The Sunday Salon – Life Beyond Books

The title of this post is perhaps slightly misleading, as a lot of what I want to tell you is in fact quite bookish in nature. But there will also be some general chatting involved, so I thought it was a fitting title regardless. In a Twitter conversation with fellow bloggers Iris and Verity the other day, we all vowed to never feel guilty for posting off-topic posts on our book blogs; books are a huge part of all our lives and that will probably shine through in every posts, but everyone feels like chatting about other things every now and again, and there are fortunately no set blogging rules that dictate how to Do It Right. In fact, according to the comments to this post over at Simon’s blog, blog readers do appreciate the occasional general chattiness and life updates. I know I’ve been a reviews-on-weekdays-and-one-essay-post-on-weekends sort of blogger for a long time now, but that’s likely to change now that my life is so different than it was a few months ago.

You’ll most likely have noticed some changes in how I blog ever since I returned from my break, the most obvious of all being a decrease in my frequency of posting. Unlike what I was expecting, though, this isn’t necessarily because I have less time to read as a graduate student than I did when I was working full-time. Quite a lot of reading gets done on my 40 minute commute to university, for example, as well as during lunch break or even between lectures (not really knowing anyone does have its bright side, ha). But I have to organise my time differently now; and if I have more reading time, on the other hand I certainly have far less computer time, which sadly forces me to be a less prolific poster and commenter. Most of you know all about the cycle of guilt and inadequacy that befalls a blogger who feels they can no longer keep up with the community, so I won’t bore you with the details; suffice to say that I’m very very sorry to be neglecting so many of your lovely blogs lately, and that I will continue to try and do my best.


(Some more recent book acquisitions. Oh dear. Yes, some of those are also on the previous picture, but never fear: I have not yet reached the point of losing track of what I have and buying duplicates. The keyword here probably being yet.)
What I have decided to do is stop posting about every single book I read, and instead focus only on those that elicit a strong response in me, be it a positive or negative one. Of course, this isn’t always easy to predict – who guarantees I won’t read five or six remarkable books in a row and want to tell you about them all? I love sharing my thoughts on what I read, but I’m trying to get used to the idea of just letting go sometimes – and if that means never writing about some books at all, so be it. The choice was between consciously limiting myself or risking burn-out, and I need not tell you which one I'd prefer.

So, you wonder, what have I been up to besides reading and blogging? Grad school assignments are keeping me pretty busy at the moment, but I did have time for some weekends away, plenty of visits to bookshops (I so need new shelves. By which I mean I need a shelf, period), and even some bookish events. As part of the Manchester Literature Festival, I went to a talk by Spanish comics creator Miguelanxo Prado, who spoke passionately about all the artistic potential of the medium and told humours life stories in-between. An unintentional funny moment came when he couldn’t remember the name of the famous British comics writer he had worked with in the past – that happens to be Neil Gaiman, and I was amused because I was fairly sure he was the reason why 80% of the audience had first heard of Prado (myself included). I regret not having written a more detailed account of the event, but fortunately this post at the official festival blog took the words off my mouth.


(Enjoying an autumn day in the Peak District)
Also as part of the literature festival, I got to spend a Sunday with the Moomins at a lovely event where Tove Jansson’s niece Sophia spoke at length about her aunt’s work. Though the focus of the event was the Moomin stories and not Jansoon’s books for adults, the majority of the audience was in fact adult – some who likely grew up with the Moomin stories, and others like myself who discovered them later on. This made me quite happy, as I always enjoy seeing adults be unapologetically enthusiastic about children’s literature.

The very charming Sophia Jansson spoke eloquently about the humour, subtlety, gentleness and wisdom of Tove’s work, and as a result made me want to pick up my next Moomins book sooner rather than later. She also mentioned that she always gets asked if the fact that she shares a name with the little girl in The Summer Book is in any way significant – her answer was that her aunt’s writing is of course fictional, but also intensely personal, so it could be that there’s something of her in that little girl. At any rate, she does have childhood memories of summers spent in tiny Finnish islands, which I very much envy her as they sound absolutely gorgeous.


Sophia Jansson spoke a little about the many unconventional decisions that marked her aunt’s life: in the early twentieth century, Tove Jansson decided to devote her life to the arts instead of forming a family like most women of her generation (and yes, it is sad that for so many it was a question of either/or). Furthermore, later in life she fell in love with a woman, a fellow artist, and bravely lived with her as a couple at a time when homosexuality was illegal. All this made me long to read a biography of her; a like-minded member of the audience asked Sophia if one was available, and she said there is one in Swedish, but it hasn’t yet been translated into English. Fingers crossed that it does get translated at some point.



Finally, I’ll have to report what was probably my favourite comment of the evening – in answer to a question by a member of the audience, Sophia remarked that it’s interesting that in many cases Tove’s fantastical creatures are of undefined gender, and that this makes you consider that perhaps gender isn’t nearly as central a part of who we are as we’re led to believe. No wonder I enjoy her writing so much.

Last but not least, I hope those of you who celebrate it have a wonderful Halloween. If not, have a happy Sunday anyway!

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Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

Fledgling opens with its heroine, a black girl who looks approximately ten or twelve years old, waking up with severe injuries and no memory at all of what might have caused them. But that’s not the only thing Shori (as she comes to find out she’s called) doesn’t remember. She also has no idea who or what she is, or of what her life was like before the fire that seems to have killed all those she knew and obliterated her identity.

Most readers go into Fledgling knowing that this is a vampire story, as it in fact is. But Butler’s vampires – the Ina – are unlike any others you’re likely to have come across before. I don’t want to say too much about them, though, as part of what kept me reading compulsively was being lost and clueless when Shori was lost and clueless, and then gradually gaining knowledge about her species’ form of life along with her. So instead of telling you more about the story itself, I’m going to move straight into why I found Fledgling so original, daring, and difficult to put down.

One of the first things Shori remembers about herself is that she’s the result of an experiment that mixed human and Ina DNA, and that’s why she, unlike others of her kind, has dark skin. Her skin is actually what saved her from the mysterious attack that killed her family, as it enables her to be awake and alert in the daylight. Shori’s skin colour, size, gender and apparent age lead many of those she meets to make immediate assumptions about her, and part of what Butler is doing here is using these plot elements as obvious metaphors for race and gender relations and power dynamics.

I think Fledgling might have felt a little heavy-handed if all Butler had done was use the figure of the vampire as an outsider to comment on racism and the historical fear of miscegenation – not, of course, that these aren’t things that still very much need to be talked about. But the book is all the richer exactly because she goes beyond that. A lot of what goes on in the story is not overt. On the one hand, we have attitudes towards race, the concept of “purity” and all its inherent dangers, the process of othering and attempting to dehumanise a group of people, and what it inevitably leads to. But on the other hand, we also have Butler’s very careful positioning of these categories in a way that exposes them as the artificial social constructs that they are, as well as her firm and clear rejection of essentialism of any kind.

Reading some other reviews made me realise that many readers weren’t too crazy about the prose in Fledgling. Personally I found it serviceable rather than beautiful, but extremely effective at doing just what it sets out to do. It’s not in her phrases than Butler’s genius lies, but in her careful manipulation of the reader’s assumptions, and in her careful consideration of everything her story implies. Butler is a cautious, deliberate writer, and nothing gets thrown into the story without its repercussion being examined.

One of the reasons why I immediately connected with Fledgling was because I loved Shori from the very beginning. Even when she’s at her most desperate, she never ceases to be compassionate and to have a very strong sense of justice. In an excellent essay I found via Jodie at Book Gazing, I came across a great quote about what Butler often does with her female characters:

Though Butler's heroines are dangerous and powerful women, their goal is not power. They are heroines not because they conquer the world, but because they conquer the very notion of tyranny.

I love thinking of Shori and of some of the other Ina in these terms. Their strength is very much the strength they do not use, and their power over humans comes with a great deal with responsibility. There’s a lot of extrapolations I could make here about social power and the responsibilities attached to it – and you know, this could all be very patronising in a be-kind-to-weaker-creatures sort of way, but Butler’s point is exactly the opposite. Power and strength are so often arbitrary that we most definitely shouldn’t put those who have them in a pedestal. Furthermore, privilege should never go unexamined, regardless of its source and our perception of how legitimate or not they might be

In an interesting twist, Butler puts a character like Shori in a position of both great vulnerability and great strength. She’s an outsider in many senses of the word, among humans and Ina alike. And yet, what many would see as her weaknesses are actually a source of great strength. She’s also someone whose mere existence extends the definition of what is acceptable, what is “normal”, what is human (or Ina), which is exactly why she makes so many uncomfortable to the point of violence.

