Tag: England

Review 2742: Precipice

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It’s the eve of the First World War, and Venetia Stanley (sharing the name of her famous ancestor, subject of the novel Viper Wine) is having an affair with Prime Minister Asquith, more than twice her age. Perhaps it’s not a sexual affair, but it is certainly an emotional one. Asquith is known for his relationships with young women, but this one seems to be more serious.

In an incident that seems unrelated to the rest of the novel for a while, Venetia decides to meet Asquith at a party instead of going on a pleasure cruise with the set she hangs out with. During the cruise, two young men drown as part of a bet. The investigation brings in the character Detective Sergeant Paul Deemer, who notices Venetia’s name on the guest list and calls on her to take her statement.

Periodically, we check in on Deemer as he is recruited into Intelligence after the war starts, his job to find German spies. But most of the time, the book follows the relationship between Venetia and Asquith, leaving me wondering when and how the characters would link up.

Asquith’s behavior is frankly shocking, especially during war. Riding around in his limo with Venetia, he shows her a confidential message and then wads it up and throws it out the window. He encloses confidential and even secret telegrams in his letters to her and asks her opinion. Some of these actions make her uncomfortable, and she doesn’t know what to do with his letters, locking them in a box. He writes her several times a day.

The stories finally begin to link up when Deemer is assigned to find out about several messages turned in by the public. The conclusions of the initial investigation end with Deemer assigned to intercept Venetia’s correspondence.

This is not the taut thriller that Harris often produces. I found it interesting but got a little tired of reading especially Asquith’s letters, which are cringingly romantic. As the affair continues, Asquith writes Venetia letters during cabinet meetings and seems more obsessed by her than concerned about the war. Venetia in turn begins trying to find a way to escape the relationship.

I had very little sympathy with him, although I began slowly to sympathize with Venetia. It was interesting to learn about politics of this period and this odd relationship, but this wasn’t one of my favorite Harris novels.

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Review 2741: Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish

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I’m not sure what possessed me to read two biographies about Margaret Cavendish so close together. I think I moved Pure Wit up in the pile without really looking to see what it was about, just remembering I had wanted to read it.

While Katie Whitaker’s Mad Madge is more of a biography for the general public, Peacock’s biography is the more scholarly and more concerned with Cavendish’s ideas and legacy.

Certainly, it traces Cavendish’s own concern with her legacy and her difficulties in being taken seriously in her own time. Although Cavendish was not the first woman writer to publish her work, she was pretty much the first to publish not only poetry and plays but her ideas on science and philosophy. Of her earlier work, some claimed that her husband, William, had written it, but by the last decade of her life, she had been invited to attend the Royal Society to see their experiments despite a reputation for eccentricity.

Peacock explores how Cavendish’s work, which made her famous during her lifetime, after her death quickly began to be denigrated and made hard to find so that scholars couldn’t make up their own minds about it. Biographers and critics began to fasten on a few contemporary remarks to claim she was unstable and to discuss only her poems about fairies and her biography of her husband, whereas she wrote widely on a multitude of subjects. For a while, she was depicted as a dutiful wife—which she probably wasn’t—and then the Mad Madge badge was pinned on her. Even Virginia Woolf made her the butt of jokes instead of trying to understand what she had done.

But actually, Cavendish was very much an early feminist and a ground-breaking writer. She was self-contradictory, but Peacock points out that other philosophers and poets of her time with the same faults—if it is a fault to change your mind about your ideas as you reconsider them—were not being criticized for them.

It’s pretty clear that the reputation Cavendish accumulated over time is a matter of misogyny.

If you want an easier-to-read biography, I’d recommend Whitaker’s, but if you are interested also in an in-depth analysis of Cavendish’s works and legacy, this is the book for you.

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Review 2739: The Crime at Diana’s Pool

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Victor L. Whitechurch explains in the Foreword of this novel that he wrote it using an unusual technique. Instead of planning it out beforehand, he started it not knowing himself who the murderer would be. Now, I figured out who the murderer was at about page 50, and nothing made me doubt it, so I don’t know how that statement could be true.

Felix Nayland is relatively new to the neighborhood when he and his sister throw a big party. Part of the entertainment is the Green Albanian Band, all dressed in green jackets.

The observant young vicar, Harry Westerham, and Major Challow, the Chief Constable, are walking around the property where there’s a water feature when they spot a man in a green coat face down in the pool. They pull him out, thinking he’s a member of the band who went missing. Instead, it’s Felix Nayland stabbed in the back and wearing the performer’s green jacket.

