think about this novel. On the one hand, it seems unlikely that events, which could go so horribly for Sukey, depend on her constantly receiving help from unexpected people. Too, it was difficult for me to imagine a person could be so simple-minded and naive. (Of course, I assumed she was a little older than she actually was until they told her age at the end.) On the other hand, I don’t think we’re supposed to take this apparently simple tale at face value.

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Day 940: Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland, of Sunnyside

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Cover for Passages in the LifeI have mentioned before that Margaret Oliphant was one of the most popular novelists of her time, but only a few of her novels are easily available except in print by demand. So, her complete works was one of the collections I selected from Delphi Classics in e-book form.

I decided to read the works in order of their appearance in the collection, and this novel is the first, published in 1849. Like the others I have read, it is a domestic novel, about events in the lives of ordinary people. It has a few light overtones of a more sensational genre, however.

Margaret Maitland is a spinster when she takes on the charge of raising a young orphan, Grace Maitland. Since her mother’s death, Grace has been in charge of an aunt, but Margaret’s friend thinks she will do better with Margaret, and Grace’s aunt has no objection. So, Margaret takes young Grace and frankly loves her at first sight. Grace lives happily at Mistress Maitland’s home of Sunnyside and spends a lot of her time with Margaret’s niece Mary and nephew Claud. Margaret’s brother Claud is a minister, and Margaret and her family are strict Scottish Presbyterians.

When Grace is a young woman, though, her aunt, Mrs. Lennox, demands that she return to live with her in Edinburgh. Grace does not have fond memories of Mrs. Lennox and does not want to go, but Margaret urges her toward obedience and hopes that things will be better for her than Grace expects. There have been rumors that Grace is an heiress, but no one at Sunnyside has put much store in them.

For some time, all we hear from Grace are her letters. Her family keeps her isolated from other people, never letting her attend events but telling others she is an invalid. When Claud, who is at school in Edinburgh, calls on her, he is first told she is not at home and later treated shamefully.

There is other drama closer to home, because Margaret’s niece Mary is being courted by Allan Elphinstone, young Lilliesleaf. His mother is looking higher for him than Mary, though, and encourages him to associate with the nearby gentry, where he gets into bad company. Mary won’t have him, therefore, and Margaret can only agree, for a similar situation in her youth brought her to her solitary state. Margaret thinks Allan can improve, though, and he sets out to try to do so. A subtitle on some editions of “Lilliesleaf” leads me to suppose that the plot about Mary and Allan was supposed to be the main story, but I was more interested in Grace’s predicament.

This is an enjoyable novel with likable characters, even though some of its attitudes seem very dated. One difficulty I had with it, though, is that it is written in Scots dialect. The narration by Mistress Maitland isn’t difficult to understand, but some of the country folk use expressions with which I am unfamiliar, so I think I missed most of the humor of the novel. In addition, this e-book was almost certainly machine read from an old manuscript and there are many mistakes, especially in words where old-style typography had ligatures, or connected letters. The combination of the dialect, which had words I didn’t understand, with the many typos made the text difficult. If you want to read this, you might try finding an old used book instead of an e-book or print on demand edition (which I assume would have the same problems).

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Day 939: A Man Could Stand Up

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Cover for A Man Could Stand UpBest Book of the Week!
At the beginning and end of A Man Could Stand Up, the third book of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, it is Armistice Day. In between, the book returns in time several months to the front.

Valentine Wannop is at her job as a schoolmistress in a London school when classes are dismissed because of the Armistice. But in the midst of all the confusion, Valentine receives a spiteful phone call from Lady MacMaster about Christopher Tietjens. Since Lady MacMaster has been spilling her poisonous lies to the headmistress, Valentine finds herself having to make plain to her what she barely understands herself.

Months earlier, Tietjens has been ordered to take second in command of a unit at the front. He was in a much safer position in charge of moving men, but General Campion has, as usual, miscontrued the events in the second book between Tietjens and his faithless wife and has transferred Tietjens to a position of more danger. Unfortunately, his commanding officer has been drinking too much, and Tietjens has to remove him from duty. The novel depicts the events of a chaotic night during a bombardment.

This novel has been considered one of the best books about World War I. Certainly I have enjoyed every minute reading about the principled Tietjens, whose every action has been misinterpreted, and his so far unfulfilled affair with Valentine Wannop.