Then there’s the whole issue of memory loss, and what it implies about the dangers of not only not remembering your history, but not being aware of your own ignorance – for individuals and communities alike. Along with Shori’s memory goes her sense of identity and of belonging, but instead of giving up, she reclaims it by getting to know those who once meant something to her all over again, and by asking them to re-teach her her past. Instead of blindly trusting blood ties, she puts her faith on the kind of emotional ties that require work to be developed, and on the kind of sense of identity that comes with a careful study of your own history.

The last thing I wanted to mention was the Ina – symbiot relationship (symbiots being the humans the Ina suck blood from, but unlike what happens in many traditional vampire stories, the Ina do not harm them in any way and in fact develop very close emotional ties with them). What Butler is in fact writing about are polyamorous families, which was very interesting if only because it’s not something I’ve come across in fiction very often. I loved the fact that she actually explored the emotional consequences of Shori’s relationships with her different symbiots, the affective dynamics, the potential pitfalls and power imbalances, the sources of tension and the sources of joy.

I could have read a whole novel that focused on the emotional dynamics between Shori and her symbiots to be honest, some of which I found provocative but intentionally so. I wonder if Butler would have ever return to the world she created here if she hadn’t passed away shortly after the publication of Fledgling. In any case, I loved that she treated it all with nothing but complete seriousness and respect. But in a novel whose main argument is that attempting to narrow down what is properly human is both futile and misguided, that’s not in the least surprising.

What other readers had to say:
Cynical Optimism, Book Gazing, Athyrium filix-femina, Capricious Reader, A Striped Armchair, Shelf Love (Jenny), Shelf Love (Teresa), Rat’s Reading, Park Benches & Bookends

(Have I missed yours? Let me know and I’ll be glad to add it.)

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The Woman in Black & Love Lies Bleeding

Today I have two fantastic RIP books to tell you about: Susan Hill’s classic ghost story The Woman in Black, and Edmund Crispin’s 1948 mystery Love Lies Bleeding. The two couldn’t be more different, but each in in their own way they were both perfect October reads.

The Woman in Black opens on Christmas Eve: our narrator, Arthur Kipps, listens to his stepchildren tell ghost stories, and what is to them an innocent and fun game awakens in him some dreadful memories. As a young solicitor, Kipps was once sent to the funeral of one of his firm’s clients, a widow by the name of Mrs Alice Drablow, who lived on her own in the solitary Eel Marsh House. Kipps is requested not only to represent the firm at the funeral, but to sort through Mrs Drablow’s papers, which means that he has to spend some time at Eel Marsh. Bit by bit, he discovers why the townspeople seem to shudder at any mention of the house or its occupants, as well as just who the spectral-looking woman in black he saw at the funeral is, and what exactly happened at the house in the past.

What makes The Woman in Black stand out is most of all its atmosphere. Susan Hill’s writing is extremely evocative, and I know that the mood and the imagery of the story will stay with me for a very long time even, if I forget some of the details of the plot. Take, for example, this wonderful description of a November fog:

Fog was outdoors, hanging over the ricer, creeping in and out of alleyways and passages, swirling thickly between the bare trees of all the parks and gardens of the city, and indoors, too, seething through cracks and crannies like sour breath, gaining a sly entrance at every opening of a door. It was a yellow fog, a filthy, evil-smelling fog, a fog that chocked and blinded, smeared and stained. Groping their way blindly across roads, men and women took their lives in their hands, stumbling along the pavements, they clutched a railings and at one another, for guidance.
Sounds were deadened, shapes blurred. It was a fog that had come the day before, and did not seem inclined to go away and it had, I suppose, the quality of all such fogs – it was menacing and sinister, disguising the familiar world and confusing the people in it, as they were confused by having their eyes covered and being turned about, in a game of Blind Man’s Buff.

The story itself didn’t exactly scare me (and I say this with some regret), but there’s no denying that it is unsettling, especially the chilling coda. I think the reason why it didn’t have more of an impact on me is because in some ways it’s a fairly standard ghost story, in the sense that none of the things that happen were all that difficult to see coming. However, even as I write this I realise how unfair a comment it is, because that was probably not really the case when The Woman in Black was first published. I suspect that this is one of those stories whose popularity has made it become part of our collective set of narrative references, and as a result it no longer feels new even to readers encountering it for the first time. But even so, the superb writing and the tone are still more than enough to make it unique. And anyway, there is such a thing as overrating the immediate thrills provided by the element of surprise – The Woman in Black works in more subtle and ultimately more satisfying ways.

At first I was also slightly disappointed that we only ever get to see the woman in black herself from the outside, but then again, it would be very difficult to make this work as a ghost story if that weren’t the case. My initial disappointment was due to the fact that even when we get to the heart of the mystery that surrounds her, she remains a cipher, and a fairly stereotypical example of the embittered female spectre. But again, this is a somewhat unfair comment: the more I think about the story, the more I realise that even though it doesn’t dwell at length on what motivates this woman’s grief and rage, the chilling power of the story alone is enough to invite readers to think about the social structure that allowed something like this to happen.

I apologise for the vagueness, but spoilers prevent me from saying more. So I’ll wrap this up by saying that The Woman in Black was a very satisfying read, and the more I think about it, the more I like it.

Edmund Crispin’s Love Lies Bleeding is, as I mentioned, a different sort of book altogether: while Hill’s story is atmospheric and unsettling, this is a cosy and humorous sort of book. Love Lies Bleeding is one of Crispin’s Gervase Fen mysteries, which were written just after the end of WW2 (and yes, it was interesting to read a book from the same period Sarah Waters was writing about, and set in the same area too, so shortly after The Little Stranger). This is not the first of Crispin’s Fen mysteries, but it works perfectly as a stand alone and as an introduction to his work. Gervase Fen, by the way, is an Oxford Professor of English who does some amateur sleuthing in his spare time – and this alone should tell you a lot about what to expect from these books. They’re eccentric, slightly academic, a little absurd, and full of references to other literary works.

Love Lies Bleeding is set at Castrevenford, a boy’s boarding school in Warwickshire. As the school is preparing for the Speech Day ceremonies, several strange incidents take place: first, a student from a neighbouring girl’s school begins to act strangely, as if she had seem something that terrified her, which causes the headmistress to confer with the headmaster of Castrevenford. Secondly, someone breaks into a locked cupboard in the chemistry lab and steals and unknown quantity of an unspecified dangerous substance. Thirdly, the aforementioned girl, Brenda, disappears when returning home from school the following day. And finally, two members of the Castrevenford staff turn up dead.

This was a somewhat implausible but nevertheless very enjoyable mystery involving boarding school politics, intrigue, and the works of William Shakespeare. What I enjoyed the most was Crispin’s satirical tone – the humour put me in mind of Milne’s The Red House Mystery – and his tendency for metafictional one-liners.

If I have one complaint, it’s the fact that Crispin makes use of the off-putting suspense-inducing strategy of not letting readers in on secrets the characters already know. And as a consequence of this there’s the fact that there’s a bit of information dumping towards the end, when the whole of the mystery’s solution is exposed at one time rather than being gradually revealed. But considering how much fun I had with this book in general, those are minor complains. I can’t wait to get my hands on Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop.

They read it too:
The Woman in Black: Chasing Bawa, Melody’s Reading Corner, books i done read, A Book Sanctuary, cardigangirlverity, Book Gazing, Nonsuch Book, Savidge Reads, You Can Never Have Too Many Books, Paperback Reader

Love Lies Bleeding: Sadly I couldn’t find any other reviews.

Have I missed yours?

