Everything and More by Geoff Nicholson

Another entry in my Year of Geoff Nicholson project, and this time it’s Everything and More–a Nicholson novel I loved for its originality and sheer compressed scope–you’ll see what I mean later. The novel, with a few minor exceptions, is set inside Haden Brothers, a vast, seemingly endless London department store (“including 12 different eateries,“) designed as a replica of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel & built in the 1930s by “maverick visionary” Edward Zander, the architect who mysteriously disappeared once the project was completed.

However, Zander’s building has few of the rhythms, repetitions or classical form of its supposed model. Rather it suggests a series of multiple codings, elements of Russian Constructivism, Italian Renaissance and stuccoed Baroque. It is decked, as though at random, with crenellated parapets, pantile roofs, ogee arches, steel balconies, oriel windows and flying buttresses. Carved into the fabric of the building are angels, putti and mythological beasts. There are gargoyles, caryatids, mosaics, expanses of Moorish tiling and some magnificent stained glass. Zander had envisioned a menagerie on the ninth floor and wanted the whole building to be painted blood red, but he was talked out of these schemes.

 This story is the perfect vehicle for Nicholson’s frequent themes of collection and obsession, for after all, doesn’t shopping encompass both of these neurotic pastimes? And what better place for the compulsive shopper to hang out than Haden Brothers–the 400 department emporium that boasts that it sells “everything and more,” where shopping is an experience rather than a mundane activity.

Enter two eager job seekers: Vita Carlisle and would-be artist Charlie Mayhew. Charlie applies for a job because he’s an unwelcome guest sleeping on the sofa of the only friend who’s still talking to him. Vita has a boarding school & university background along with an impressive resume, and while her determination to work at Haden Brothers seems a little odd, her professionalism and apparent fanaticism about the workings of the sprawling shopping metropolis really can’t be faulted or penetrated. Vita could obviously do a lot better than Haden Brothers, but she insists that she’s in love with the place and working there is her dream. Both Charlie and Vita are employed on the spot by Derek Snell, who’s officially head of personnel and unofficially, the pimp for the reclusive owner of Haden Brothers, Arnold, the last of the line. Arnold lives in the penthouse suite, accessible by a private lift, on the very top of the Haden Brothers building, and he hasn’t stepped into the outside world for years. Derek Snell, a rather sleazy character, has an eye for the sort of women his boss prefers, and since he is, in essence, the pimp for the king of Haden Brothers, he has a position of some power:

Derek Snell was no fashion victim, or at least he had been victimized in about 1975 and had never entirely recovered. He wore a brown Viyella suit with wide lapels and deep turn-ups, a chunky knitted wool tie, a shirt with a flapping collar and a pattern of tiny veteran car motifs. He was a toothy, slim-chinned man, about forty-five with a lot of gingery hair that curled round his head like a tarnished halo.

Vita becomes part of the so-called Flying Squad–a sort of troubleshooter, and here she is in the toy department with “raw, lean, adrenalin-driven, toy buyer,” Carl:

On Vita’s first day in the department he took her aside and told her, ‘We sell a lot of merchandise here on the basis that we’re educating the little fucks, stimulating their imaginations, fostering hand-eye coordination, that kind of crap. The truth is, what we’re struggling to do here is sedate and socialize a generation of would-be Adolf Hitlers.’

Vita looked at him uncertainly but still managed a smile.

‘The thing to remember is this,’ Laughton continued, ‘all children are thugs, fascists and megalomaniacs. There was a time when they wanted scaled-down versions of the real world; toy animals, toy soldiers, dolls, building blocks to make miniature cities. Then they pulled the eyes out of the animals, tore the dolls limb from limb, massacred the soldiers, razed the cities.

‘These days, they play with computer games, and they can play at destroying whole life forms, whole planets and galaxies. They take to it like ducks to water. It all comes perfectly naturally to them. And they genuinely believe that when they grow up they’ll be able to do all this stuff for real. But when they do grow up they discover, with one or two important exceptions, that they don’t get to blow things up at all, and that really hurts them. It’s a discovery nobody ever quite recovers from. I know I haven’t.

‘That’s why toys are so attractive to adults, why they carry so much nostalgia with them, because they remind us of a time when we were power-mad, conscienceless dictators.’

While Vita moves from department to department as part of the elite Flying Squad, poor Charlie becomes a furniture porter. The subliminal messages piped out over the sound system geared to make shoppers and employees alike behave don’t seem to work on the porters who take the example of their subversive leader, Anton, and spend most of their time devising elaborate ways of not working. This means hiding when there’s work to be done, spending hours quibbling over payroll deductions in the accounting office and engaging in “extravagant pilfering.” What’s so interesting is that Vita is involved in the day-to-day activities of ensuring that Haden Brothers runs smoothly, while Charlie becomes snared in the subversive shadow life of Haden Brothers, the bomb threats, the mysterious graffiti that appears periodically on the shop’s windows, the hidden, fully operating miniature railway, and the secret passages down deep in the basement. Only the Head of Security, Ray Chalmers seems to recognize that there are elements undermining the efficient day-to-day operations of the huge department store, and since everyone connected with Haden Brothers seems to lose all sense of proportion, Chalmers declares war on the subversives:

I’m not trying to say that it’s like Vietnam out there, but in a sense it is. It’s a jungle. The enemy’s hard to spot. The terrain is difficult and we don’t always get the backing we need. There are goons. There are traitors and double agents. There are men from our side who’ve abandoned discipline and gone native. At least in Nam they were allowed to use defoliant, napalm, cluster bombing. I wish we could do that at Haden  Brothers. That would shake the buggers up, flush them out so they could be punished with loads of prejudice.

The newest furniture porter seems like a suspicious character to Chalmers. After all, what’s his first name?

Initially Charlie isn’t thrilled with his job, but over time he becomes entranced with the fabulous exotic extravagance of the building as he begins to note “strange faces and African masks carved into the woodwork, wrought iron archways with swastikas and pentagrams, staircase finials that looked like simple spheres but turned out to be intricately carved globes of the world.”