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Day 937: Suite Française

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Cover for Suite FrancaiseI tried to read Suite Française when it first came out in the early 2000’s, but I was completely turned off by its characters, whom I found petty and vicious. But that’s exactly the point, I find, picking up the book again because of a book club. Although a well-known writer who had lived in France for half her life, Némirovsky was denied French citizenship presumably because she was Jewish. She was inspired to write the novel because of the behavior she witnessed during the evacuation of Paris in World War II. She never finished this ambitious novel because she was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 by the French government and died there a month later.

Suite Française consists of the first two parts of what was to be a five-part novel. “Storm in June” follows various Parisians as they evacuate Paris with the rumor of the German advance. They have left it very late, but even so, Mrs. Péricard delays, waiting for her linen to be returned from the launderer. Later, she scours a small village trying to find sweets to refill her supply that she has passed out to starving fellow evacuees, but when she learns that everyone is out of everything, she snatches back some of her treats to save them for her family. Even later, in a rush to catch a train to safety, she actually forgets her ailing father-in-law, who dies alone in a hospice.

Charles Langelet abandons Paris in his car filled with his collection of porcelain. When he runs out of gas, he persuades a young couple that they can rest and he will watch their car, which he steals.

Gabriel Corte is a famous writer who evacuates with his mistress, Florence. Throughout the chaos, he behaves with extreme selfishness and expects special treatment.

The only sympathetic characters are the Michauds, who work in a bank. They have been instructed by their boss, Corbin, to meet him with their things in front of the bank, where employees who are needed in Tours can share rides. He himself has promised a ride to the Michauds, but when they get to his car, his mistress is there with her dog, even though he has already told her he can’t take her. After an argument, the Michauds are abandoned, with no recourse except to walk to Tours. All the while, they are worried about their son Jean-Marie, a soldier at the front. When they are forced to return to Paris because the road to Tours is closed, Corbin fires them.

The spiteful, satiric tone of “Storm in June” subsides a bit for “Dolce.” This volume examines the fate of two families in the village and countryside nearby where many of the evacuees ended up stranded before they returned to Paris. It is now months later.

One family is the Sabaries, the country folk who tended Jean-Marie when he was wounded. Although their foster daughter Madeleine fell in love with Jean-Marie, she has married the son of the family, Benoît, and has had a baby. A young German officer has been billeted on the family and pays attention to her. Although she is afraid of the German, Benoît is jealous.

In the village, Lucile Angellier is shut up in the dark house with her mother-in-law, who dislikes her. (The Angelliers briefly took in the Péricard family during the evacuation.) Lucile was pushed into her marriage by her father and found out soon afterwards that her husband has a mistress. In her loneliness, she becomes attracted to the German lieutenant billeted in their house.

My strongest reaction was to the first book, which I found a bit shocking. Despite a review comment on the back of the book about its “indictment of French manners and morals,” I wasn’t sure if the social commentary was meant to be more general or specifically against the French. According to Némirovsky’s own notes, it was against the French.

As to the second book, it seemed as if it was intended to build toward ramifications later in the novel, which, of course, was never finished.

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Day 934: One Fine Day

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Cover for One Fine DayBest Book of the Week!
It is shortly after World War II, and Laura Marshall and her family are trying to return to normal life during the privations of post-war England. With only one part-time housekeeper, Laura is struggling with unaccustomed chores. The house and garden are beginning to look shabby, which bothers Laura’s husband Stephan, who struggles with the lawn every weekend.

The family is also having to accustom itself to living together again. Through the war, Laura and her daughter Victoria shared the house in a relaxed way of life with various female friends and children. Stephan is inclined to be more fastidious, while Laura is dreamy and untidy.

This novel takes place over the course of a fine summer’s day as Laura does her chores and thinks about a way of life that is disappearing. It is beautifully written, with evocative descriptions of nature. Barrow Down, which looms over the landscape, is an important feature of this novel.

This is a lovely short novel.

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Day 929: The Railway Children

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Cover for The Railway ChildrenThe Railway Children is a classic British children’s story, written in 1906. At the beginning, Roberta (Bobbie), Peter, and Phyllis live a happy and comfortable life with their parents in a suburb of London. Then one evening two men come to see their father, and they hear angry voices. Their father goes away with the men, and shortly afterward they move with their mother to a cottage in the country.