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No Name by Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins’ 1862 novel No Name tells the story of the Vanstone family, specifically of Norah and Magdalen, Mr and Mrs Vanstone’s daughters. You know as soon as the novel opens that their initial happy and prosperous home circumstances are going to change dramatically, but it’s not up to me to tell you how that happens. In fact, there isn’t very much I can tell you about the plot without ruining it to some extent – a common problem with even trying to summarise Victorian sensation novels. So instead, I’m going to devote the next paragraph to attempting to convince you really need to read No Name without saying too much about the story itself. Here it goes:

I’ll start by saying that whatever else No Name is – and it is, in my view, an extremely rich and insightful novel when it comes to gender roles and Victorian social and sexual mores – it’s also an absolutely fantastic read. There’s a fast-faced plot that constantly twists and turns and keeps you on the edge of your seat (believe me, the book doesn’t feel nearly as long as it actually is); there’s amazing suspense and unforgettable scenes galore; there are epistolary bits (always a plus); there are plenty of touches of Collins’ fabulous sense of humour; and there are unforgettable characters that very nearly rival his most memorable creation, Count Fosco. The battle of wits between Captain Wraggle, the “moral agriculturalist” and Mrs Lecount, a fearsome housekeeper (believe me, you do want to meet these two) was an absolute joy to read.

From this point on, I’ll have to include some spoilers if I want to discuss some of my favourite aspects of No Name in any detail. To be honest, this isn’t so much a novel of secrets as it is a novel of conspiracies, plots and intrigues (most of which, interestingly enough, would only be possible to execute in a now gone world; a world with far less surveillance than our own). The only big secret is revealed about a hundred and twenty pages into the novel (which, in a 740 pages chunkster, really is early on). Of course, the synopsis on the back cover of the book gives it away on the very first line, so if you care about spoilers do what I did and don’t read it until you have finished the book. But I’m really not comfortable giving it away myself, so consider yourselves warned. Spoilers begin now:

Despite some concessions to conventionality, the most obvious of all being the ending, No Name is a deeply subversive novel – one that explores social and personal possibilities that were seldom even mentioned, let alone discussed in any amount of detail at the time. Personally I didn’t find the ending disappointing, but possibly that’s mostly because I was expecting it. I was relieved that Collins didn’t kill Magdalen Vanstone, the most common end for supposedly troublesome or tainted women in Victorian novels, and instead simply had her be “saved” by the influence of a good man.

So yes, in the end she embraces respectability, and yes, her past conduct is overtly frowned upon, while her sister’s passivity and submission are rewarded – but this is only what happens at the very surface of things. Scratch it away, and there’s so much more to this story. No matter how things turn out, Wilkie Collins’ heroines are the Madgalens, the Rachels, the Marian Halcombe; not the Lauras or the Norahs whose passivity he seems to praise. The possibilities of female temperament and behaviour he acknowledges are revolutionary in the mere fact that he does acknowledge them – No Name and his other novels show us that there were other ways of being a Victorian woman; that there were Respectable Ladies who would not be patience and submissive, but would instead struggle against convention, refuse to become non-persons, feel angry and desperate, attempt to correct injustices and to make their own way into a deeply patriarchal world. As Virginia Blain so perfectly puts it in the introduction:

Clearly Collins had succeeded in touching some very sensitive nerves in his portrayal of Magdalen Vanstone. For the subversive, ‘sinful’ and lively side of his character, given so much space and animated with so much energy earlier in the novel, cannot be easily wiped out for the reader by a safe ‘moral’ conversion at the end. It is not in the superimposed black and white simplicities that out interest lies. Rather, it is in the detailed elaboration of an array of counterpointed similarities and contrasts between characters that the richest and most living parts of the novel take shape.

In the case of No Name, the right or wrong of Magdalen’s methods isn’t so much the point as is the fact that she does something. And this remains true no matter how much conventionality Wilkie Collins sprinkles on the surface of the story. Yes, his characters will often tut-tut them and say that women are or ought to be this or that – but there they are, Magdalen, Marian or Rachel, happily deviating from the established mould.

Another thing I liked was the fact that No Name is a novel of great seriousness and ethical complexity, even if it’s also full of schemers, tricksters and plotters. It’s a story about social and psychological motivations rather than one about pointless tricks, and Collins confuses the heroes and the villains to the point where you don’t quite know who to root for, or what kind of ending you’d like best. I have to say that my sympathy was with Magdalen at the whole time, even when she was at her most scheming, simply because of the sheer unfairness of the situation she was in. At the same time, however, I didn’t exactly want her to succeed, even for her own sake. But the important thing, and the thing Collins repeatedly draws attention to, is how easy it is to sympathise with her motivation if not with her methods. Her fury and her desperate desire to right the wrongs that befell her and her sister are absolutely legitimate.

And of course, there’s Wilkie Collins’ undisguised sympathy for the two daughters of the Vanstones, regardless of the circumstances of their birth; his outright criticism of the law that disinherited illegitimate children; his pooh-poohing of the general belief that not being legally married made a couple immoral or any less of a real couple; his validation of the anger Magdalen feels at being left destitute through circumstances that were in no way her fault. And all this in 1862. HEARTS, Wilkie Collins. Hearts.

Interesting bits (again, spoilers warning):

“No, Miss Garth, we must look facts as they are resolutely in the face. Mr. Vanstone’s daughters are Nobody’s Children; and the law leaves them helpless at their uncle’s mercy.”
“A cruel law, Mr. Pendril—a cruel law in a Christian country.”
“Cruel as it is, Miss Garth, it stands excused by a shocking peculiarity in this case. I am far from defending the law of England as it affects illegitimate offspring. On the contrary, I think it a disgrace to the nation. It visits the sins of the parents on the children; it encourages vice by depriving fathers and mothers of the strongest of all motives for making the atonement of marriage; and it claims to produce these two abominable results in the names of morality and religion. But it has no extraordinary oppression to answer for in the case of these unhappy girls. The more merciful and Christian law of other countries, which allows the marriage of the parents to make the children legitimate, has no mercy on these children. The accident of their father having been married, when he first met with their mother, has made them the outcasts of the whole social community; it has placed them out of the pale of the Civil Law of Europe. I tell you the hard truth—it is useless to disguise it. There is no hope, if we look back at the past: there may be hope, if we look on to the future. The best service which I can now render you is to shorten the period of your suspense. In less than an hour I shall be on my way back to London. Immediately on my arrival, I will ascertain the speediest means of communicating with Mr. Michael Vanstone; and will let you know the result. Sad as the position of the two sisters now is, we must look at it on its best side; we must not lose hope.”

“I know her, Mr. Vanstone! She is a nameless, homeless, friendless wretch. The law which takes care of you, the law which takes care of all legitimate children, casts her like carrion to the winds. It is your law—not hers. She only knows it as the instrument of a vile oppression, an insufferable wrong. The sense of that wrong haunts her like a possession of the devil. The resolution to right that wrong burns in her like fire. If that miserable girl was married and rich, with millions tomorrow, do you think she would move an inch from her purpose? I tell you she would resist, to the last breath in her body, the vile injustice which has struck at the helpless children, through the calamity of their father’s death! I tell you she would shrink from no means which a desperate woman can employ to force that closed hand of yours open, or die in the attempt!”

This one made me immensely sad, as it perfectly expresses the situation Magdalen and countless other Victorian women found themselves in:

“Do you know who I am? I am a respectable married woman, accountable for my actions to nobody under heaven but my husband. I have got a place in the world, and a name in the world, at last. Even the law, which is the friend of all you respectable people, has recognized my existence, and has become my friend too! The Archbishop of Canterbury gave me his license to be married, and the vicar of Aldborough performed the service. If I found your spies following me in the street, and if I chose to claim protection from them, the law would acknowledge my claim. You forget what wonders my wickedness has done for me. It has made Nobody’s Child Somebody’s Wife.”

Other points of view: books i done read, Moored at Sea, Savidge Reads, Tales from the Reading Room

(Have I missed yours?)

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The Sunday Salon - Three Classic Ghost Stories

For today’s Sunday-Salon-meets-Short-Story-Peril post, I want to tell you about three ghost stories by early-twentieth century women writers we don’t normally associate with horror or Gothic Fiction: Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Bowen and E. Nesbit. One of my goals for the RIP challenge this year was to read one or two complete short story collections and anthologies; unfortunately circumstances made this difficult, but I decided to take advantage of the fact that the Internet is a treasure trove of classic literature to at least read some individual stories online.

I picked Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover” (PDF link) because Sarah Waters listed it as one of her top ten favourite ghost stories – and I’m sure I don’t need to explain why I’d read anything Sarah Waters told me to. “The Demon Lover” is set in London during the Blitz, and it tells of a woman’s return to the home she left behind when the bombings began. Mrs Drover returns to London in the middle of WW2 to collect some more of her family’s personal belongings; the ghostly aspect of the story, however, goes all the way back to WW1, to Kathleen Drover’s youth and to the fiancée who never returned from the Great War.