While on the surface, Haden Brothers is a monument to shopping and materialism, there’s a lot of peculiar goings on, and Charlie begins to be aware of just what some of those peculiarities are even as the unfathomable Vita becomes increasingly involved in the surface management.  One of my favourite scenes takes place when a customer lodges a complaint and is summarily whisked off to a seductive paradise hidden away in the secret corners of Haden Brothers. And here, in exotic hypnotic luxury, the half-dazed customer, is grilled:

He wanted to be cooperative  but he was too entranced by the room in which he now found himself. The carp pool was undoubtedly the most imposing and unexpected feature, but then he had not been expecting the Persian tapestries either, not the ornamental fountain, not the parakeets on their perches, not the bejeweled mirrors and tables and fireplace, not the ornately carved golden couches on to one of which he was now being guided. It was impossible to sit on these with any degree of formality and he found himself lying back, reclining like some Roman hero.

Miss Peabody’s Inheritance by Elizabeth Jolley

Last year when I posted a list of The Best of 2011, Gummie from Whispering Gums mentioned that she hoped I’d have an Australian category included in the Best of 2012. This seemed a good idea, so I’ve made a point to read a few Aussie books this year. While Tirra Lirra by the River is still the best Australian novel I’ve read this year, a serious challenge to that title appeared as I read and laughed at Elizabeth Jolley’s novel, Miss Peabody’s Inheritance. I’ve read a couple of Jolley’s novels, and I considered them ok–nothing more, nothing less. Before Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, I certainly wouldn’t have considered myself a fan, but that all changed with this extremely funny, subversive novel that’s really a novel within a novel for Miss Peabody’s Inheritance is a marvellous example of metafiction.

So here’s the premise:

Miss Dorothy Peabody is a lonely middle-aged spinster who works an office job in London and scurries home every night to take care of her demanding, bedridden mother who has the uncanny ability to know whether or not the downstairs furniture has been dusted. Nothing much ever happens in Miss Peabody’s dreary life, and a daring act for Miss Peabody is to get into the lift and squeeze between the males with “Je Reviens of Worth Paris dabbed on her wrists and behind her ears.” Miss Peabody has a secret yen for romance, and as a people watcher she notes the lurid office affair between the married Mr Bains and Miss Truscott, embellishing the affair with her imagination. There’s only one bright element to Miss Peabody’s life, and that is her amazing correspondence with the Australian  novelist, Diana Hopewell.

After reading Diana’s novel, Angels on Horseback, Miss Peabody writes a fan letter, and to her astonishment, Diana replies. Soon a lively correspondence begins between the two women. Miss Peabody sends details of her life, work and her dreams, and Diana writes about her horses and her beautiful ranch in Australia. Diana is also writing a new novel, and she includes the latest installments for Miss Peabody, and through the correspondence, Miss Peabody is drawn into Diana’s story of Pine Heights, an exclusive boarding school for girls….

In Diana’s installments, she introduces the world Pine Heights–a boarding school which is managed on a tight budget by the idiosyncratic headmistress, stout, middle-aged Miss Thorne (picture an Aussie Miss Fritton from St Trinian’s). Miss Thorne, also known as Prickles, is a strange blend of conformity and radicalism. A proponent of an annual school bra-burning ceremony, she has little time for men and every year she enjoys an annual holiday in Europe with her current companion, the nervous, clingy Miss Edgely, and Miss Thorne’s long-term friend Miss Snowdon, a matron of Queen’s Hospital.

Both Miss Snowdon and Miss Thorne have the same kind of figure; a portliness brought on by years of responsibility, plenty of money, comfortable accommodation and good meals. Both women have the education, the background and the capabilities required for their positions. neither of them care too deeply for other human beings and they are not dangerously touched or moved by the human predicament.

Miss Edgely shares some of the qualities but, by contrast, is small. She has no taste and far less money.

Miss Peabody receives, via her correspondence with Diana, installments of the novel, so the delightfully funny Miss Peabody’s Inheritance goes back and forth between Miss Peabody’s personal life (which grows increasingly out of control) and Miss Thorne’s fictional trip to Europe.  In these installments, Miss Thorne, Miss Snowdon and Miss Edgeley make their annual Mecca to “the wine houses at Grinzing,” but this time, Miss Thorne elects to take schoolgirl Gwendaline (Gwenda) Manners along. Gwenda’s widower father recently re-married a young Brazilian woman, and after bouncing a cheque for Gwenda’s tuition and board, he more or less disappeared. Miss Thorne argues that a trip to Europe is just what Gwenda needs and that it will give her “a little finishing,” but is Miss Thorne really motivated by altruism or lust? Miss Edgely “all but smashed the place up” in a jealous rage at Gwenda’s inclusion in their annual holiday, and as the trip continues via installments to Miss Peabody, a disaster unfolds with unexpected consequences.

Over the course of the holiday, we see how the formidable Miss Thorne organises her relationships so that she’s always in charge, always has the upper hand and always gets what she wants. Poor boring Miss Edgely:

Somewhere between Vienna and Paris Miss Edgely gets left behind in a station lavatory, the novelist’s letter starts straight in without any enquiries or remarks of a personal nature.

“D’you think I’ve got time?” Miss Edgely asks.

“Oh, rather! Edge of course you have, but don’t be all day.” Miss Thorne notices that the guards are slamming the doors of the Express. All around them are the noises of departure. She knows Miss Edgeley has not really time. Whistles blow and flags wave.

As Miss Peabody continues to receive letters from Diana which include fragments of the adventures of Miss Thorne, she begins to live for the arrival of the next letter, and as she burrows deep in the lives of Diana’s fictional characters, Miss Peabody begins to lose her grip on reality.

Miss Peabody’s evenings had become another world. A world of magic and enchantment. She lived for the evenings and for the time spent with the novelist’s letters and the composing of her own replies.

All the different things her mother asked for hardly mattered. The petulant voice calling down the narrow stairs could not remove the anticipation of her happiness.

Miss Peabody’s correspondence with Diana serves to broaden her horizons and it also brings several titillating issues to the fore. For example, partly inspired by Miss Snowdon’s paper, The Forgotten Placenta, Miss Thorne hopes to organise a lecture at the school for the edification of the “gels” as she calls them: Chasing the Orgasm: How When and Where. This makes rather shocking reading for the very sheltered Miss Peabody, and the correspondence between Diana and Miss Peabody ultimately has startling results.

