Tag: England

Review 2317: William

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William Nesbitt is a successful ship builder and owner, and at the beginning of this novel, he is contemplating the successes of his life. The only thing he feels he has missed is some romance in life, his wife Kate being a very practical woman. But he experiences romance vicariously, through his favorite daughter, Lydia, whom he views as a source of light.

Kate Nesbitt is a worrier, and she has a sense of impending doom. She also is extremely conventional and I think old-fashioned, even for the time (1925). For example, she disapproves of her daughter Dora going to visit Lydia in London without her husband. Kate has a sense that something is going to go wrong with what she sees as her family’s happy and content existence.

Of course, she is being almost willfully blind. Their son Walter and his wife Violet are content, but their daughter Dora is increasingly discontented with her husband Herbert. Their daughter Mabel and her husband John are self-righteous, and Mabel likes to complain and pretend they are poor when John’s business is going well. Janet, the youngest, unmarried daughter is silent and unhappy. Later, it becomes obvious that she thinks she’s in love with Oliver, Lydia’s husband.

Then, something bad does happen: Lydia leaves Oliver for Henry Wyatt, a writer. William is still accepting of Lydia, thinking she is trying to live her life honestly, but he begins to see that Kate is more rigid and unaccepting than he realized.

This novel is an insightful and nuanced study of how a crisis can affect a family. Since Young ran off with a married man, it’s interesting to speculate how autobiographical this novel may be. I found the novel deeply interesting, with complex characters.

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Review 2313: Kate Hardy

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I usually like D. E. Stevenson’s novels for very light reading, but Kate Hardy seemed all over the place.

Old Quinings is a village that has been left in the past, and the residents like it that way. They are interested to learn, though, that Mr. Morven has sold the Dower House. The new owner is Kate Hardy, a writer of adventure stories who has been yearning to get out of London and away from her selfish sister and spoiled niece.

Kate has bought the Dower House sight unseen, but she loves it as soon as she sees it, even the resident ghost. She meets Mr. Morven early on, but he is careful to visit only rarely because he is old-fashioned and married, although he and his wife live apart.

Kate doesn’t mean to be a recluse even though she needs time to write, and she gets involved in all kinds of things. When she barely knows Mr. Morven, she receives an anonymous letter alleging an improper relationship between them. Another letter goes to Mrs. Morven, who comes back from America hoping her husband wants a divorce. Then Kate arranges to take care of the couple’s nine-year-old daughter Susan, which is an odd offer to a stranger and even odder for the stranger to accept. Susan arrives, but we hardly spend any time with her.

In a gesture that seems sweepingly condescending, Kate also gives a party to welcome back Mrs. Stack’s son Walter from his service in India even though she has just met Mrs. Stack and doesn’t know Walter. There’s a class issue here, not only because of the invitation but because Walter has bettered himself in the service but is stubbornly insisting on keeping his promise to take back his old job and take care of his mother. His old mates are resentful of his getting his job back, although that was promised when he went to war, and his mother and Kate think he could do better.

Then there is the witch plot, which is just silly.

I think there is too much going on in this novel. Maybe the whole thing with the witches was meant to give atmosphere, but it just seemed sort of thrown in, as does the presence of Mr. Morven’s daughter. Also, Kate ends up with two suitors without us having much of a sense of what they are like. I noticed in addition a couple of occasions when Stevenson tells us what people talked about without recounting the dialogue—and the dialogue gives us a better sense of what people are like. Its not very convincing to be told a character’s views are interesting instead of learning what they are or hearing the character say them.

So, I don’t think that this was one of Stevenson’s best.

On the old subject of mistakes in the Furrowed Middlebrow series, which we haven’t encountered in a while, Mrs. Stack is called Mrs. Stark on the back cover of the book, and there is a section after the novel ends that was apparently written by Stevenson but in my copy appears to be missing pages, because it has no heading and starts in the middle of a sentence.