The story begins with a letter Mrs Drover finds waiting for her on the table of her house - but I don’t want to tell you much more about how events unfold, as this is such a short tale and therefore so easy to spoil. What I’ll say instead is that Sarah Waters is absolutely right: the most powerful and unsettling thing about this story is not the supernatural element per se, but rather how well it captures the atmosphere of wartime London: the emptiness and the silence, the eeriness of suspended lives, the daily uncertainty, the close brushes with death. Needless to say, “The Demon Lover” made me look forward to reading one of Elizabeth Bowen’s novels all the more.

A favourite passage:

The rain had stopped; the pavements steamily shone as Mrs. Drover let herself out by inches from her own front door into the empty street. The unoccupied houses opposite continued to meet her look with their damaged stare. Making toward the thoroughfare and the taxi, she tried not to keep looking behind. Indeed, the silence was so intense—one of those creeks of London silence exaggerated this summer by the damage of war—that no tread could have gained on hers unheard. Where her street debouched on the square where people went on living, she grew conscious of, and checked, her unnatural pace. Across the open end of the square, two buses impassively passed each other: Women, a perambulator, cyclists, a man wheeling a barrow signalized, once again, the ordinary flow of life.

Also, make sure you check out Mel U’s wonderful and detailed review of this story at The Reading Life.

Edith Wharton’s “The Eyes” begins, like other classic ghost stories such as The Turn of the Screw or The Woman in Black, with a group of people telling ghost stories as a way to pass the evening. As is customary in stories with this setup, one of the group turns out to have had a personal encounter with the supernatural. Mr Andrew Culwin tells the story of his nightly encounters with an eerie pair of eyes, and slowly his friends realise that this story is having a strange effect on another member of the party…

Naturally I don’t want to give too much away about the story itself, but I can say that Wharton takes a fairly common Gothic trope and turns it into a psychological story about personal relationships, communication, and the effects of subtly patronising others by doing what you think is best for them, or telling them what you think they want to hear. It’s interesting that Mr Culwin never does seem to realise why the supernatural pair of eyes visits him, even though this is obvious to readers. I suppose this was Edith Wharton’s way of keeping the story from becoming didactic or heavy-handed - and it works.

I regret not having had time to read a collection of Wharton’s ghost stories for the RIP challenge as I’d planned, but I suppose that any time is a good time for ghost stories, especially ones as well-written and layered as “The Eyes”.

Finally, there’s “The Power of Darkness” by E. Nesbit, which was my favourite of the three (not that I didn’t love them all). “The Power of Darkness” is set in Paris at the turn of the century, and it concerns two British art students who make a bet. The two young men, Edward and Vincent, are in love with the same girl, and when Vincent perceives that she favours Edward, he comes up with a plan to turn his old schoolfellow’s fear of darkness against him and thus gave his revenge. Only the plan doesn’t go exactly as expected, and in the end—well, again I won’t tell you what happens then.

As with the previous two stories, I absolutely loved the setting of “The Power of Darkness”. The cherry on top of this one was all the early twentieth-century slang: I don’t know why it is that a profusion of dash- its and don’t-you-knows and whats-at-the-ends-of-sentences never fails to charm me, but there you go. Most of all, though, I loved what “The Power of Darkness” had to said about fear, the notion of “cowardice”, and how these are ingrained in mainstream definitions of masculinity; as well as about the dangers of underestimating the human imagination and the power of suggestion. I’m determined to get my hands on this Wordsworth Classics of the Supernatural edition of Nesbit’s ghost stories as soon as possible.

A teaser:

The silence was intense, but it was a silence thick with rustlings and breathings, and movements that his ear, strained to the uttermost, could just not hear. Suppose, as Edward had said, when all the lights were out these things did move. A corpse was a thing that had moved, given a certain condition—life. What if there were a condition, given which these things could move? What if such conditions were present now? What if all of them—Napoleon, yellow-white from his death sleep; the beasts from the amphitheatre, gore dribbling from their jaws; that soldier with the legs—all were drawing near to him in this full silence? Those death masks of Robespierre and Mirabeau—they might float down through the darkness till they touched his face. That head of Mme de Lamballe on the pike might be thrust at him from behind the pillar. The silence throbbed with sounds that could not quite be heard.

Have you read any of these stories? As always, if so I’d absolutely love to hear your thoughts. And if not, have you read any good ghost stories lately? What are some of your all-time favourites?

Also: as per Neil Gaimans’ command, I wanted to give someone a scary book this Halloween. But instead of doing a traditional random giveaway, I thought I’d just give one to the first person who leaves me a comment telling me which book they want. The only thing I ask is that you promise to give someone else a scary book in return - it doesn’t have to be on your blog; it can be to a friend, family member, acquaintance, etc. And it doesn’t need to be a brand new book, of course. You don’t need to tell me which book you’re giving away yourself, but as a shameless book snooper I’m always interested. Happy spooky reading this week, everyone!

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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aidanmorgan/3072704794/lightbox/

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The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

Back in early September, when I posted my list of potential reads for this year’s RIP reading challenge, many of you express your shock at hearing my say I had yet to read any Agatha Christie at all. Well, I’m happy to report that this particular gap in my reading has now been amended, and that my first experience with Dame Agatha was quite a success.

The Murder at the Vicarage is the first of the Miss Maple mysteries, and it’s set in the famous village of St. Mary’s Mead. The story is narrated by the vicar, Leonard Clement, but the mystery is of course solved by none other than Miss Maple herself, the elderly single lady whose perceptiveness and quick intellect nothing escapes. The murder the title refers to is that of Colonel Protheroe, who turns up dead at the Vicar’s study one day. The fact that the Colonel was by far the least popular inhabited of St. Mary’s Mead makes the case all the more complex, as there’s no lack of potential suspect with a motive to want him dead. But little by little, the list narrows down – until, as Sherlock Holmes would put it, the remaining hypothesis, however improbable, proves to be the only possible explanation.

I’ve gone on and on before about how a reader’s expectations of a book can very easily ruin the reading experience, even if there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with the book per se. But in the case of The Murder at the Vicarage, I’m happy to say, my expectations helped me enjoy it. Many of you had warned me in the past not to expect from Christie the same kind of storytelling I get from, say, Dorothy L. Sayers, and as a result I approach this novel counting on little more than wit, intrigue and masterful plotting. I got that indeed, with the added bonus that St. Mary’s Mead is a fascinating setting, full of intriguing characters that give Christie ample opportunity to comment on small town life.

I was particularly interested in the way Christie’s writing combines all social stereotypes of many kinds with subtle attempts to subvert them: on the one hand, you have character types such as the silly wife, the clueless policemen, the spoiled rich young lady, the unmarried elderly woman with too much time on her hands, and so on (and yes, I did find the female characters far more formulaic than the male ones). You also find characters making the type of class and gender generalisations that authors like Sayers tend to avoid; but then again, none of this necessarily means that the story itself endorses them. Sometimes it actually discreetly subverts them, as the first passage I share at the end of this post illustrates.

Miss Marple herself is a character who perfectly embodies all these tensions and contradictions. If in many ways she’s a stereotypical elderly busybody, she’s also a lot more intelligent than anyone gives her credit for. She repeatedly gets the better of those who dismiss or patronise her either because of her gender or because of her age. The fact that she’s the one to solve the mystery – drawing, as she says, from the extensive knowledge of human nature she’s acquired over the course of her long life – is a way of acknowledging forms of wisdom and competence that tend to be marginalised. And this, as you can imagine, made me very happy indeed.

While I wouldn’t exactly describe what Christie does as social writing, I also wouldn’t call it superficial, nor would I say that she’s entirely disengaged with the social issues of her time. That’s the interesting thing about literature, really: it doesn’t necessarily matter whether or not an author sets out to engage with certain themes, as the mere fact that they live in a certain time and place makes it almost impossible for its social, political and ideological questions not to be present in the writing in some shape or form.

And let us not forget the fact that The Murder at the Vicarage is a whole lot of fun to read. The plot absorbed me from the very first chapter, and I very much enjoyed my first encounter with Christie’s legendary wit. I loved her sense of humour, her subtle irony, and the fact that she never hesitates to gently mock her characters – even the first-person narrator himself, which is not an easy thing to pull off.

I’m wondering where to go next with Christie: I want to read the Poirot stories at some point, of course, but I think that for now I’m going to stick to Miss Marple, as I’m really interested in spending more time in St. Mary’s Mead. Should I continue to read them in order and get The Body in the Library next?