Often with novels that have a clear division (in this case the division is between the life of Miss Peabody and the letters from Diana), there is a range of quality, and one strain becomes stronger than another. Not so with Miss Peabody’s Inheritance. In fact the two strands come together and mesh extraordinarily well. Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, is of course about loneliness, but it’s also about how little we human beings need to jettison our imaginations beyond our lowly, and often restrictive conditions.

Review copy

NW by Zadie Smith

If I had to describe Zadie Smith’s latest novel, NW, I’d say ‘brilliant but difficult.’ That’s a compliment, but at the same time I can see why many readers would drop out along the way. This is a novel set in a distinct geographical area of London, the NW (Northwest) of the title, but specifically focusing on Willesden–an area with a vast social history:

A great hill straddles NW, rising in Hampstead, West Hampstead, Kilburn, Willesden, Brondesbury, Cricklewood. It is no stranger to the world of letters. The Woman in White walks up one side to meet the highwayman Jack Sheppard on the other. Sometimes Dickens himself comes this far west and north for a pint or to bury someone. Look, there on the library carpet between Science Fiction and Local History: a knotted condom filled with sperm. Once this was all farm and field with country villas nodding at each other along the ridge of this hill. Train stations have replaced them, at half-mile intervals.

That passage gives the essence of the author’s style–a vibrant cacophony of voices and colliding lives in this exploration of class and race through friends and their relationships. At the heart of the story are two women–friends from childhood. Keisha has moved on from her beginnings and transformed into Natalie while her friend Leah appears to be locked in the past–stuck on the spot, left wondering about the validity of her choices while the rest of the world whirls by. Has Natalie matured, and this is the novel’s great question, or is maturity just another way of describing an upwardly mobile, affluent life?

The novel begins with Leah, a young white woman of Irish background, who lives with Michel, a French hairdresser of African descent, opening the door to the apparently distressed Shar. Leah’s neighbourhood is questionable, and even opening the door and letting this young woman in–someone who attended the same underachieving school, is an act of bravery, and even a sort of social defiance as it later turns out. The intruder is Shar, and she wants money, she claims, to go and visit her ill mother in the hospital. As in often true in good Samaritan acts, the decision to help Shar is based in Leah’s perception of herself, and this is our introduction to Leah.

This seemingly small incident has a ripple effect with serious ramifications for Leah. For Leah, time has stood still since she finished “three years of useless study” which culminated in the collection of a degree in Philosophy which has no practical application and does not translate to her employment as “the only white girl on the Fund Distribution Team.” Leah seems disconnected with her life, as if she washed up, shipwrecked in this place, in a relationship with no idea exactly how she arrived there.

Meanwhile Leah’s childhood friend, Natalie aka Keisha, “the girl that done good,” now a married barrister, invites Leah and Michel to dinner parties at their posh home, and it’s here amongst the other guests, that Leah and Michel stick out rather uncomfortably. Not that Michel seems to notice.

Nothing in Leah’s childhood prepared her for the frequency with which she now attends dinner parties, most often at Natalie’s house, where she and Michel are invited to provide something like local colour. Neither of them know what to say to barristers and bankers, to the occasional judge. Natalie cannot believe that they are shy. Each time she blames some error of placement but each time the awkwardness remains. They are shy, whether Natalie believes it or not. They have no gift for anecdote. They look down at their plates and cut their food with great care, letting Natalie tell their stories for them, nodding to confirm points of fact, names, times, places. Offered to the table for general dissection these anecdotes take on their own life, separate, impressive.

I can’t review the book without touching on the author’s style, and at this point I’ll add that I am not a fan of experimental writing. Don’t hand me a book that has pages without punctuation and even stream of consciousness is pushing it. These techniques may be fun for the author, but they annoy me.  Nonetheless, with these prejudices in mind, some of Zadie Smith’s stylistic decisions worked excellently, and she’s a genius for dialogue. Here for example, is a passage from one of Natalie’s swanky dinner parties. You can almost hear the dishes and cutlery, the mastication of the teeth, and the banal comments made to the person on the right by her upwardly mobile, and smug guests, safe in the cocoon of their ever-growing affluence.

Many of the parents are immigrants–from Jamaica, from Ireland, from India, from China–and they can’t understand why they have not yet been invited to live with their children, as is the custom, in their countries. Technology is offered as a substitute for that impossible request. Stairlifts. Pacemakers. Hip replacements. Dialysis machines. But nothing satisfies them. They worked hard so that we children might live like this. They “literally” will not be happy until they’ve moved in our houses. They can never move in our houses. Pass the heirloom tomato salad. The thing about Islam. Let me tell you about Islam. The thing about the trouble with Islam. What do you think, Samhita, yeah what do you think, Samhita, what’s your take on this?  Samhita, the copyright lawyer. Pass the tuna. Solutions are passed across the table, strategies. Private wards. Private cinemas. Christmas abroad. A restaurant with only five tables in it. Security systems. Fences. The carnage of a 4×4 that lets you sit alone above traffic. There is a perfect isolation out there somewhere, you can get it, although it doesn’t come cheap.

Other stylistic maneuvers did not work so well for this reader. The lack of inverted commas, at least for the first part of the book caused me to wonder, more than once, who was saying what, or even if these statements were thoughts rather than speech. While the first section of the novel concerns Leah, the second section moves ahead with Felix, a recovering drug addict who think he’s putting his past behind him and moving forward in a new relationship with the dynamic Grace. At first there was a sense of frustration that Leah was more or less left behind while Felix’s story developed. This section, however, was so good, I quickly forgot my grumbling and submerged myself into Felix’s story as he buys a dilapidated sports car from upper class Tom, the sort of person we might find sitting around the table at one of Natalie’s soirées.  

One of the novel’s very best scenes takes place between Felix and Annie, his former fellow addict and sometime sex partner. It’s in this scene that the entire notion of ‘getting ahead’ and ‘moving on’ is dragged out into the open and trammelled on by the very confident and self-possessed Annie. Note the appearance of inverted commas:

“You listening? Next level. People can spend their whole lives just dwelling. I could spend my whole life dwelling on some of the shit that’s happened to me. I done that. Now it’s time for the next level. I’m moving up in the game. And I’m ready for it.”

“Yes, yes, I’ve grasped the metaphor, you don’t have to keep repeating it.”