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Review 2311: Big Ben Strikes Eleven

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Financial tycoon and former politician Sir Robert Boniface is found shot to death in his limousine in the Vale of Health on Hampstead Heath. At first, the police aren’t sure if the death is murder or suicide—only the lack of the gun tells them it is murder.

The body is discovered by a window washer, but Matt Caldwell, an artist, is present in a nearby pub. He is not only able to identify the victim and his car, having painted Sir Robert’s portrait, but he is happy Sir Robert is dead.

Enquiries by Inspector Beckett and Superintendent Mooney lead in the direction of Sir Robert’s nephew, Frank Littlewood, who was recently fired by Sir Robert. However, two office mates, Sir Robert’s confidential secretary Miss Pritt and the obsequious Mr. Fuller, seem too eager to drop him in it.

Then the police find the gun and establish that it belongs to Matt Caldwell. Unfortunately, he is nowhere to be found.

I haven’t paid much attention to this issue until other bloggers pointed it out about other novels, but I would say this novel is about 100 pages longer than it needs to be. First, the action is brought to a screeching halt while the author lays out the case against the original three suspects—as if readers haven’t been paying attention—then we follow Matt Caldwell’s progress in a completely unnecessary romance that coincidentally brings more clues to light. The information is important, but it seems as if it could have been introduced in a different way that didn’t take two or three chapters.

But my biggest problem was with the actual investigation. Early on, Miss Pritt tells the police that the murder had nothing to do with business and uses that reason to withhold information about Sir Robert’s appointments. And the police just go along! Later, the Superintendent just hands her her handkerchief, which he found at the scene of the crime! In other ways, the approach to evidence is just as casual.

Finally, an interview with the Earl of Rollesborough, on the board of the trust that Sir Robert works for, seems called for from the beginning but doesn’t take place until the end. And no wonder, because it pretty much makes everything obvious.

I was able to identify the murderer fairly early on, but that didn’t bother me as much as the sloppy police work, or possibly lack of knowledge about police work.

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

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Review 2310: Jane Austen at Home

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Although I read Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen years ago and thought it was very good, I feel that historian Lucy Worsley’s book provides a more personal look at Austen with more detail about her everyday life. Although some references are drawn from Worsley’s knowledge of Georgian society, she doesn’t hesitate to draw inferences from Austen’s novels and letters. Further, I think she has a better sense than some biographers of when in Austen’s letters she is joking

Worsley points out how important a settled home is in Austen’s fiction. Certainly, from the time of her father’s retirement from Steventon, that is something she and her sister and mother did not have that provoked much anxiety.

It was Tomalin’s suggestion that Austen was unable to write when she was unsettled, but Worsley suggests that Austen was working on novels all along but not doing much to market them. She also pointed out some subversive ideas in Austen’s fiction that I never noticed despite how many times I’ve read the novels. In any case, she does a good job of showing how revolutionary Austen’s fiction was for her time.

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Review 2309: The Curate’s Wife

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When I reviewed E. H. Young’s Jenny Wren, I remarked that I preferred Jenny’s sister Dahlia to Jenny. So, I was delighted to find that The Curate’s Wife is about Dahlia (although Jenny’s romantic fate is also involved).

Dahlia has married the curate, Cecil Sproat, on the basis of a friendship in which she feels she can say anything. But very soon, she finds that’s not true when it applies to religion, which has not formed part of her upbringing and which she finds silly. For his part, Cecil is rigid and has been unthinking in his religious beliefs. There is also the problem that Cecil is in love with Dahlia, but the reverse is not true.

Another issue is created by Mrs. Doubleday, the wife of Rector Doubleday, Cecil’s boss. She is an unpleasant woman who already dislikes Cecil and takes a strong dislike to Dahlia. She makes it her business to listen to gossip about the girls’ mother’s inferior social standing and her affair during the war. Their mother foolishly married farmer Thomas Grimshaw at the end of Jenny Wren, hoping that would remove a bar to Jenny’s marriage with Cyril Merriman, but that only made the situation more hopeless. Jenny has gone off to live with Mr. Cumming’s sisters and father and learn about the antique business.

