Tag: England

Review 2455: Spam Tomorrow

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Spam Tomorrow is Verily Anderson’s memoir. Although it briefly hits other times of her life, it concentrates on the war years and ends shortly after D-Day.

The book begins with Anderson’s marriage to Donald, an event not encouraged by her parents because of his lack of wealth and an age difference that is unstated but I figure has to be at least 20 years.

At the beginning of the war, Verily, having already been warned off Donald , volunteers as an ambulance driver. At first, the drivers mostly just wait around to be dispatched, and later, she is erratic in her actual attendance at this job, getting very sick and later going off when she feels like it. She keeps running into Donald, though, who is found unfit for the military because of physical reasons and instead is working for the Ministry of Information. Finally, they decide to marry.

Most of the book has to do with the struggles—sometimes serious ones but related in a lighthearted manner—of living in London during the Blitz, of a difficult pregnancy, of motherhood, and of problems trying to find a suitable home to raise children when you’re not well off and being bombed.

Again, although sometimes concerned with serious problems, like Verily’s difficult first childbirth and subsequent illness, the memoir is related in a lighthearted manner and is often amusing. It provides yet another angle on British life during the war.

Related Posts

One Woman’s Year

Mrs. Tim Carries On

The Midnight News

Review 2453: The Square of Sevens

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

Now, this is the kind of historical novel I like. The time period seems to be well-researched, the flawed heroine is still likable, and the plot is twisty and interesting.

Red tells us about her life in 1730, when she was seven. She has been traveling all her life with her father, a Cornish cunningman named John Jory Jago. But he believes his life is in danger so is using an assumed name. He has taught her to read fortunes using the square of sevens, a technique passed down in her family. She knows nothing of her mother except she is dead.

They meet Robert Antrobus at an inn. He is an antiquarian who is interested in the square of sevens. Her father tries to get him to take Red, but he refuses. Red’s father dies, and Antrobus returns to take her home to Bath and adopt her.

Now named Rachel Antrobus, Red begins as a young woman to try to find out about her family. The pack of cards she has always used has a Latin slogan on it that is the motto of the rich and powerful De Lacey family. That family is engaged in a legal battle over the estate between most of the De Laceys and Lady Seabourne, a sister of Julius De Lacey who is estranged from the family. The dispute is about a codicil that Nicholas De Lacey left, leaving the bulk of his estate to his first grandchild. Lady Seabourne’s son is that grandchild, but the rest of the family claims that Nicholas burned the codicil.

Red learns enough about the family to believe that she is the daughter of a runaway marriage between John Jory Jago and Patience De Lacey. Then she finds the codicil in the tube that contained the document explaining the square of sevens and realizes she is the first grandchild.

Fairly early on, we see another point of view. Lazarus Darke is working for Lady Seabourne trying to find the codicil.

Someone breaks into the house, killing the housekeeper, Mrs. Fremantle, obviously looking for something. Then Mr. Antrobus dies. Red has reason to believe that her new guardian, Henry Antrobus, has stolen her inheritance from Mr. Antrobus, and then he sells the codicil. Red runs away from home to London.

Red finds herself a job telling fortunes at a show, an illegal activity. The show was once a joint enterprise between John Jory Jago and Morgan Trevthick. Red, who has thought her mother dead, finds out that Patience De Lacey is Lady Seabourne. She presents herself to her, but Lady Seabourne throws her out. So, Red decides to infiltrate the De Laceys as a fortune teller for Mirabel Tremaine, who she believes is her grandmother. But can she find the codicil? And how will she prove that she and John Jory Jago lived instead of both going over a cliff when she was a baby, as everyone believes?

Soon, Red realizes she has entered a nest of vipers. But are they all or only some of them vipers? It seems as if I have told a lot of the story, but there is much more to come.