Annie lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and exhaled it through her nose.

“Life’s not a video game, Felix–there aren’t a certain number of points that send you up to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everyone dies at the end. Game over.”  

It’s these sorts of vibrantly alive scenes that, for this reader, made up for the rest of the novel’s difficult moments. After finishing the book, I found myself returning and chewing over Annie’s arguments. She’s arguably one of the most fucked up people in the book, and yet she’s intelligent, coherent, perfectly comfortable in her own skin, and living in poverty. She is mentally in the sort of place that Leah can’t seem to reach. Leah is being propelled ahead by the current, but she’s not altogether copacetic with ‘moving up,’ and Leah, who is “faithful in her allegiance” to her roots certainly doesn’t want to be the sort of person that Natalie has become. There’s an uncomfortable undercurrent to the lives of these Londoners, and the novel questions society’s notions of “the next level.” Acquiring affluence is arguably a questionable goal, and yet that is the quest for the characters here who appear to succeed in a sink or swim society while other lost characters, Nathan Bogle is just one example, are wrecked and washed up by crack. I found myself wondering what would happen in Zadie Smith’s NW if we mixed up the characters a bit and invited Annie to Natalie’s table? Would Annie and Leah be friends? Would Felix admire Michel? How would someone like Natalie cope with someone as potentially myth-puncturing as Annie? These are all rhetorical questions, of course, because that’s the whole point of ‘moving on.’ You drop those people who no longer fit in.

A writer of Zadie Smith’s standing can get away with a lot of idiosyncratic moves that would trash a newer, humbler writer. The Big Questions here, and each reader will decide independently, are whether 1) the novel works and 2) whether Zadie Smith is aware of the unevenness and inconsistencies of the novel. For this reader, it’s a resounding yes to both questions.

Thanks to John Self at Asylum for recently interviewing Zadie Smith and reviewing the book.

Review copy.

The St .Zita Society by Ruth Rendell

Picking up a Ruth Rendell novel feels as though I am returning to an old friend. I know, more or less, what to expect, and I am delighted to be in this author’s company. Ruth Rendell seems to excel in creating fictional spaces, uniquely malignant cauldrons in which the fouler aspects of human behaviour breed and simmer before exploding into crime. In the novel Portobello, I had a niggling concern about snobbery through the delineation of the poor vs the rich characters with criminal behaviour landing solidly on the former, but Rendell has irrevocably swept that aside in The St. Zita Society, a psychological crime novel in which the servants and various hangers-on of the rich rub elbows with their employers in the upscale houses of Hexam Place. It’s in this unhealthy environment that violent death makes its appearance.  

The St. Zita Society (named after the patron saint of “domestic servants“) is formed by June Caldwell, the companion of the autocratic, petulant, self-invented woman who calls herself Her Serene Highness, the Princess Susan Hapsburg. The two women have lived together for sixty years, and June is HSH’s servant, companion, dog-walker, secretary and the recipient of all of her employer’s moods and temper tantrums. It’s very likely that this is the reason that June, now 78-years-old forms the society which holds its meetings at the local pub. Eligible for membership are the servants who work in the swanky addresses of Hexam Place, and June’s intention is that the St. Zita Society will give the servants some sort of clout, but in reality, the society is June’s attempt to make her own life more tolerable.

The servants include: cleaner Zinnia who splits her time at several homes, Dex the ”criminally insane” and now certified cured, gardener-for-hire who believes that the voice in his cell phone gives him orders, Thea who rents a Hexam Place flat and is misused and underappreciated by her landlords, Henry, the chauffeur of Lord and Lady Studley, whose after hours duties include secretly servicing the very attractive and neglected Lady Dudley, Monserrat, the unpleasant au pair to the troubled Still family, Rabia, the Still’s Muslim nanny, and Jimmy the driver to Dr. Jefferson.

While June is intent on addressing ”human rights,” there are other items on the St. Zita agenda–including dog feces left by those passing through the neighbourhood. Of course, since the servants are the ones cleaning up the dog poo, they are the ones who want the council to ‘do something.’ Meanwhile the homeowners are oblivious. This tiny subject of disgruntlement is the epitome of the division between the worlds of the wealthy and those they employ to make their lives run smoother. It’s an unhealthy relationship, even at the best of times, and we see some servants taking advantage of their employer’s good nature (Jimmy), and others taking advantage of their employer’s lack of interest (Monserrat). Of course, others are worked beyond reason, and June seems to be the most put-upon partly due to her age, her lack of choices and her tyrannical employer.

Monserrat comes from the same sort of privileged background as her employer, and she deeply resents her position as a servant for people she simultaneously envies and despises.  She’s facilitating her employer, Lucy Still’s affair and accepts ‘tips’ to keep her mouth shut about it.

Monserrat knew all about it. She made it her business to know who was having an affair with whom, who was skiving off, and who was borrowing a Beemer or a Jaguar when such a loan was strictly forbidden. She had never blackmailed anyone, but she liked to keep the possibility of a modified sort of blackmail in reserve. The only friend she had in Hexam Place was Thea, and the only member of the St. Zita Society who possessed a car of their own was herself, keeping her rather old VW in a garage in the mews that belonged to number seven.

It’s no coincidence that Thea is Monserrat’s only friend as Monserrat does not considers herself a servant and has little in common with the other employees of Hexam Place. Monserrat doesn’t slot easily into the servant-master dynamic; her father went to school with Lucy Still’s father and at one time, they were both wealthy men. Monserrat’s father lost all his money in “some banking scandal,” and Monserrat is given the job as the Still’s au pair as a favour to a friend. Monserrat is opportunistic and resentful and can’t help but notice that her employer, Lucy Still, has a relatively cushy life full of designer shopping, jogging, and an affair.  Thea isn’t a servant, but she is a doormat and she’s treated badly by her landlords. While she struggles against this role, she seems unable to alter it. Interestingly, these two characters, Thea and Monserrat, are connected by fate.

The St. Zita Society covers just a few months of the lives of those who live in Hexam Place–from Autumn to Spring. Marriages melt down, adultery runs rampant, and with a slow-building menace brewing, murder is the inevitable result.