The police think this is going to be easy—just find the performer, apparently a foreigner, and clearly the murderer. But figuring out who he is turns out to be more difficult than expected, because he was a substitute for a regular band member, and that man has no idea who he is. Also, how did Nayland end up wearing the other man’s jacket?

It seems clear that the mystery man stole a wooden box from the Nayland’s house because they find pieces of it at the crime scene. But there are other clues that make no sense.

It gradually becomes clear that the murder has something to do with an obscure South American country and its politics, but when they find Garcia, the substitute, he claims to have only come for the box, to have been caught by Nayland, and to have explained what he was doing. Then Nayland helped him leave the grounds, because Garcia saw someone he was afraid of.

Although the plot becomes complicated very quickly, I figured out the murderer almost immediately. There were some other issues with the book as well. Characterization wasn’t a big consideration, except a little bit with the vicar, who is in love with a girl who is clearly hiding something—something obvious, I thought, but he can’t figure out what it is.

And a murder has been committed at a party, but the police think it’s not necessary to question the guests—just the servants. There are a couple of instances of this, where suspects are clearly divided by class.

Altogether, I found this mystery easy to predict and a little hard to pay attention to.

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Review 2736: Venetia

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I’ve already reviewed Venetia for this blog, but my purchase of a new Folio Society copy seemed like a good excuse to reread it.

Venetia Lanyon has lived an isolated life, mostly with only her brother Aubrey for company. Her late father having refused her a London season when her aunt offered one, she has only attended a few local dances. However, she has two suitors—Edward Yardley, a worthy neighbor, and Oswald Denny, a quite young man who emulates Lord Byron in his careless dress and sulky manner. Venetia is interested in neither of them and plans to make a home for Aubrey, a studious teen with a bad hip, after her older brother Conway returns from the wars to take up his position as head of household.

But two incidents complicate this plan. One is her encounter with Lord Damerel, a neighbor she and her brothers called the Wicked Baron when they were children because of his unnamed crimes that made his family disown him when he was young.

Although Demerel, mistaking her for a village girl, offers her an insult, he is taken aback by her reaction, and she soon finds him to be a companion who shares her sense of humor. When he rescues Aubrey from a bad fall, the three of them begin a comfortable friendship.

Then strangers arrive. Without so much as a letter of warning, Conway has married a shy, biddable girl and sent her before him with her extremely unpleasant mother to establish his household.

Now, we’re set up for Heyer’s usual romance with lots of striking characters, a good deal of lively, funny dialogue, and an engaging, sparkling heroine with an unconventional mind.

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Review 2734: Review-Along! Lady Audley’s Secret

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Yesterday FictionFan was hosting a Review-Along of Lady Audley’s Secret, a book I thought I read long ago but did not really remember. I wasn’t able to participate yesterday because of Literary Wives, but today I can.

As I said, I thought I had read Lady Audley’s Secret long ago, but apparently I was wrong. Nothing in this book was familiar.

Lady Audley is newly married. She is a young, beautiful, child-like woman who was working as the governess for a doctor’s children when she met the much older Lord Audley. He is enchanted by her, but his daughter Alicia thinks she is superficial.

After we meet Lady Audley in her beautiful old home, the narrative skips to a young man, George Talboys, returning to England after three years in Australia. He left his young wife and child in the care of her father, because his father disowned him when he married, and the couple has run through his money. So, he departed to seek his fortune and is returning a wealthy man, eager to see his wife. However, he is stunned after he finds a newspaper announcement that she has died.

His friend Robert Audley, Lord Audley’s nephew, takes pity on him, and the grieving Talboys moves in with him. Sometime later, Robert thinks it will enliven George to visit his family at Audley Court. The young men repair to an inn nearby. First, Lady Audley makes excuses to delay a family dinner, and then she has to travel out of town because an old friend is on her deathbed.

We think we already understand Lady Audley’s secret when George catches a glimpse of her in her carriage and becomes preoccupied. The next day the two young men are fishing when Robert falls asleep by the stream. When he awakens, George is gone, yet he is not in their room at the local inn. He was last seen walking toward the dark lime avenue where Lady Audley was supposed to be. Robert assumes George returned to London, but he is not there, and his things have not been disturbed.

When George doesn’t resurface or respond to advertisements and Robert can find no evidence that he took a boat to Australia, as Lady Audley claims, Robert begins to have dreadful thoughts. He begins trying to trace Lady Audley’s past.

I can imagine that this Sensation novel made quite an impact on Victorian society. I thought it moved along pretty well and only was frustrated by the number of times conscientious Robert tells Lady Audley what he’s found out and what his next move will be, hoping she will go away and not wanting to give his uncle a shock. But Lady Audley thinks her husband will believe anything she tells him.