Here things are a bit more primitive. They only have one servant, a housekeeper, and a pump in the yard for water. They have to help their mother more, and Peter can’t go to school. Their mother can’t play with them, because she is busy writing stories for money. They are poor and have to be careful how much coal they use and what they eat.

Near their house is the railway, and they find lots to entertain themselves watching the trains and getting to know the men at the station. They wave to an old gentleman on the morning train every day, and they have adventures related to the railway.

I can see why children would love this story. Although the children’s adventures are all realistic, they would be exciting reading for children. There is also the mystery about their father. Character development is not a strong suit of the novel, but the children and their mother are sympathetic and the children behave like actual children.

Perhaps the novel does not have as much to offer adults, especially those who didn’t read and love the book as children. Still, it’s easy to see why the book is still popular.

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Day 927: The Casebook of Carnaki the Ghost Finder

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Cover for the Casebook of CarnakiW. H. Hodgson’s sleuth Carnaki is in answer to the fad for detective stories that came about after the success of the Sherlock Holmes stories. But Carnaki is not a regular detective. He is a psychic detective who investigates hauntings. The Casebook of Carnaki the Ghost Finder is a collection of nine Carnaki stories.

These stories all follow the same format. Carnaki summons a group of friends to his house for dinner. He speaks very little before and during dinner and will not talk about what he’s been doing. After dinner, he relaxes into his favorite chair and relates his latest case. This format is very common in earlier genre mysteries. Unfortunately, it removes some of the immediacy of the story.

These stories are straight wonder tales. There is no attempt made at characterization, of Carnaki or anyone else. The stories are simply meant to amaze and puzzle and so have more in common with earlier gothic stories than with Sherlock Holmes. The puzzle of whether the mystery will be of human or occult causes is probably the most interesting part of the stories.

I actually found one of these stories to be quite chilling. That was “The Gateway of the Monster.” In that story, Carnaki is called to investigate the Grey Room in a very old house. Although the door of the room is locked every night, it is slammed continually all night long. Each morning, the bedclothes are found jerked off the bed. Since three people were killed there years before, no one has slept in the room.

Unfortunately, Hodgson cheats by waiting until the end to tell us a key piece of the story. Also, this haunting, along with some of the others, runs more along the lines of something like The Castle of Otranto than a more modern ghost story, and I find things scarier that are more feasible.

In “The Thing Invisible,” Carnaki is summoned to figure out how the butler could have been struck with an ancient dagger when there was no one around him and he was in full view of everyone. This story is marred, too, because one person there understood what had happened and would never have summoned Carnaki.

Still, this book is full of haunted castles, spectral horses and pigs, a ship pursued by strange weather, and other wonders. It can be quickly read and should offer most folks some pleasure on a rainy afternoon (or a dark and stormy night).

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Day 926: No More Parades

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Cover for No More ParadesBest Book of the Week!
The second book in Ford Madox Ford’s tetrology about World War I, No More Parades, begins as Christopher Tietjens is busy preparing a draft of men for the front in an atmosphere of almost total chaos. The discussion between Captain Tietjens and his fellow officers reveals the difficulties of this task, with shortages, supplies withheld from his troops because they are Canadian, and contradictory orders.

During this night, Tietjens is not able to retire to bed because of his duties. And one of his men is killed because of the lack of a helmet during a bombardment, helmets having been refused them. Since Tietjens recently refused the man leave because of fears he would go home and get himself killed over an unfaithful wife, he blames himself for the death.

Tietjens is already feeling rocky when Colonel Levin comes to tell him that his wife Sylvia has arrived. Levin has been sent by General Campion to advise him of this extremely compromising situation, women not being allowed there and Sylvia having come without papers.

Tietjens was under the impression that Sylvia had left him, after an evening where she acccused him of infidelity with Miss Wannop just before he returned to the front. He is in love with Miss Wannop, certainly, but he has never acted on it. In fact, it is Sylvia who has been consistently unfaithful.

Sylvia, though, is torn between the need to get some sort of reaction from Tietjens and the realization that she wants him back, that in fact, no man seems adult after him. However, she continues to try to injure him with his family, his commanding officer General Campion, and society.

This volume is a fascinating portrait of two unusual characters—Tietjens with his old-fashioned morality and Sylvia with none at all. This story is an indictment of the conduct of war but also a tale about a disappearing kind of man.

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