Rendell argues that we know little about what goes on the house next door, and the book is a strong statement regarding the inherently unhealthy relationship between employer/master and servant. It’s a relationship that breeds familiarity, abuses and resentments on all sides. Some of the book’s scenes highlight the inherent fragility and hypocrisy of the relationships between the characters. A few visits from June’s famous soap opera nephew, Rad Sothern, sets Her Serene Highness reeling, and yet while HSH treats Rad coquettishly, like some ardent suitor, the Princess never shifts an inch in the treatment of Rad’s aunt, June, so some awkward evenings are spent with an unpleasant hierarchy between the three characters.

Ruth Rendell  is no stranger to the theme of the complex and difficult relationships between servants and those who employ them. A Judgement in Stone, considered one of this author’s finest psychological crime novels explores the twisted relationship between the affluent Cloverdale family and their psychotic housekeeper Eunice Parchment.

Review copy

Chapman’s Odyssey by Paul Bailey

Paul Bailey’s latest novel, Chapman’s Odyssey, is mostly set within the confines of a London hospital. The story plays with the idea of memory through the mind of one man, Harry Chapman, a writer aged 70, collapsed and whisked off to hospital where he remains undergoing numerous tests and awaiting a diagnosis. Naturally, he contemplates the possibility of death, and in the twilight moments of sleep and effected by drugs, he has numerous visitations and conversations with a wide range of ‘visitors’–mostly imagined. There’s his indomitable mother, Alice, who lived to the ripe old age of ninety–a reassuring thought when one is facing death at 70:

Was it courtesy of Dr Pereira’s wonder drug that he was hearing her now, her naturally harsh voice sharpened by hurt and disappointment?

During his quiet and lonely moments, sometimes tempered with sedatives and painkillers, Alice’s words return as arguments and recriminations are revived, and Harry recalls his mother’s favourite phrase:

–Get back in you pram, Harry Chapman.

That taunt for all his childhood; that lethal combination of five short words intended to diminish him; oh the terrible inference that he would never grow into the kind of manhood she might approve of–her it was, harshly expressed, unsettling him, angering him, in this hospital ward, in a changed London, on the eve of his seventieth birthday.

Fortunately, Alice is not the only memory to visit. There are many other visitors from Harry’s past, including a local homeless woman known as The Duchess of Bombay, but most curiously, fictional characters impose their equally real presence as they appear from the novels of Harry’s reading past:

–Who are you?

He was curious to identify the stranger.

–You don’t recognise me?

–I can scarcely hear you.

–I have not much to say. I have no reason to speak louder.

He thought he detected a subtle American twang, suggestive of a refined New England upbringing, perhaps.

–Then why are you bothering to talk to me?

–I am bothering to talk to you because I cannot–no, I must not–be bothered.

–Did I meet you in New York?

–You have met me in many places. We have been companions of a kind in London and in Rome and once, I believe, in Calcutta. I am unusually verbose tonight. I am, usually, a man of very few, necessary words. That is my customary condition.

And this is madness, Harry Chapman thought, to be communing with someone who never lived, except in the pages of a little book.

–Are you still there?

He was relieved that there was no answer. Of course Bartleby wasn’t there. It had been the purest lunacy to have imagined that he ever was.

That quote should give a taste of both the writer’s style and the sort of encounters Harry has throughout the novel as he lies in his hospital bed and waits for the results of his tests. Visits from Pip (Great Expectations) are every bit as real as Harry’s conversations with his dead lovers. It’s impossible to read Chapman’s Odyssey without wondering which literary characters would come and visit us in our hours of illness and loneliness, and yet even as I considered the possibilities, it seemed both fantastic and wonderfully reassuring that visits from some of the great fictional characters who have become… well… our treasured compansions in their adventures and adversities should come and visit in our hour of need. Unfortunately, this is a cleverly written novel which will appeal only to people who ‘get’ the frequent literary allusions as Bailey is writing for a literate audience who know their Austen and their Dostoevsky.

The book’s title, Chapman’s Odyssey, is in itself a play on words and a giveaway about the novel’s complexities. George Chapman translated the first complete Homer’s Odyssey in English in the 16th century and died in poverty and debt. Our modern-day protagonist, Harry Chapman, has his odyssey from the confines of his hospital bed where he recalls the highlights of his life, the people who meant a great deal to him, and the moments that shook his life to its foundations. These memories are mingled with his waking moments when he regales the nurses with poems he’d memorised, and then when he nods off to sleep, finally, he meets all the fictional characters who composed another part of his life: his reading life which is every bit as real as the great passions and that poisoned, tortured relationship with his mother.

Chapman’s Odyssey is a rather sad novel–not so much because of the direct subject matter–a man waiting to hear whether or not he’s going to die; instead the novel is sad because of its immense poignancy. Stuck in bed, surrounded by nurses, doctors and other patients, Harry is diminished, at first by his mother, and now at the end of his life to a set of symptoms and an elusive disease. Death and disease are the great levellers of humankind and no respecter of youth, circumstances or wealth. Harry struggles against this leveller not by the usual cliché ‘it isn’t fair,’; in Harry’s case he tries to assert his individuality by reciting poetry to the nurses and engaging in pedantic mental wordplay to assure himself of his individuality in the face of death. The figures from the past mingle equally with the figures of fictional characters as if there is little difference between the two, and perhaps, after all, this is the only level of immortality we will ever reach as we become visiting shades in the memories of those who loved us.

Had there ever been a golden age in the long life of Harry Chapman? He tried to recall it as he lay–dying, perhaps–in the room reserved for those poised on the very brink.

 Review copy from publisher

The Cost of Living in Gissing’s New Grub Street

The subject of a man’s ‘worth’ comes up frequently in the novels of Jane Austen. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, “five minutes after his entrance ” into a dance,  it’s a matter of public knowledge that Mr. Darcy has “ten thousand a year,”–a veritable Rothschild compared to Bingley, who according to the rapacious Mrs. Bennet has “four or five thousand a year” and is considered an amazing ‘catch.‘  Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, and what of Gissing’s world of  late Victorian England, 1891?