Interesting bits:

‘You can’t take any notice of what old ladies say. When they’ve seen something curious, and are waiting all eager like, why, time simply flies for them. And anyway, no lady knows anything about time.’
I often wonder why the whole world is so prone to generalise. Generalisations are seldom if ever true and are usually utterly inaccurate. I have a poor sense of time myself (hence the keeping of my clock fast) and Miss Marple, I should say, has a very acute one. Her clocks keep time to the minute and she herself is rigidly punctual on very occasion.

I found my wife and Miss Marple with their heads together.
‘We’ve been discussing all sorts of possibilities,’ said Griselda. ‘I wish you’d solve the case, Miss Marple, like you did the time Miss Wetherby’s gill of picked shrimps disappeared. And all because it reminded you of something quite different about a stack of coals.’
‘You’re laughing, my dear,’ said Miss Marple, ‘but after all, that is a very sound way of arriving at the truth. It’s really what people call intuition and make such a fuss about. Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can’t do that because it has had so little experience. But a grown-up person knows the word because they’ve seen it often before. You catch my meaning, Vicar?’

They read it too:
Just a (Reading) Fool, A library is a hospital for the mind, Notes from the North

(Yours?)

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Victorian Feminists by Barbara Caine

Barbara Caine’s Victorian Feminists is perhaps best described as an intellectual group biography. The Victorian feminists the title refers to are Emily Davies, the founder of Girton college; Frances Power Cobbe, a suffragette, animal rights advocate and activist, who particularly called attention to domestic violence; Josephine Butler, who fought for the welfare of prostitutes and for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act; and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.

More than in these women’s work itself, Barbara Caine is interested in how they became feminists – specifically in how their personal experience of being Victorian women and facing all the limitations that society imposed on female behaviour at the time impacted their thinking in general and their views on gender in particular. That does mean that there’s some room in the book for conjecture, but worry not: it’s all sensible, plausible, and well-grounded on the known facts of these women’s lives.

I could tell by the introduction alone that I was going to really enjoy this book. You see, Barbara Caine is interested in the Victorians for the exact same reasons as I am. She says:

…it does seem to me that Victorian feminists faced dilemmas which continue to trouble contemporary feminists – and that their articulation and discussion of these dilemmas have a continuing relevance and importance.

EXACTLY. Furthermore, she says that one of her goals in writing Victorian Feminists was to show the “range and complexity of feminist activities and the diversity of approach and political commitment even amongst the leading figures of the English women’s movement.” I love how she emphasises the diversity of these women’s ideals and beliefs - Caine is always careful to point out that the term “feminism” was not and continues not to be a monolith. She also problematize its retrospective use; however, she differs from the historians who refuse to apply it to the past altogether in that she does find it useful to trace the history of similar ideas and common goals regarding gender equality.

This is a view very similar to my own: the more I read about the history of feminism, the more aware I become that, as with everything else, things are rarely a matter of either/or. People from previous centuries weren’t either feminists in a contemporary sense or complete misogynists, which is why I have a slight tendency to roll my eyes when people go, “but Mary Wollstonecraft wasn’t really a feminist! She never said blah blah blah….” Yes, I do know that there’s a lot that she never said, and I completely respect those who disagree with me or with Caine when it comes to the retrospective use of the term. What I’m less fond of is a dismissal of how radical she and other women truly were for their time; of just what they had to surpass to voice ideas that seem completely obvious to us today.

The four women Barbara Caine writes about were women who did a lot to begin to correct the gigantic gender power imbalance of their time. At the same time, they held beliefs that were complex, nuanced, and not always fair when viewed through the eyes of contemporary readers. These should by all means be discussed, of course, but the fact that they don’t necessarily fit the modern definition of a feminist (whichever one you decide to use) doesn’t lessen the importance of their role.

One of the things Caine writes about in some detail is how these women reconciled their feminism with either liberal or conservative political beliefs – a subject that is definitely still relevant today. Davies and Cobbe were vehement conservatives; Fawcett and Butler were liberals. On the other hand, Davies was what we would today call an equality feminist (she believed that women and men’s common humanity largely surpassed their socially acquired gender differences), whereas the others, and particularly Butler, were adepts of the dominant Victorian equivalent of the Men-are-from-Mars-and-Women-are-from-Venus philosophy.

I could certainly identify with Davies’ equality feminism, but not so much with her social conservatism and her strict adherence to class privilege. And if Butler’s defiance of the silence surrounding female sexuality and her dismissal of class boundaries earned my admiration, her belief that men and women were practically members of different species was harder to swallow. But this was actually part of the reason why I so appreciated Victorian Feminists: the wide range of these women’s ideas was a much needed reminder that people who believe very different things can work together to achieve common goals (and I say this as someone who admittedly has some trouble seeing difference feminism as anything other than harmful).

Victorian Feminists provides a context for all those Victorian novels I so enjoy, and also does a great job of contextualising the commonly pointed out pitfalls of early feminism – namely, most of its adherents’ stance on class and on sexuality. By “contextualise” I of course don’t mean “make excuses for”; I mean that Caine makes an effort to understand why these women’s ideas were revolutionary up to a certain point but did not go further, and why many of them remained blind to other forms of injustice while being so aware of sexism.

Victorian Feminists is an excellent read: passionate, informative and detailed, scholarly but never dry, and a good reminder of just how much we owe to those who first began to break the mould of what a woman was allowed to be.

Have I mentioned how happy it makes me to have access to an academic library again? SO MANY BOOKS, all at my disposal. Whee.

Interesting bits:

Had these mid-Victorian feminists not accepted and addressed the ideal of womanhood articulated in Victorian domestic ideology, they would not have been able to speak to their contemporaries at all. Once they addressed it, it was inevitable that the moral overtones of this ideal would become centrally involved in their feminist discourse. Their example should serve not to warn us against the Victorians, but rather to sensitize us to the extent to which twentieth-century feminism has accepted and been organised around the agendas which have dominated the societies or the circles from which feminists have come – rather than one which feminists created for themselves. It is these shifts in agenda which allow us to explore and to understand the history of feminism and its relationship to the various societies in which it has developed.

Davies’ insistence on the similarities between men and women ensured that one of her major targets was prevailing Victorian views on sexual difference. (…) Davies was at one with most other feminists in stressing the ignorance and prejudice and irrationality that went into many accepted beliefs about the intellectual differences between the sexes. But she stood almost alone in her refusal to enter into any kind of adulation of conventional notions of femininity or of motherhood, and in her attempt to bypass or to play down the whole question of the ways in which women differed from men. Accurate knowledge on these questions was unavailable, in her view, and until such time as it was available the matter should be allowed to rest.

Class was the only basis women like Cobbe had for asserting their superiority over particular groups of men whose claim to authority was based on knowledge and professions from which women were excluded. Emily Davies refrained from replying to the medical attacks made on higher education for women, much though they angered her, because she knew that all she had at her disposal was her own beliefs. Her strategy was to have Elizabeth Garrett Anderson reply, thus inserting into the debate a contrary medical opinion. Cobbe, by contrast, entered the debate herself, making use of her experiences and the knowledge she gained from the antivivisection campaign, but framing all of this with the assumption of an authority gained through her privileged social position.

(Have you posted about this book too? If so, let me know and I’ll be glad to add your link here.)

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The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

The Little Stranger is a historical Gothic novel set in a decayed old mansion in Warwickshire in the late 1940’s. The narrator is one Dr. Faraday, a country doctor whose mother had once upon a time been a nursemaid at Hundreds Hall. Faraday renews his acquaintance with the old house and its inhabitants when one day he’s called by the Ayres family to see to their maid, Betty, who’s in bed with a bellyache. The doctor ends up befriending old Mrs Ayres and her daughter, Caroline; and more or less against the will of Roderick Ayres, begins to treat him for the muscle pains in his leg which result for a war injury.

The Ayres’ dire financial circumstances have left them isolated, and so it’s on the family doctor that they come to rely when increasingly strange things begin to happen at Hundreds Hall. Roderick is the first to be affected by them, but readers can tell from the very beginning that no one, not even our narrator, is going to be left untouched by what’s going on.

Earlier this year, I read The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey, a post-WW2 mystery novel in response to which Sarah Waters wrote The Little Stranger. I found that having Tey’s work in mind when I read this – especially her portrayal of the changes in the class system that followed the end of the war – made Sarah Waters’ novel all the more enjoyable.