Dahlia begins to feel as if she missed out. After school, she was first isolated on the farm and now is living with a dedicated man doing good works. She has never even been to a party or enjoyed other types of amusements. She begins to fancy herself in love with Simon Tothill, a young man she met at a theater rehearsal.

Just as Dahlia and Cecil are beginning to understand each other, Jenny arrives without warning. She has left the Cummings and expects to live with Dahlia and Cecil. Although Dahlia is happy to see Jenny, she begins to realize just how selfish her sister can be. For his part, Cecil is a little jealous of how close the sisters are.

Dahlia’s problems with Cecil have an interesting parallel in the relationship between the Doubledays. Mr. Doubleday is easy going and tries to avoid trouble but is afraid of his ill-natured wife. Their son is returning after three years of service in Africa, and Mrs. Doubleday wants him all to herself. But she soon makes a mistake in a remark that frees Mr. Doubleday from trying to please her.

This novel takes a complex look at new marriage and the lack of preparation people have for its problems. I didn’t like Jenny any better, but I have been impressed by how far below the surface Young’s novels go.

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Review 2306: The Midnight News

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Is The Midnight News a love story? a murder mystery? an espionage tale? a story about a dysfunctional family? an exploration of how the stress of war affects people psychologically? I’m not telling.

Charlotte is the daughter of privilege. Her father is a peer and a member of Parliament with an important war job. But Charlotte has chosen to work as a typist in a government office and live in a respectable but middle class boarding house.

It is the Blitz, and Charlotte’s home is in a dangerous area south of the Thames. She and the other residents of the house have been spending their nights on the lowest level of the house.

The novel starts slowly. Charlotte spends a day with her best friend, El, who has been elusive lately. Then El is killed in the Blitz. Charlotte goes to visit her godmother, Saskia, after she hears that a well-known actress, a schoolmate, has also been killed. Then Saskia dies, too. Charlotte has noticed a square gray man in several different places and comes to believe he is following her and killing people she is close to. This may seem like a wild idea, and since Charlotte has begun hearing the voices of her dead friends and has a history of mental illness, we begin to worry about her.

Then there is Tom, the son of an undertaker whom Charlotte has noticed feeding the birds. He is waiting to hear about a scholarship and a place at King’s College, but notifications are delayed because King’s has been hit in the Blitz. He is in love with Charlotte but thinks she is above him.

Is Charlotte being followed or is she paranoid? Is there something else going on? This novel eventually because a fast-moving, tightly plotted, and satisfying tale.

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Review 2303: Alice

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Margaret admires her best friend, Alice, even from their days at school. She thinks Alice is beautiful and elegant and envies her her siblings. However, Alice’s sister Sonia disillusions Alice early by leaving home with a man and turning up at school to demand Alice give her her monthly allowance.

As the two naïve and protected girls emerge into womanhood, Margaret comes to understand that Alice is afraid of life and has no confidence in its success. After Sonia steals the boy that’s been courting Alice, she tries to commit suicide and then incautiously marries Cassius, the man who saves her, when she hardly knows him.

Although the marriage is clearly ill-advised, to Margaret Alice lives a much more exciting life than her own. Still, Margaret notices how suggestible Alice is to those giving bad advice, even people she used to avoid.

Although this novel, about young women in the upper echelons of society, works as a social satire, it also has a serious message about what happens to unprepared young women thrown into society, especially in the years between the wars, when mores where changing.

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Review 2301: Someone from the Past

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I found Someone from the Past to be the best of the British Library Crime Classics I’ve read so far. It has a smart, feisty, occasionally indiscreet heroine, is fast moving, sometimes exciting, and presents an interesting, character-based mystery.

Nancy is at a restaurant about to receive a proposal from her boyfriend Donald when her estranged friend Sarah approaches the table. This approach creates some awkward moments, because Donald was the last in a string of Sarah’s lovers and didn’t take her departure well. Finally, he leaves the table so the women can talk.