There are a few little perplexing complaints against women in general in the book, but otherwise, I thought the story was quite entertaining, gaining most of its impetus from a contest of wits. It also has an interesting secondary character in Robert’s cousin, Alicia.

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Review 2732: Tea on Sunday

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Alberta Mansbridge is having a tea party. She’s an elderly woman of fortune who controls a family business and is philanthropic to many causes and people in need. However, she doesn’t suffer fools and abandons anyone who tries to cheat her.

When the guests arrive on this snowy Sunday afternoon, no one answers the door. The guests become alarmed, but the house is secure, so they call the police. Inside, they find Alberta dead, strangled. No one has broken in, so Inspector Corby guesses that one of the guests arrived early and killed her, and we know this is true from the Preface.

What quickly becomes obvious is that none of the guests seem likely to have killed Alberta, and none of them have alibis except the wife of Alberta’s nephew, Anthony Seldon (a most unlikable wife, by the way). Anthony seems to be the one with the biggest motive, since he is likely to inherit much, but he claims not to know that. The two most suspicious characters, Barry Slater, a young ex-con, and Marcello Bartolozzi, an Italian conman, are not likely to have cut off their own income streams, although Barry disappears before the police arrive and remains missing for some time.

The others are Myra Heseltine, an old friend with whom Alberta had fallen out; Ewan Musgrave, her doctor; John Armistead, manager of her company in Yorkshire; and her lawyer, Russell Holdeworth.

This novel spends a lot of time up front with the interviews of the guests. I’ll say up to one third of the book. It’s definitely not an action mystery, but it doesn’t lag, either. I found it interesting that the murderer seemed obvious a good 80 pages before the end, but the evidence was needed. Overall, I found this novel interesting of approach and entertaining.

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Review 2728: Held

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Held is a poetic musing on some deep subjects framed in the fluid story of mostly one family, with a perplexing few sections about Marie Curie. It begins during World War I and goes forward for some time before looping backward and forward between (mostly) descendants and ancestors.

Returning painfully disabled from World War I, John reopens his photography studio. John and his wife Helena have a deep connection, but John is troubled by his war experiences. After he hires an assistant, an image that shouldn’t be there appears in a photograph, making him wonder if some essence of the dead exists after death.

John and Helena’s story takes up about a third of the book, and then we travel forward to 1951 and a very short section in which Helena agrees to model for a famous artist and awakens her own artistic tendencies, buried since the death of John. We also briefly meet their daughter, Anna.

Then it’s 1984, and Peter, Anna’s partner, is relieved to welcome home his daughter Mara, a doctor who works in war zones. Mara has met Alan, a journalist, who seems to share with her the same deep loving connection that each member of this family has with the others, and with their friends.

These are some of the bones of the stories, but these characters are thinkers as well as feelers, and they consider some weighty subjects. Nature is also intimately entwined in these stories.

I understand that many readers have found this novel difficult, especially because of its fluid structure and many characters. None of this bothered me, but I am not a person who dwells on the meaning of life, so I felt I was missing a lot of the more esoteric content. I still enjoyed it. It’s absolutely beautiful, and the kinds of relationships depicted are to be admired. The characters are good and kind.

I read this for my Booker Prize project.

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Review 2727: Lessons in Crime: Academic Mysteries

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Another British Library Crime Classics volume features mystery stories set in schools. Many of these seem a little more benign in general than their usual collections, only a couple featuring actual murders. In fact, it’s almost halfway through the book before we encounter an actual murder, although earlier there is an attempted one.

In “The Greek Play” by H. C. Bailey (1932), Reggie Fortune’s goddaughter invites him to her school play because she thinks something disturbing is happening. It is.

Sherlock Holmes and Watson visit a school from which a wealthy man’s son has disappeared in “The Adventure of the Priory School” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1904).

Another student disappears in “The Missing Undergraduate” by Henry Wade (1933).

I really enjoyed “The Gilded Pupil” by Ethel Lina White (1936) about a governess who is unwittingly used to trap a wealthy man’s daughter.

“Murder at Pentecost” by Dorothy L. Sayers (1933) doesn’t feature Lord Peter Wimsey but Montague Egg, and some schoolboys help solve the murder of the master.

Schoolboys assist again in the search for a diamond hidden in what was once a private home but is now a school in “Ranulph Hall” by Michael Gilbert (2000).

It’s Raffles versus an old school nemesis during a reunion in “The Fields of Philippi” by E. W. Hornung (1905).

The anatomy professor is substituted for the corpse in “Lessons in Anatomy” by Michael Innes (1946).