The Little Stranger is a much more ambiguous novel than Tey’s, of course, and purposefully so. As is customary with Sarah Waters’ writing, nothing is clear cut; subtlety reigns and there are no well-defined sides. I don’t necessarily mean this in relation to the what-exactly-was-going-on aspect of the story (on which more later), but mostly in regards to how it portrays a quickly changing world. Perhaps the mindset with which I approached The Little Stranger is somewhat responsible, but from the very beginning the historical aspect interested me a lot more than the ghost story itself – not, mind you, that the two are at all easy to separate.

I love the fact that Waters writes about the personal consequences of the breakdown of the class system for the privileged and the unprivileged alike. It’s interesting to think about the role a man like Faraday played in maintaining the status quo himself, even though he clearly did not belong to the upper class himself. His fear and instinctive dislike of the National Health Service that was to come is perhaps a good example of his stance. Even though he didn’t belong with the Ayres, Faraday didn’t really want them, or people like them and the way of life they represented, to disappear completely. It’s difficult to write about this – the complicit role individuals or groups of people sometimes play in social systems that oppress them – without coming across like you’re blaming the victims, but if anyone can do it with sensitivity and insight, it’s Sarah Waters.

The Little Stranger isn’t really a novel that takes sides in a class war; in fact, the most interesting thing is that it doesn’t really present the social changes it portrays as a war at all. What Waters does is write about people, all of them complex, occasionally contradictory, and fully human, and about what it felt like to be them. Despite all her money and privilege, things were difficult for someone like Caroline Ayres, an educated and intelligent woman who, after being allowed to get out there and do something during the war, was forced back into a secluded existence serving her family and the estate once WW2 ended. Likewise, things were difficult for Betty the fourteen-year-old parlour maid (and Waters does of course draw attention to her age), or to someone like Faraday, stuck between classes and unsure of his place in the world.

What The Little Strange is, then, is a novel about misunderstandings and miscommunication between people and social classes; a novel about vertiginous change; and a novel about the very human fear and sense of misplacement that inevitably follows it. There’s so much bubbling under the surface here: the status difference between the Ayres and Dr. Faraday and the unacknowledged feelings of awkwardness and resentment that surround it; Roderick’s wartime experiences and his unnamed post-traumatic stress disorder; Mrs Ayres grief over the loss of her first child, the boredom and emptiness of Caroline’s post-war existence; and so on. All of these issues are bottled up and ready to explode, and they largely contribute to the suffocating and unsettling atmosphere that permeates the novel.

I was very impressed with Waters’ use of point of view in The Little Stranger: Faraday’s distance from some of the events he retells could easily have taken away from the story, but in fact it actually added to it. The deep sense of nostalgia and relish in that same nostalgia that accompany Faraday’s narration grabbed me immediately. I worry that by calling him an unreliable narrator I might be saying too much, but then again, this is a novel of lingering questions; not of twists or sudden revelations. The gap between what Faraday tells us and what we’re allowed to see for ourselves is a large part of what gives The Little Stranger its power.

As for the matter of the ending, or What Really Happened: though I’m a stubborn sceptic, as I read on I found myself favouring a supernatural explanation of events more and more, simply because this was the explanation that Faraday did not favour. His dismissal of Caroline’s thoughts in particular, his insistence on her exhaustion and incompetence, put me in mind of John, the narrator’s husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Needless to say, I was very much inclined to disagree with anything he said. Which brings me to yet another source of unspoken tensions, one to which Waters devotes a lot of attention: the interplay between class and gender privilege, and how this affected the power dynamics in Caroline and the doctor’s relationship.

I find that I’m fairly comfortable with the novel’s somewhat ambiguous ending, as the questions it raised interested me more than any definitive answers ever could. I wrote “somewhat ambiguous”, by the way, because while I think that the text points towards one possibility more insistently than towards any others, it doesn’t completely close off alternative interpretations – and that, of course, only adds to its richness.

The Little Stranger didn’t exactly scare me, but that has more to do with me than with Sarah Waters’ writing, which is incredibly evocative and atmospheric. And I have to admit that the more I think about the story, the more unsettling I find it – and mostly for reasons that have little to do with the supernatural. I imagine that it takes a lot to successfully orchestrate a novel like this; a novel that simultaneously works on so many levels; a novel that implies so much without ever becoming heavy-handed or overdone. But then again, I always suspected Sarah Waters of being a genius. The Little Stranger is only further proof.

Interesting bits (spoilers in the second one):

Caroline, setting down a bowl of tea for Gyp to lap at, said, ‘Poor Betty. Not a natural parlourmaid.’
But her mother spoke indulgently. ‘Oh, we must give her more time. I always remember my great-aunt saying that a well-run house was like an oyster. Girls come to one as specks of grit, you see; ten years later, they leave one as pearls.’
She was addressing me as well as Caroline—clearly forgetting, for the moment, that my own mother had been one of the specks of grit her great-aunt had meant. I think even Caroline had forgotten it. They both sat comfortably in their chairs, enjoying the tea and the cake that Betty had prepared for them, then awkwardly carried for them, then cut and served for them, from plates and cups which, at the ring of a bell, she would soon remove and wash… I said nothing this time, however. I sat enjoying the tea and cake, too. For if the house, like an oyster, was at work on Betty, fining and disguising her with layer after minuscule layer of its own particular charm, then I suppose it had already begun a similar process on me.

I said, ‘My darling, I—I think you’re tired.’
A look of dismay came into her face. She moved her shoulder to shrug off my grip. My hand slid down her arm and caught at my grip instead. I said, ‘With everything that’s happened, it’s not surprising you’re confused. Your mother’s death—‘
‘But I’m not a bit confused,’ she said. ‘My mother’s death was what made me begin to see things clearly. To think about what I wanted, and didn’t want. To think about what you want, too.’
I tugged at her hand. ‘Come back to the sofa, will you? You’re tired.’
She pulled herself free, and her voice hardened. ‘Stop saying that! It’s all you ever say to me! Sometimes—sometimes I think you want to keep me tired, that you like me to be tired.’

They read it too: Capricious Reader, Caribousmom, Shelf Love, Regular Rumination, Book Gazing, Paperback Reader, Presenting Lenore, Back to Books, Savidge Reads, Jenny’s Books, Rhinoa’s Ramblings, She Reads Novels, somewhere i have never travelled, Page 247, Serendipity, You’ve GOTTA Read This, Stella Matutina, once, oh marvellous once, Reviews by Lola

(I’m sure I have missed many – let me know if yours is one of them, and as always I’ll be glad to add it.)

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The Sunday Salon – Catching Up

I don’t want to return to blogging with a huge backlog of books to post about, so I thought I’d try something a little different and attempt to sum up my thoughts on what I read in September in a paragraph or two. Some of these were actually excellent reads, and I wish I could tell you about them at length, but it’s probably about time I give this whole brevity thing a try anyway.

The first book is I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett, the fourth and final book in the Tiffany Aching series, and what can I say other than that it’s Sir Terry in absolutely top form? I loved it for the same reasons why I loved The Wee Free Men and the other Tiffany books: it’s sad and serious and complex and thoughtful and immensely wise; it’s about small communities and stories and human nature and being a girl and the difficulties of growing up. Also, I had a complete fangirl moment when a beloved character from an early Discworld book made an appearance, but I won’t say more lest I spoil it for any of you. For more on Sir Terry and his awesomeness, make sure you read this full review over at Magical and Colloquial.

Sadly, my experience with Molly Keane’s 1934 novel Devoted Ladies wasn’t nearly as good. Possibly the problem was one of timing: this is a harsh and unkind novel, which I realise s part of the point, but at such a stressful time of my life, I needed something a little more comforting. Devoted Ladies tells the story of a difficult friendship between two single women in the 1930’s, and what alienated me the most wasn’t really the fact that they’re enemies in the guise of friends. No, the unkindness I was talking about has a lot more to do with the novel’s tone and with how the narrator writes about the characters. You get the feeling that s/he doesn’t much like them at all, and as a result, in the end I didn’t much care what happened to any of them. Possibly I’ll return to this book at another time; Molly Keane is quite a popular Virago author, so I can’t shake off the feeling that there must be something here that I missed. But right now I sadly couldn’t get on with it at all.