In New Grub Street, one of the main themes is the dilemma literary men face when they wish to marry. At the beginning of their careers, they are extremely poor, and if they are lucky, that may change. George Gissing certainly understood exactly what the lack of money could do to you. Gissing was the son of a pharmacist who attended Owens College on a scholarship. He fell in love with a young prostitute and stole money from other students with the aim of keeping his lover off the streets. He was caught, sent to trial and sentenced to gaol. After his release, with support from friends, he travelled to America and for a while worked for an American newspaper and even did a stint as a travelling salesman. These experiences find their way into the pages of New Grub Street through the character of Whelpdale. Gissing later married the prostitute. They lived together but finally separated. Gissing supported her until her alcohol-related death some years later.

In Gissing’s novel, according to the ambitious Jasper Milvain a writer should, in optimum circumstances, marry an heiress, but that’s best case scenario. He sees that other writers marry working class women who accept living in a freezing garret on a diet of bread and dripping.  Jasper has the goal of earning, in ten years time, “my thousand a year,” and meanwhile his widowed mother lives with her two daughters on an annuity of two hundred and forty pounds. The two daughters, Maud and Dora had received “an intellectual training wholly incompatible with the material conditions of their life,”  and because their mother supported Jasper’s life in London to the tune of 120 pounds–half of her annuity– the year previously, they work to supplement their income. During the last year, Jasper earned 1/5 of his living, 30 pounds, himself, and that brings his total cost of living to 150 pounds for the year. Due to supporting Jasper in London, the women in the Milvain household suffer deprivations and do not mingle in society as they cannot afford it.  Maud works occasionally as a music teacher, and Dora is employed as a “visiting governess” with a local family. Are they destined to become old maids?

So let’s look at some of the numbers: When Edwin Reardon was single, he inherited 200 pounds, moved to London and lived for almost 4 years off of the money using “painful economy.” That’s 50 pounds a year. He lived in a garret with rent at 3/6 a week and spent about 1 shilling a day on food. After his inheritance ran out, and still trying to make a living as a novelist, Reardon was lucky enough to land a job as a clerk at a hospital for a pound a week.

He held this position for three years, and during that time important things happened. When he recovered from his state of semi-starvation, and was living in comfort (a pound a week is a very large sum if you previously had to live on ten shillings), Reardon found that the impulse to literary production awoke in him more strongly than ever. He generally got home from the hospital about six o’clock, and the evening was his own. In this leisure time he wrote a novel in two volumes; one publisher refused it, but a second offered to bring it out on the terms of half profits to the author. The book appeared, and was well spoken of in one or two papers; but profits there were none to divide. In the third year of his clerkship he wrote a novel in three volumes; for this his publishers gave him twenty-five pounds, with again a promise of half the profits after deduction of the sum advanced. Again there was no pecuniary success. He had just got to work upon a third book, when his grandfather at Derby died and left him four hundred pounds.

Reardon takes the second inheritance, lives off of it and publishes a third book for which he is paid fifty pounds. He is now an author of modest reputation. He meets Amy Yule, a young woman of good family and fueled by the expectations of his literary career, they marry.  She foolishly imagines that writing a novel is an easy thing and sees the next novel being sold for 300 pounds with royalties in the range of another 200-300.

Poor Edwin Reardon who’s frantically writing himself into a mental and physical breakdown lives with his wife Amy and their child in a flat, eight flights up, in which “gentlefolk” live, and their flat is composed of a living room, a bedroom and a kitchen (which doubles and triples as a dining room and a parlour). The rent of 50 pounds a year is paid on the quarter. Impractical Amy makes economies but still bemoans the family’s inability to go on holiday. She’s disappointed and cold about Edwin’s failure when he finally sells his novel for 75 pounds; after all at this rate writing and selling a novel a year is going to pay the rent with not enough to live on left over.

One character lands a job that pays 150 pounds a year, housing included, so a life of relative worry-free existence is anticipated. We are told at one point that Marian Yule is expected to be able to earn only 50 pounds a year through her writing, and yet we know that a pound a week is poverty for these “gentlefolk” or “gentry” as the Russians would say. A position on the literary magazine Chit Chat pays 250 pounds a year, and the character who gets the job sees the pay as a “glorious competence.” Clearly, somewhere between 150-250 pounds income a year, life begins to look a lot rosier.

Then there’s the matter of inheritance. One person inherits 5,000 pounds and another 10,000. Numbers are bandied about, but it seems that 4% interest is the going rate, so the person who inherits 10,000 will have 400 pounds a year to live on, while the person who inherits 5,000 will have about 200 pounds a year. The wealthier woman lands into the heiress category while the one with the lesser inheritance is seen as a tolerable match.

Then there’s Mrs Edmund Yule, Amy’s mother:

Like the majority of London people, she occupied a house of which the rent absurdly exceeded the due proportion of her income, a pleasant foible turned to good account by London landlords. Whereas she might have lived with a good deal of modest comfort, her existence was a perpetual effort to conceal the squalid background of what was meant for the eyes of her friends and neighbours. She kept only two servants, who were so ill paid and so relentlessly overworked that it was seldom they remained with her for more than three months. In dealings with other people whom she perforce employed she was often guilty of incredible meanness; as, for instance, when she obliged her half-starved dressmaker to purchase material for her, and then postponed payment alike for that and for the work itself to the last possible moment. This was not heartlessness in the strict sense of the word; the woman not only knew her behaviour was shameful, she was in truth ashamed of it and sorry for her victims. But life is a battle. She must either crush or be crushed. With sufficient means, she would have defrauded no one, and would have behaved generously to many; with barely enough for her needs, she set her face and defied her feelings, inasmuch as she believed there was no choice.

With a mother such as Mrs. Edmund Yule, it’s easy to see why Amy has difficulties understanding why she and Edmund Reardon can’t afford a holiday. What’s so interesting here is we see the financially challenged Milvains pooling their resources in solidarity whereas Mrs. Edmund Yule and her children pull apart, and when Amy goes to her mother for help, the knives are drawn against Edmund.

Next up: the triple decker.

New Grub Street by George Gissing

“A year after I have published my last book, I shall be practically forgotten; ten years later, I shall be as absolutely forgotten as one of those novelists of the early part of this century, whose names one doesn’t even recognise. What fatuous posing!”