Related Posts

The House of Fortune

The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins

The Clockwork Girl

Review 2452: La Rochelle

~ whatmeread ~ 1 Comment

Mark Chopra is a neurologist who lives alone and has apparently never had a partner. He also seems at first to have no friends except a much younger couple, Ian and Laura. The draw there is Laura, with whom he is in love. As for friends, it gradually becomes clear that he has other friends, but he disregards them.

Mark judges the stories Laura has told him and his own observations and thinks that Ian doesn’t treat Laura the way she deserves. At the pub at the start of the novel, Ian tells Mark that Laura has left him to think about their future. He doesn’t know where she is and doesn’t look for her, saying she’ll come back when she’s ready.

Mark is a highly intelligent person who tends to overthink things. He starts worrying about Laura, thinking she could have had an accident or even have been kidnapped. But he does nothing except hang out with Ian every night, getting so drunk that he can’t remember things and smells like booze at work. He ignores the warnings of coworkers (his other friends that he doesn’t seem to recognize) about his job.

Toward the end of the novel, Mark finally does something, but the trip there wasn’t pleasant for me. Mark is not a reliable narrator. He knows more than he tells until toward the end of the novel. But I also found him an unpleasant person. Despite being, he finally claims, willfully abstinent, he seems to think of women only in terms of sex. He meets a couple and immediately wonders how often they have sex. He makes constant demeaning comments about female anatomy. He expresses his gratitude toward a female friend and coworker by mentioning her bra size! Is this supposed to be a side effect of Mark’s lifestyle choice? Is it supposed to be funny? I have no idea. I found this character to be deeply unpleasant despite his desire to be a knight errant for Laura. It was no surprise at all to me to find him ultimately having no interest in what he finally gets, even though it’s what he wanted.

The plot eventually has some surprises, but after a labyrinthian scheme finally reveals itself, the whole idea just seemed stupid to me. The characters go to all kinds of trouble instead of speaking a single sentence. (I think Roger Ebert used to call that the “idiot plot,” in reference to movies.) I really wouldn’t have finished this book if it hadn’t been part of my James Tait Black project.

Related Posts

Amsterdam

The Sense of an Ending

Eileen

Review 2451: Endless Night

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

Mike Rogers is a wanderer who moves from job to job, never seeming to amount to much. But he has a taste for finer things. One thing he wants is to have an architect he’s met build a house at Gipsys’s Acres, but even though the property is going cheap because of the curse on it, he can’t afford it.

He goes up to look at the property one day and meets Ellie Guteman. She is a young, wealthy heiress who has slipped her leash from trustees who keep her so protected that she never has any fun. With the help of her companion, Greta, she contiues to see Mike, and they daydream about buying Gipsy’s Acres and building their dream house. Eventually, they decide to get married on the day she turns 21. (Here’s some book serendipity, a concept coined by Bookish Beck, two books within a week that have houses being built that may turn out to be haunted. The other is The House Next Door.)

All goes well until they move into Gipsy’s Acres. Ellie keeps meeting Mrs. Lee, an old gypsy woman who warns her of danger. Someone throws a stone through the window. Even though Ellie’s relatives are American, they show up for visits, and they are not very nice. And Ellie has offered Greta a place to live. Lots of people seem not to like Greta, including Mike.

The novel is narrated by Mike, who seems disarmingly straightforward. However, there is a lot going on under the surface, and Mike is an unreliable narrator.

Although I guessed what was going on fairly early, that didn’t ruin my appreciation of how Christie slowly builds suspense. Then, at the very end, the novel took a turn I didn’t expect. Note that gypsies don’t fare well in the comments of characters.

Related Posts

They Do It with Mirrors

Taken at the Flood

Murder at the Vicarage

Review 2443: After Sappho

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

I read After Sappho for my James Tait Black project. It is experimental, written in short vignettes that jump around in time and from person to person. It tells the stories of lesbian women, mostly literary figures, trying to make a place for themselves. It begins in the late 19th century with women fascinated by the poet Sappho. Some of them study Ancient Greek, some dress like ancient Greeks or re-enact ancient plays, some travel to Greece.