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers, the very first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, was fortunately an absolute delight. It wasn’t nearly as good as the Harriet Vane books, especially when it comes to character development and social insight (I’m SO grateful that so many of you told me to start with those, causing me to realise right away everything Sayers was capable of), but plot-wise it’s an immensely satisfying novel. And interestingly enough, it really does owe a lot to E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case. I knew he’d been an influence on Sayers, but I hadn’t realised that her first novel echoed him quite so directly. Having read Bentley’s mystery recently made the ending of this one quite easy to figure out, but that didn’t really spoil the fun. In addition to that, the language was charming as usual, and I loved all the bits about Lord Peter’s WWI experiences and his and Bunter’s relationship. So: perhaps not an ideal introduction to Sayers, as it doesn’t quite reveal the depth of her work, but a wonderful novel nonetheless. Here’s a full review by Memory at Stella Matutina.

Bog Child by Siobhan Down was the 2009 Carnegie Medal winner, and while I can’t say I liked it more than The Knife of Never Letting Go (then again, few books have that honour), I can see why it won. It’s a historical novel set in Northern Ireland in the 1980’s, and it’s an incredibly moving and powerful story. This is the book I wish the most I were reviewing in detail – not because I didn’t like Whose Body or I Shall Wear Midnight just as much, but because the reasons why I loved them aren’t very different from the reasons why I normally love Sayers and Pratchett, whereas this is unlike anything I’ve read before. Shiobhan Down (who sadly passed away even before the book was published) writers about “the troubles” in Ireland, about Iron Age history, about archaeology, about growing up, about first love, about social pressure and expectations, about ethical conundrums, about idealism, about freedom, about prejudice, and about hunger strikers and what their families went through – all with amazing sensibility and insight. For a full review, please read this one over at Claire’s blog. (Or this one a Beth Fish's.)

The Squirrel Machine by Hans Rickheit is a slightly steampunkish and very surreal graphic novel set in an alternative New England in the late 19t century. It’s about two brothers with a flair for inventions, about the imagination, about sexuality, about small town life, and I’m not even sure what else. Rickheit’s storytelling is largely visual (even more so than usual in comics, I mean), and the result is one of the strangest graphic novels I have encountered to date. The story grows eerier and eerier as it progresses, sometimes verging on the grotesque, but not necessarily in a negative way. I’m not sure what else to say, except that I’d love to have someone to discuss this with, especially the bits where I can’t quite decide what Rickheit was going for - so if you’re thinking of picking it up, please please do.


Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo is also YA historical fiction, this time set right before and during WWI. It follows two brothers, Thomas and Charles Peaceful, straight from a poor but idyllic countryside childhood and young adulthood to the trenches of Ypres. The story focuses on one specific horrific detail of WWI, only I can’t tell you about it without giving too much away. Sadly I also can’t tell you about the clever thing Morpurgo does with point of view, except to say that I had an “…oh” moment at the end that made the whole thing even more moving in retrospect (and by the time I was already in tears). Back in August I read Morpurgo’s The Kites are Flying, which is about a journalist’s encounter with a small boy from Palestine (thank you again for the book, Darren!), and now I’m starting to think that Morpurgo might be as wonderful a discovery as David Almond was last year.

Skim by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki is a graphic novel that has been quite widely reviewed all over the blogging world, so I’ll keep this brief: yes, I enjoyed it every bit as much as everyone else. It’s a smart and sensitive story about being a teenager, being gay, falling in love for the first time, dealing with loneliness and depression, and struggling to be yourself. Possibly this makes it sound like so many other glbtq coming-of-age stories, but trust me, you’ll want to meet Skim. But I’d better shut up now and just point you towards Aarti or Mee’s excellent posts on this book.


Finally, I read Permanent Rose by Hilary McKay, the third book in the charming and wonderful Casson family series. Permanent Rose is not quite as good as the absolutely perfect Indigo’s Star, but I did enjoy it as much Saffy’s Angel, the first book in the series. The characters are as lovably eccentric as ever, the mix of humour and moving moments is pitch perfect, and there’s more than enough here to appeal to children and adults alike. I suppose I should also say that even though McKay makes an effort to contextualise the story, it’s probably a good idea to read these in order. And I’d better wrap this up now before the urge to use lots and lots of exclamation marks and beg you all to read Hilary McKay TODAY (yes, IN CAPS) overcomes me.

That’s about it. There are a few other September books I want to tell you about at length, namely The Little Stranger and The Murder at the Vicarage, but I’ll leave those for next week. As usual, if you’ve read any of these, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have a great Sunday, everyone!

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North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell’s famous novel tells the story of Margaret Hale, a young woman who has spent most of her life in the comfort and beauty of a Hampshire village. But Margaret’s life takes a complete turn when, for reasons that have to do with his faith, her father gives up his livelihood as a churchman and moves the family to the industrial northern town of Milton (a fictional place heavily based on Manchester). The change is quite a shock to Margaret, as well as to her mother, Mrs Hale. Early in the novel, Margaret expresses her dislike of all “shoppy people”; and in Milton-Northern, even the most prosperous inhabitants are people who made their fortune by way of trade and are therefore tainted in her eyes. Frequent contact with them, especially with her father’s friend Mr Thornton, cannot but lead Margaret to see their humanity. But as Gaskell so wisely shows us, overcoming the gulf of class, prejudice and miscommunication is no easy task.

As I effusively told you in my return post the other day, North and South made a complete Gaskell convert out of me. What I loved the most about it was something that might perhaps sound trivial, but which really stood out to me: the fact that more than anything else, this is a coming-of-age story; a story in which our heroine comes a long, long way. And I would perhaps argue that despite North and South being a love story on the surface, this side of it is in fact secondary to the maturity, humanity, and increased capacity to sympathise with others that Margaret acquires. Possibility this comparison will make sense to no one but myself, but in this regard North and South quite reminded me of Austen’s Northanger Abbey.

A lot happens to the Hales in the time period North and South covers, and if there might be a touch of the melodramatic about some of the novel’s scenes, I for one absolutely didn’t mind. One of the reasons for this is of course the fact that dramatic or not, this is an absolutely excellent story. As for what happens at the end (cue in my awkward attempts to discuss the ending without giving it away), as I was saying, for me it’s secondary to everything Margaret goes through over the year the novel covers – and even more importantly, it’s secondary to how these events change her.

Victorian novels are frequently criticised for almost invariably wrapping up the lives of their female protagonists with either a marriage or a death, which is a fair enough point (remind me to tell you, however, what Mary Elizabeth Braddon makes of this particular convention when I discuss Aurora Floyd). North and South doesn’t rewrite these rules, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be a lot more to Margaret’s story than becoming a wife if you read between the lines. More than a romance, this is a story in which a young woman’s psychological and emotional growth and her dealings with some of the main social issues of her time take the centre stage. (And lest it sound like I’m completely dismissing the love story, let me clarify that I also loved it.)

I find Elizabeth Gaskell particularly good at that mix of conventionality and subtle defiance I so love about the Victorians. She has the ability to follow the norms while simultaneously acknowledging possibilities of identity other than those that fit the mould of mid-Victorian society. There’s a lot she doesn’t acknowledge, of course, but I also think there’s a lot about North and South that will appeal to a modern reader’s sensibility.

I haven’t even started to discuss the social side of North and South, which is of course not in any way secondary to Margaret’s story. Margaret gets caught up between the poor workers of Milton-Northern and the rich manufacturers who, to put it in Marxist terms, own the means of production. She learns to conciliate her knowledge of the grievances these two groups of people have against each other with her personal knowledge of members of both, which forces her to see them as fully human. Gaskell’s not too subtle point is of course that everyone would gain by doing the same. As the following passage tell us, it’s only when Margaret begins to get to know the people of Milton and to see them as human beings that the town ceases to seem so unwelcome to her:

Margaret went home, wondering at her new friends, and smiling at the man’s insight into what had been passing in her mind. From that day Milton became a brighter place to her. It was not the long, bleak sunny days of spring, nor yet was it that time was reconciling her to the town of her habitation. It was that in it she had found a human interest.

Which brings me to my other favourite thing: I loved North and South because it’s a deeply sympathetic book. It’s a book more concerned with people than with class strife – and I disagree with the view that it’s naïve and sentimental of Gaskell to approach the topic of social injustice from such a personal angle. Of course that putting an end to social inequality has to involve (then and now) structural changes in society rather than mere patchwork solutions. But to me, encouraging people to get to know each other, to see the humanity of those they perceive as their adversaries, can’t ever be unhelpful. Possibly I’m somewhat naïve and sentimental myself, but if so, I’ll take comfort in the fact that I’m in very good company.