I intensely disliked Detective Chief Inspector Dover in “Dover Goes to School” by Joyce Poster (1978). Fat, slovenly, lazy Inspector Dover seems to solve the crime by accident in a story I think was supposed to be funny.

“When the Deaf Can Hear” by Malcolm Gair (1959) is an almost too basic story about the disappearance of some club money.

“Low Marks for Murder” by Herbert Harris (1973) follows languages master George Faraday as he plots to murder the headmaster.

The three most repellent sixth formers in existence form the main characters in “The Harrowing of Henry Pygole” by Colin Watson (1974).

“Dog in the Nighttime” by Edmund Crispin (1954) is very short, as Gervase Fen expeditiously solves the mystery of another missing diamond.

Headmaster Richard Lumsden’s cruelty to a boy is repaid in “Battle of Wits” by Miriam Sherman (1968).

Finally, “The Boy Who Couldn’t Read” by Jacqueline Wilson (1978) features another cruel instructor.

Some of these stories of comeuppance are too far over the top, and at least one story is so abbreviated that it made me think it might be an incident taken from a longer book. In general, like all such collections, the stories are mixed in interest and craft. Overall, the feel of the volume is a little more lighthearted than usual with these collections, with some exceptions that are notably cruel.

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Review 2726: The Land in Winter

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For Britain, the winter of 1962-3 was one of the coldest on record, with massive amounts of snow in some areas. Miller has set his novel in a rural area near Bristol where two young married couples are neighbors.

Eric Parry is the local doctor. His wife Irene is early in pregnancy, but he is also having an affair with a wealthy married woman. Irene, somewhat isolated in their country home, is feeling her separation from her sister Veronica, who is in the U. S.

Next door are Bill and Rita Simmons. Bill is the son of a wealthy immigrant who has left his father’s world behind to become a farmer. Rita is about the same distance along in her pregnancy as Irene. She is a lively girl with a dodgy past, but she is haunted by voices, and her father is resident at a nearby asylum.

Rita comes calling on Irene, and the two women get along well. Irene finds Rita pulling her out of herself and getting her out of the house.

Both of the households have some class differences, although they are noted rather than seeming to cause problems. Irene is quite posh in origin, whereas Eric’s father was a railroad worker. Bill has attended university and seems to be a bit ashamed of his father, who is a slum landlord, while Rita’s past hints at darker things.

This novel was more moody than anything else. For some reason, perhaps in time setting and themes, it reminded me of The Ice Storm (although that is set ten years later), the movie not the book, which I haven’t read. There’s the sterile life of the housewives, the weather, the rowdy party, and the infidelity.

Of the books I’ve read by Miller, this is not my favorite, but it is certainly atmospheric and had me genuinely worried about some of its characters. I read it for both my Walter Scott Prize project and my Booker Prize project.

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Review 2721: Beggar’s Choice

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I had difficulty reading this book after the first few pages, because it was so obvious that someone was trying to frame the main character, without him realizing it, that it was painful to read.

Car Fairfax is down and almost out. First, his father lost the family fortune, and then Car took a job with a man who mishandled other people’s money. Since then, every time he’s landed a job, he’s been let go.

He is out walking after losing his latest job when someone puts a leaflet in his hand about an opportunity to earn £500. He notices right away that the boy is handing out leaflets for something entirely different, so he figures he was purposefully given the one he got. Shortly afterward, he gets two requests for £500. His friend Peter’s wife Fay asks him for it and his cousin Anne, whom he distrusts, tells him she has forged a check for that amount and wants him to go to jail for her. He says no to both women but responds to the job. He has also run into Isobel, with whom he is hopelessly in love.

The writer of the ad, calling himself Z10, sets an assignation, which Car keeps. He is driven out to his uncle’s neighborhood, where someone shines a light in his face just as the doctor drives past to see his uncle, and later Anna shows the doctor apparent evidence that there’s been a break-in at her house.

Car hasn’t met Z10 on the rendezvous, but he thinks he has until he actually meets him and Z10 apologizes for missing the meeting. Z10 puts him on retainer and gives him money to buy new clothes and socialize.

Although it was clear to me that Anna is trying to set Car up and Fay seems to be in on it, I wasn’t sure of Z10. I was still dreading what was coming until a new character appears—an American friend of Peter’s named Corinna. She is a breath of fresh air. She immediately begins wondering why Car keeps losing jobs. The only problem with Corinna is that she is a much more interesting character than Car’s love interest, Isobel.

This novel becomes a complex adventure story as someone is clearly out to get Car and he remains mostly oblivious for a while. Once I got over my initial dread, I enjoyed it a lot.

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