The novel is vividly written in first person plural or in third person, at times slyly ironic, sometimes engaged in word play, often invigorating and with lots of sexual metaphors. It is interesting, telling of repressive laws against women, particularly in Italy, and reporting actual aggressively misogynistic “scientific” or political statements by men. It goes on to tell of the accomplishments and tragedies and love affairs of its protagonists, largely ignoring the men in their lives. For example, from this novel, you wouldn’t know there was a Leonard Woolf, just a Vita Sackville-West.

Although I found the novel very interesting at first, there were so many characters that I couldn’t keep track of them or remember which events happened to which ones. I could only track the ones I was already familiar with. For example, the novel begins and ends with Lina Poletti, even though she disappears about halfway through, so she is obviously important to Schwartz, but by the end I couldn’t remember her. I felt like I needed a chart.

And yet, I feel that with more character definition, I might have remembered all of them, but these short vignettes that tell of an activity or something they said didn’t really provide a cohesive picture to me of what the women were like.

So, I applaud this novel’s daring devices, but they didn’t really work for me.

Related Posts

The Hours

Crudo

LOTE

Review 2442: Killing Me Softly

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Although I have lost track of it, I followed Nicci French’s series featuring psychoanalyst Frieda Klein for some time. So, when I was looking through my To Read list for books published in the missing years for my A Century of Books project, I picked out Killing Me Softly, which is a stand-alone.

Alice Loudon is bored with her job, but she is happily involved in a relationship when she locks eyes with a startlingly attractive man while crossing the street. When she comes out of her workplace later, he is waiting for her, and they begin a torrid affair. His name is Adam Tallis, and he is a well-known mountaineer. He is intent and possessive, but it’s as if Alice is possessed by him. At one point, she tries to break it off, but she ends up instead breaking up with her boyfriend.

Sex is an important part of their life, and Alice finds herself agreeing to practices that are farther and farther from the norm. She drops most of her friends and can’t concentrate at work. In addition, she and Adam are receiving threatening messages.

Alice finds that Adam is the hero of an incident he has refused to talk about, in which several people died on a mountaineering trip when a storm came up. But there’s a lot Adam won’t talk about, and Alice begins to believe that he has secrets.

Nicci French is a master at building suspense, and this novel is no exception. Although Alice is not an entirely likable character—she pulls several deceptions over people to get at the truth—we can’t help but be on her side.

Related Posts

Thursday’s Children

Friday on My Mind

Dark Saturday

Review 2439: Classics Club Spin Result! The Prophet’s Mantle

~ whatmeread ~ 7 Comments

I picked this book out of my collected works of E. Nesbit for the Classics Club as one of her first novels for adults. In fact, it is her first novel. So, I wasn’t aware until I looked for a hardcopy that it was publicized under the name of Fabian Bland. In fact, I was confused, because some editions showed both names, so I thought they were two different people. I don’t agree with the custom some publishers use of listing works under the most well-known name just to make more money, but I have had to revise my listings of this work because of this error and listed both so as not to confuse.

In the prologue to this novel, Count Michael Litvinoff prevents Armand Percival from drowning himself after gambling away all his money. Litvinoff takes Percival as his secretary to Russia. But Litvinoff is the author of a pamphlet that the Russian authorities deem dangerous, so the two have to flee. On the trip, it is reported that the secretary is killed by their Cossack pursuers.

It takes a while to see the connection between this story and the body of the novel, which begins with two brothers, Richard and Roland Ferrier. Their father leaves his mill to both of them, hoping to keep them friends, as they are rivals for the same girl, Clare Stanley. If they can’t run it together, the business will fold.

However, Richard believes a rumor in the village that Roland is responsible for the disappearance of Alice Hatfield, the assumption being that she left because she was pregnant. When Roland learns this, the two become unreconciled and the mill is closed. It’s clear from the beginning that Roland knows nothing about Alice, though.