Sarah tells Nancy she is about to marry a wealthy man, Charles. Then she says that someone has been writing her letters threatening her life. As Nancy is a reporter and knows all the suspects—Sarah’s discarded boyfriends—Sarah asks her to try to find out who is writing the letters. She says she’ll send her one of them in the morning.

Nancy’s evening ends poorly, with Donald stomping off. But the next morning, he arrives at her flat, confused and frightened. He tells her he went to see Sarah in the early hours of the morning and ended up falling asleep in the sitting room. When he awakened shortly after eight, he found Sarah murdered in her bed. He is sure the police will think he did it.

To protect Donald, Nancy lets herself into Sarah’s apartment and tries to remove all traces of his visit. In doing so, she notices some odd things about the scene. Unfortunately, when the cleaning lady arrives, Nancy puts the chain on the latch instead of hiding or going out another way so it was obvious someone was in the flat.

Shortly after she arrives home, the police are at her door. They think she killed Sarah, partly because she left her own fingerprint in the apartment and because the cleaning lady recognized her when Nancy met one of Sarah’s other lovers in a pub before going home. Nancy thinks the only way to clear herself and Donald is to figure out who did it herself. The list of suspects consists of Sarah’s last four lovers, including Donald.

Nancy finds she isn’t very good at lying to the police, keeping secrets, or fleeing the country, but she is good at figuring out clues. I’m not so sure she’s that good at picking future husbands, though.

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

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Review 2299: The Salt Path

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The Salt Path is Raynor Winn’s memoir of walking with her husband the 600+-mile Salt Path from Wales around the tip of Cornwall and back to Devon. This may not sound extraordinary or appealing to everyone, but the circumstances that initiated the walk were difficult.

It must have been the worst few days of their lives to date. For years, Raynor Winn and her husband Moth had been fighting a lawsuit that, through no fault of their own, threatened their home and livelihood. They went to court having found a document that proved they owed nothing, but because they didn’t follow the proper procedures, they were not allowed to admit it as evidence. They lost the farm they built up from nothing and were homeless.

As if that weren’t enough, a few days later some pain Moth had in his arm for years was diagnosed as a terminal illness that would result in the degeneration of his muscles and end with him choking to death.

The Winn’s reaction to these circumstances was unusual. With a very small income and almost no ready cash, they decided to walk the Salt Path. And although Raynor wanted to walk it the easy way, from the southeast westward, because the best guidebook went the other way, they went that way.

This book is compulsively readable, as the couple deal with grief, bad weather, physical problems, lack of food and water, poor equipment, difficulty finding camp sites, and general bad treatment of the homeless. It is vividly written and although I tripped over some misplaced modifiers, impels you along with them on their journey.

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Review 2295: Frederica

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I didn’t set out to reread Frederica, but the Folio Society just brought out a couple of beautiful editions of some of Heyer’s books, so I had to buy them. My original review is here, but I thought I’d talk about some things that struck me this time around.

Heyer has a great sense of humor, and I was tickled by the situation that brings about the climax of the book. Frederica has spent a good deal of ill-afforded money and enlisted Lord Alverstoke’s help with the aim of making a good match for her beautiful but dim-witted sister, Charis. Unfortunately, Charis has fallen in love with Endymion Dauntry, Alverstoke’s handsome but stupid heir. Frederica is skeptical of Charis’s affections because she has fallen in love many times before. Endymion has convinced himself that Alverstoke would prevent the match by having him sent on a mission. Not only does Alverstoke have no power to do so, but he doesn’t really care who Endymion marries. He thinks Endymion isn’t serious because he hasn’t consulted him about getting married.

The incident with the dog in the park

Endymion is friends with Harry, Charis’s and Frederica’s brother, and the two have been confiding their star-crossed misfortunes to him. Frederica makes him angry for some trivial reason, and he suddenly realizes he is Charis’s guardian. So, the three of them stage a totally unnecessary runaway marriage.

Felix and Jessamy, Frederica’s young brothers, are especially delightful characters. Heyer is an amusing writer and a master of silly situations such as the one that Charis and Endymion create for themselves.

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