George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street, published in 1891, is essentially the story of two young men, Jasper Milvain and George Reardon who take vastly different approaches to their literary careers. George Orwell was a great admirer of George Gissing and called New Grub Street, one of the few Gissing novels still in print,  Gissing’s masterpiece. Orwell defined New Grub Street as a “protest against the form of self-torture that goes by the name of respectability.” Orwell argues that Gissing showed the “horrors” of late Victorian London for those who teetered on the fringes of ‘good’ society.

The grime, the stupidity, the ugliness, the sex-starvation, the furtive debauchery, the vulgarity, the bad manners, the censoriousness — these things were unnecessary, since the puritanism of which they were a relic no longer upheld the structure of society. People who might, without becoming less efficient, have been reasonably happy chose instead to be miserable, inventing senseless taboos with which to terrify themselves. Money was a nuisance not merely because without it you starved; what was more important was that unless you had quite a lot of it — £300 a year, say — society would not allow you to live gracefully or even peacefully. Women were a nuisance because even more than men they were the believers in taboos, still enslaved to respectability even when they had offended against it. Money and women were therefore the two instruments through which society avenged itself on the courageous and the intelligent.

That marvellous quote from Orwell should give you a good idea about the book–this is a serious, sometimes depressing critique of late Victorian society–a society in which talent is crushed by need, deprivation, and the desire to keep up ‘appearances.’

 In New Grub Street, writing has been reduced to a commodity, and this is exemplified by the two main male characters, Jasper Milvain and Edwin Reardon. We are introduced first to Jasper, an intense, vital young man who lives in London but is visiting his mother and two sisters, Maud and Dora in the town of Wattleborough. Jasper is busy making connections in the London literary world, and in order to keep up appearances and maintain the necessary social contacts, he siphons off money from his widowed mother’s tiny annuity. Anything given to Jasper necessitates sacrifices on the part of his mother and sisters. While his sisters despair of Jasper ever earning a living, for his part, he sees the money as an investment in all their futures.

The novel opens with a scene over the Milvain breakfast table and Jasper regaling his country sisters with the insider’s view of the London literary world. He holds up his friend, Edwin Reardon, a writer who’s managed to publish a few excellent novels that have sunk without a trace, as a prime example of how not to do things and predicts that “he is just the kind of fellow to end by poisoning or shooting himself.”

Jasper lacks the talent to write novels, but if he could he admits that he ”would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies.”  Instead his aim is to become a figure in the literary world through one of London’s influential literary review magazines that are effectively the gatekeepers of fame and fortune for writers, so his time is spent in London cultivating the right people and making the connections that will pay off for his future career.

While New Grub Street is ostensibly about the rise and fall of the two main characters, Jasper Milvain and Edwin Reardon set against the backdrop of the London literary world, in true Victorian fashion, the novel includes a host of other characters and various sub-plots-all of which are connected to the literary world in one form or another. We are introduced to the various branches of the Yule family: John Yule, in poor health who has a sizeable estate and has nothing to do with his brothers or their families, writer Alfred Yule and his daughter, Marian, and the widow and two children of the youngest brother Edmund Yule. Although John Yule does not make an appearance in these pages, his estate and the promise of possible inheritance for his relatives is a sizeable concern and plays a tremendous role in the drama that unfolds.

One of the most interesting aspects of this hugely enjoyable novel is the depiction of working life for the various characters. Edwin Reardon, after scoring a few modest publication successes and selling a novel for 100 pounds has made the mistake of marrying a girl of good family, Amy Yule, the daughter of the late Edmund Yule. Amy has certain expectations, and these expectations have resulted in the Reardons living beyond their means. Jasper predicts disaster and says that Edwin should have married “either a work-girl or an heiress.”   Indeed, as the book develops, just who a writer should marry becomes one of the book’s major themes. If a writer marries a lower class woman, then it’s likely that he will have a wife that accepts living in poverty, while a wife from a middle-class or an upper class background will have expectations that her husband will not be able to provide. This is most certainly the case with the Reardons. Amy cannot cope with poverty and rather than make stringent economies, she pushes her husband to write a novel as speedily as possible, and heavily influenced by Milvain, she agrees that “art  must be practised as a trade.” Meanwhile, Edwin, who would rather be writing obscure scholarly articles, is having difficulty writing a three-volume novel (a popular format of the day) he hopes will sell but it’s a work that he despises. Amy has no sympathy whatsoever, and she sees his inability to write a bestseller as a character flaw, a weakness:

But don’t you feel it’s rather unmanly, this state of things? You say you love me, and I try to believe it. But whilst you are saying so, you let me get nearer and nearer to miserable, hateful poverty. What is to become of me–of us? Shall you sit here day after day until our last shilling is spent?

With the rent due and the money running out, Amy becomes more and more frustrated while Reardon becomes less and less capable of completing his novel. The introduction to my edition, written by Bernard Bergonzi, makes the point that the situation between Reardon and his wife Amy reflects Gissing’s beliefs and experiences with marriage, the writing life and poverty, so perhaps it’s not too surprising that the theme of just who writers can marry pops up repeatedly in the novel. Gissing shows that there’s no easy answer, and the men who marry ‘beneath’ them live to regret it and make their wives pay for their discontent–Alfred Rule, for example, married a shop girl  who was willing to share the garret he lived in, and he treats her little better than an unpaid servant. One chapter begins with the discussion of the marital states of a number of writers  and how the lowly social positions of these spouses have supposedly ruined any chance for success in the literary world. Then again, couldn’t a poor marriage and an inability to move in prominent social circles also act as a smokescreen for a writer of mediocre talent?

Of the acquaintances Yule had retained from his earlier years several were in the well-defined category of men with unpresentable wives. There was Hinks, for instance, whom, though in anger he spoke of him as a bore, Alfred held in some genuine regard.  Hinks made perhaps a hundred a year out of a kind of writing which only certain publishers can get rid of, and of this income he spent about a third on books. His wife was the daughter of a laundress, in whose house he had lodged thirty years ago, when new to London but already long-acquainted with hunger; they lived in complete harmony, but Mrs Hinks, who was four years the elder, still spoke the laundress tongue, unmitigated and unmitigable.

Hinks is just one of the writers in Alfred Yule’s circle of friends. There’s also Christopherson who “worked casually at irresponsible journalism.” Mrs Christopherson is the daughter of a butcher and “disagreeable stories were whispered” about her past. The writers in Yule’s circle do not include their wives in their literary evenings.