Gaskell clearly goes out of her way to emphasise dialogue, empathy and understanding as alternatives to aggressive conflicts; to demonstrate that standing up for what you believe in and defying authority when necessary doesn’t have to exclude knowing when to sit down and listen. In the introduction to my edition of North and South, Patty Stoneman ties this in with gender and says:

…the novel works hard not only to bring the opposed sides into dialogue, but also to expose the way in which aggression has been build into our concept of masculinity, so that both Thornton, the master, and Higgins, the worker, have ‘tenderness in [their] heart’ towards children and weaker comrades, neither of them is initially willing to break the code of masculine toughness which forbids them to reveal this ‘weakness’. Margaret’s great achievement in the novel (and thus Gaskell’s) is to show that concern for suffering does not undermine strength.

Which I think is an absolutely brilliant point.

Favourite passages:

The evening, without employment, passed in a room high up in an hotel, was long and heavy. Mr. Hale went out to his bookseller's, and to call on a friend or two. Every one they saw, either in the house or out in the streets, appeared hurrying to some appointment, expected by, or expecting somebody. They alone seemed strange and friendless, and desolate. Yet within a mile, Margaret knew of house after house, where she for her own sake, and her mother for her aunt Shaw's, would be welcomed, if they came in gladness, or even in peace of mind. If they came sorrowing, and wanting sympathy in a complicated trouble like the present, then they would be felt as a shadow in all these houses of intimate acquaintances, not friends. London life is too whirling and full to admit of even an hour of that deep silence of feeling which the friends of Job showed, when 'they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him; for they saw that his grief was very great.'

‘Mr. Thornton!’ said Margaret, a little surprised. ‘I thought——‘
‘Well, little one, what did you think?’ asked Frederick, as she did not finish her sentence.
‘Oh, only,’ said she, reddening and looking straight at him, ‘I fancied you meant some one of a different class, not a gentleman; somebody come on an errand.’
‘He looked like some one of that kind,’ said Frederick, carelessly. ‘I took him for a shopman, and he turns out a manufacturer.’
Margaret was silent. She remembered how at first, before she knew his character, she had spoken and thought of him just as Frederick was doing. It was but a natural impression that was made upon him, and yet she was a little annoyed by it. She was unwilling to speak; she wanted to make Frederick understand what kind of person Mr. Thornton was—but she was tongue-tied.

‘A working man can hardly be made to feel and know how much his employer may have laboured in his study at plans for the benefit of his workpeople. A complete plan emerges like a piece of machinery, apparently fitted for every emergency. But the hands accept it as they do machinery, without understanding the intense mental labour and forethought required to bring it to such perfection. But I would take an idea, the working out of which would necessitate personal intercourse; it might not go well at first, but at every hitch interest would be felt by an increasing number of men, and at last its success in working come to be desired by all, as all had borne a part in the formation of the plan; and even then I am sure that it would lose its vitality, cease to be living, as soon as it was no longer carried on by that sort of common interest which invariably makes people find means and ways of seeing each other, and becoming acquainted with each others’ characters and persons, and even tricks of temper and modes of speech. We should understand each other better, and I’ll venture to say we should like each other more.’

Other opinions:
A Writer’s Blog, Good Books and Good Wine, The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader, The Bluestocking Society, The Book Whisperer, Rebecca Reads, Shelf Love, 5-Squared, Library Queue

(As always, let me know if I missed yours and I’ll be happy to add it.)

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In Which I Return

Hi all. Remember me?

Now that I’m more or less settled in and finally beginning to adjust to all the crazy changes the past month has brought to my life, I think I’m ready to start blogging again. I really can’t tell you how much I’ve missed all my blogging friends this past month, or how often I questioned the wisdom of depriving myself of my daily interaction with you all during a time of so much stress, novelty and isolation. If I ever forget how much blogging really adds to my life, thinking of the past month will surely remind me.

My time here has had its ups and downs so far, but I can happily report that library school has been very interesting so far, even if a bit different than I’d imagined. My first few assignments include writing essays on censorship, on Google, and on a children’s or YA work of my choice (Chaos Walking Trilogy, here I come). I think I’m going to have quite a bit of fun.


(My new local library. Could it possibly be any cuter?)

As I both feared and expected, not all has been quiet on the book acquiring front. The picture below shows my loot to date, and if that seems like a lot of books, well, that would be because it is. But I can’t tell you how many times I made use of huge amounts of self-restraint and walked away from a used bookshop or charity shop empty-handed. Then there was that one sad afternoon when I was in desperate need of book buying therapy and hauled home a total of twelve books… but let us not speak of that. On the bright side, some of those were actually free, as the International Society here hosted a welcome giveaway for international students. Wasn’t that lovely of them? My plunder included not only books, but also all sorts of useful household bits and bobs which I hadn’t even realised I needed yet.


(My pile of shame - click to enlarge. In my defence, I have at least already read some of them.)
One of the highlights of my time here so far was visiting the Elizabeth Gaskell – A Connected Life exhibition at the John Rylands Library. A Connected Life is an exhibition of Gaskell’s letters, manuscripts, first editions, and personal objects (such as her passport, teapot or writing materials), and it’s part of the celebrations of the bicentenary of her birth. Interestingly enough, the structure of the exhibition was actually quite similar to the one I helped organise in my previous job, and having some knowledge of the kind of behinds the scene work that goes into something like this made the whole thing even more interesting.


(A Gaskell display at the library’s gift shop. Sadly - but understandably - we weren’t allowed to take photos of the exhibition itself, so this is all I have to show you.)
The exhibition included letters by Gaskell to eminent Victorians like Charles Dickens, and letters to her from the likes of Harriet Beecher Stowe or Elizabeth Barrett Browning (!!). There was something very intimate and even actually moving about seeing all these people’s handwriting; about seeing Gaskell’s everyday objects and getting a glimpse of how she lived her life. I suppose that more than anything else, it made me realise that all those people were once actually alive, that they were real human beings just like any of us (yes, cue in Professor Obvious). I find that in my relationship with my favourite authors, especially dead ones, I tend to somehow be both acutely aware of their humanity and to completely lose sight of it. It’s a strange mix of feelings, and seeing this exhibition stirred them all up.

Anyway: the exhibition was amazing, but so was the library itself. The John Rylands Library is an impressive, cathedral-like Victorian building founded by Enriqueta Augustina Rylands in memory of her husband, and my knees might have buckled when I first entered the historical reading room. Also, there was a smaller room with an exhibition on 3000 years of gay narratives – what’s not to love?


(The John Rylands Library*)
Going back to Gaskell, I was talking to the lovely Iris on Twitter the other day, and she told me she’s going through a bit of a Gaskell obsession. I can tell you I feel one coming on myself, and I suspect she’s on her way to become one of my favourite Victorian authors. I hope to post my thoughts on North and South later this week, and if you look closely you’ll see a few of her other books in my acquisitions pile. I’m hoping to get to them very soon.

As you can probably tell, I really love my new city so far, even if it’s taking me a while to find my footing here. Other highlights to date include an arts festival in my neighbourhood where I finally got to see a Punch & Judy show, the many parks and public gardens, an exhibition celebrating the fifty years of Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, and the absolutely wonderful People’s History Museum (where I saw a fantastic exhibition on a hundred years of social protest). Also, there’s a literature festival coming up very soon: I found out about it too late to get tickets for Jeannette Winterson, but I’m going to an event featuring Miguelanxo Prado (a Spanish comics creator who did work for the Sandman, among many other things), and to another one about the Moomin stories, where Tove Jansson’s niece Sophia Jansson will be present. There’s always a lot going on here – more than I can keep up with, to be honest – and I look forward to telling you all about all sorts of bookish events in the future.


(A park just down the street from my house, where I’m hoping to do some reading when the weather allows. Which is to say, for a few more weeks and then not until sometime next April.)
As I’m sure you’ll understand, my Google Reader is inevitably getting the Mark All as Read treatment, but I’d really love it if you told me about any good books you’ve read lately, or pointed me towards any posts that you think I’d enjoy reading (on your own blog or any others - and I mean it!). I can’t tell you how happy I am to be back, or how much I’m looking forward to catching up with you all.

*Not my own photo, as sadly my digital camera died on me and is currently being repaired. Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/49627256@N00/4481881764/

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