In London, we again meet Count Litvinoff, a Nihilist (although Nesbit doesn’t seem to understand what one is, and although there is a lot of discussion about revolutionary principles, no one actually states what the characters believe) who has published several books and has been speaking around town. Clare Stanley is in town, and she is trying to attract the count, but after she hears a talk by another Russian, Mr. Petrovich, she begins to be interested in the cause. It soon becomes clear that it is Litvinoff, not Roland, who is responsible for Alice’s plight.

It’s not long before several plots are going. Who will win Clare? What will happen to Alice? Who is the mysterious Petrovich? Is Litvinoff a hero or a villain? Will Richard and Roland make it up? And what about the poor mill workers?

Despite its revolutionary theme and good intentions, I fear the mill workers get the short shrift. This novel goes in too many directions to really do a satisfactory job in 159 (small print) pages. I guessed all its secrets almost immediately, and only Litvinoff has anything approaching a rounded character. The novel is supposed to have a stunning romantic ending, but I wasn’t interested enough in the characters to care much. I think Nesbit’s young revolutionary fervor (she was a Fabianist) gets in the way of this being effective fiction.

Related Posts

That Lass O’Lowrie’s

Challenge

Sofia Petrovna

Review 2434: Family Ties

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

The Monsoon family was once better off but now not so much. The family consists of Charles Monsoon, now an old man, and his younger wife, who seems to be always referred to as Mrs. Monsoon. They have two grown sons, George, who is a solicitor but prefers to work on a book about butterflies, and Stephen, who is a market gardener. Both sons live at home with their wives. Stephen’s is Vivienne, who helps Mrs. Monsoon keep the house, and George’s is Amy, who, now that her two boys are away at school, does nothing at all.

At first, the novel introduces so many characters that I kept confusing them. There are the Rockabys, whose daughter Lavinia is engaged to Mr. Swan, the doctor’s son, who has come to the village to handle his father’s estate. There are also the Tyces. Mrs. Tyce has become eccentric, so her son Rupert has been summoned to take care of some problems. Then there is the vicar and various other characters. However, the novel eventually settles down to being mostly about the Monsoons, particularly Amy.

Amy is finding herself dissatisfied, not wanting to be thought of as only a wife and mother. She wants some other identity but doesn’t really do anything about it except mope. The time period is not specified, but later it is clear that it’s 20 years or so before the time the novel was written in 1952, so there probably isn’t much she could do, and Mr. Monsoon and the other characters keep making remarks about a woman’s place. Then she meets Rupert Tyce, who is surprised to find her reading Baudelaire in French. Rupert fancies himself a cultured man about town, so they begin spending time together.

George and Amy drift apart, and eventually the question becomes whether the marriage will survive.

This isn’t a serious novel, though. The characters are eccentric, and most of them do very little. A lot of attention goes to a stinking ditch and the excess of pigeons on the property. Mr. Monsoon does less and less, and when he hands the household affairs to his sons, they are shocked at how he has mismanaged them. Mrs. Monsoon is unappreciated and keeps taking to her bed. It’s all fairly silly in an entertaining way.

Related Posts

A House in the Country

Much Dithering

Not at Home

Review 2431: Forest Silver

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

Forest Silver is a love story but not the kind you might expect. It is steeped in the love of the Lake District, particularly Grasmere.

It’s early in World War II, but Wing-Commander Richard Blunt has already been invalided out. He has received the Victorian Cross but been told his heart is not up to much. He has also broken off his engagement. Aware that the engagement news will be published soon, he jumps on a train to the Lake District to get away from everything.

Arriving in Grasmere, he finds it stuffed with evacuees as well as vacationers. He manages to get a room, but noting an island in the lake, he decides he’d like to live there and asks who owns it. He is directed to Bonfire Hall to speak to Miss de Bainriggs.

Much to his astonishment, he finds his prospective landlord is a tall teenaged girl who dresses like a boy. She agrees to lease him the island, which is occupied by a sort of barn called a hogg-house. However, there is some unpleasantness because a Gypsy woman named Jownie Wife has been living there and has to be evicted.

Corys de Bainriggs takes seriously her ownership of the estate and is determined not to sell an inch of it even though she is broke and a wealthy evacuee is offering large sums, foreseeing that the local hotels will be commandeered. However, Jownie Wife takes her revenge on Corys by burning down the house of one of her dependents, Old John. Old John refuses to live anywhere but his own home, and because she’s afraid he will die, she sells some lake acreage to Mr. Lovely so that she can rebuild Old John’s house.

Blunt befriends Corys and eventually understands himself to be in love with her. But Corys is much too young for such things. Things are made more complicated by the appearance on the scene of Gerald Lovely, a university student, and of Maimie Ozzard, Richard’s ex-fianceé, whose parents have been killed by a bomb and has no one to turn to.

The descriptions of the area are beautiful and the picture of wartime life in a place that has to adjust to so many new people is interesting and different than the wartime stories I have read. Ward is an evocative writer and storyteller.

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

Related Posts

Tom Tiddler’s Ground

Cheerfulness Breaks In

Good Evening, Mrs. Craven

Review 2429: The Return of the Native

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

A love triangle—or rather a love pentagon—is at the heart of The Return of the Native. I put this novel on my Classics Club list because, although I read it years ago, I could remember nothing about it.

The Return of the Native is Hardy’s most contained novel, all of it taking place on Egdon Heath. The action begins on Guy Fawkes night with the lighting of bonfires. The occupants of one barrow are discussing the supposed marriage that day of Damon Wildeve and Tamsin Yeobright. But Tamsin returns home in distress and unmarried, saying Wildeve made a mistake with the license.

Wildeve has told Tamsin they can marry on Monday, but on that very night he goes to see Eustacia Vye, the girl he dropped for Tamsin. Eustacia is a vibrant, proud woman, and there is no doubt that she is tempted to get revenge on Tamsin.

Tamsin and her aunt view themselves disgraced if the marriage doesn’t come off, even though Wildeve lets weeks go by as he tries to court Eustacia. But Eustacia has heard of the return after years away of Tamsin’s cousin Clym, an educated man who works as a diamond seller in Paris, and sight unseen, she decides he’s the man for her. She hates the heath and wants to go to Paris. So, she misses a rendezvous with Wildeve and he marries Tamsin.

With this ill-conceived marriage, we are halfway set up for the tragedy. Then Eustacia marries Clym even after he tells her he plans to run a school for the poor on the heath, thinking she can easily change his mind after the wedding. The fifth point of the pentagon is occupied by Diggory Venn, a rettleman, or man who sells the red substance used to mark sheep and whose skin and clothing are dyed red from handling it. Although the Introduction to my edition explains that Hardy meant him to be a rather freakish figure about the heath, he ends up using him as a sort of deus ex machina, always in aid of Tamsin.

A strong theme of snobbery is inherent in the novel as we learn (1) that Wildeve was meant for better things but ended up owning the neighborhood pub, (2) that Tamsin turned down a proposal from Venn even when he was a respectable dairyman because he wasn’t good enough for her, (3) that the only suitable suitors for Eustacia in the neighborhood are the morally dubious Wildeve or the unambitious Clym. And Mrs. Yeobright clearly disapproves of both her son’s and niece’s choices.

So, we’re all set up for one of Hardy’s tragedies, in which he lays into the Victorian idea of marriage while making all his characters suffer. I usually like this stuff, but Hardy was forced by his publisher to add on the last section, thus providing a happier ending and making the story seem to last a little too long.

Related Posts

Far from the Madding Crowed

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

The Mayor of Casterbridge