These men were capable of better things than they had done or would ever do; in each case their failure to fulfil youthful promise was largely explained by the unpresentable wife. They should have waited; they might have married a social equal at something between fifty and sixty.

Jasper Milvain would agree–a literary man needs a wife who can hold her own in soirées and it’s even better if she can pay for them! Amongst these married men who regret their alliances there are also a number of desperate bachelors–including Whelpdale who proposes to every woman he meets and the immortal, tragic Biffen (no wonder Orwell loved this novel) who longs for the sort of wife that Edwin Reardon has but can’t afford to keep.

The introduction makes the point that while New Grub Street criticises late Victorian society, it offers no solutions. Jasper Milvain is not as great a scoundrel as Maupassant’s Georges Duroy, but there’s a link there, nonetheless. He states early in this 500 page plus novel : “ All my plans and efforts will have money in view–all. I shan’t allow anything to come in the way of my material advancement.” Jasper’s pledge is sorely tested when he finds himself attracted to Marian Yule, a very sincere and talented young woman who works as a ghost writer for her father.

In  spite of the fact that New Grub Street is a critique of late Victorian society, some of the book is surprisingly prescient. Good novels sink and rubbishy ones get rave reviews in all the right literary magazines in the London Circle Jerk of Critical Praise. As the very intelligent and principled Marian observes:

When  already there was more good literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his lifetime, here she was exhausting herself in the manufacture of printed stuff which no one even pretended to be more than a commodity for the day’s market

New Grub Street is available FREE for the kindle.

Part II: Running the numbers and the triple-decker book ….

Ill Met by a Fish Shop on George Street by Mark McShane

Fresh from reading Australian author Mark McShane’s novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon, I tracked down a copy of Ill Met by a Fish Shop on George Street. This novel sets three very different characters on a collision course that will change their lives, and it reminded me of the work of Muriel Spark for the decidedly nasty edge to its humour.

The novel begins with Tom Brady, a shabby former Londoner and a rather disreputable character who now lives in Sydney. Tom has a checkered past which includes a long-distant stint as a policeman, but it’s been downhill from there. His last job as a night watchman ended 5 months before when he was caught sleeping. Now unemployed, he hangs about in the shops and watches people as a way to pass his time. Tom was married once:

love came into the life of Tom Brady. Or at any rate, during a period of indigence wherein he was unable to make his fortnightly visit to a King’s Cross prostitute, he met a girl from Brisbane who was game for anything, even marriage. They married and lived rather drearily in small furnished flats. The children which might have held them together did not come. They drifted apart without rancour, she returning to Brisbane, living with another man and bearing three children, of the last of which she died. The whole marital episode concerned Tom less than a change in jobs.

While Tom dawdles on the streets of Sydney, he runs into Jack Partridge, an affluent man who owns a profitable motorcycle repair shop. In just one second, Tom recognises Jack as a man he saw at the scene of a brutal murder that took place in London 30 years before.

Jack Partridge, unlike Tom Brady, has aged very well. Perhaps this is partially due to clean living and a lifetime of established good habits. Perhaps it’s also due to his affluence. So while Tom and Jack would seem to be opposites in many ways, Jack also has a strange approach to matrimony. He married the boss’s daughter, Mildred–a woman he did not love–who was the practical choice at the time.

So after setting up this initial brief, wordless encounter of recognition, author Mark McShane introduces his third main character, the delightful Janet Tree, a WWII widow who owns and operates a boarding house on Dimple Hill right opposite Jack Partridge’s home. And it’s to Mrs. Tree’s house that Tom Brady moves to in order to spy on Jack Partridge….

In order to supplement her widow’s pension and the income from her boarders, Mrs Tree engages in something she calls “free shopping,” and she plans her days around shoplifting excursions and trips to a local fence to sell her “unwanted birthday presents.” Here she is scoping out the first take of the day:

Mrs Tree turned into a covered arcade of shops, a window-sided tunnel full of the clattering and echoing of the feet on its tile floor. A number of shops were fronted by tables that held special bargains, which is to say, soiled articles that refused to move unless glamourized by the bargain mystique.

By one of these table Janet Tree stopped. A little hors d’oeuvre? she mused.

At the front were evening purses priced at three dollars, the foremost a packing-bloated skin of white sequins, like a pig in tight drag. Janet looked through the store window. There were two salesgirls, neither watching, one was busy applying make-up, the other stared at herself insolently in a mirror.

Forty-two-year-old Mrs. Tree is a nervous, high-strung woman. Plagued with fears that her knickers will fall down in public, she pins them firmly “fore and aft with large safety pins.” This irrational paranoia is of course part of her sexual repression, so along with the details of her throughly secure underwear are insights into her life–a life that would appear to be the epitome of boring, sterile respectability: an immaculate home and a horror of bodily functions. But then there’s her secret life and just what is her relationship with her fence, Mr. Becker? Does the private afternoon tea behind closed shutters lead to anything else?

Perhaps by this point, you can see the connection to Muriel Spark. Mrs. Tree could have stepped out of one of Spark’s novels and found herself in Mark McShane’s Ill Met by a Fish Shop on George Street. Of course the boarding house connection helps. So the story is set in motion through a chance encounter on the streets of Sydney, and now the rest of the story plays out through its three main characters. Part of the story takes us back into Partridge’s past and his poisonous relationship with a rapacious, cruel femme fatale.

Apart from the denouement which I found a little unrealistic, I throughly enjoyed the book, loved the set-up and the three well-drawn main characters. Opportunistic former policeman Tom Brady and seemingly respectable widow Mrs Tree align against poor Partridge, and he’s arguably just as much a victim as he was 30 years before.

A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark

It had been some time since I picked up a novel by Muriel Spark, so when Caroline mentioned Muriel Spark Week, I decided to join in. For her quirky world view and dark sense of humour, this author is a great favourite of mine, and so I returned to A Far Cry From Kensington–a marvellous novel set in 1950s London.

While the story is set in the 1950s, the events that take place are recalled decades later by a woman who now lives in Italy–”a far cry from Kensington.”  During her long nights of insomnia, the woman, once known as Mrs Hawkins reminisces about her post WWII life as a vastly overweight “comfortable in her fatness,” 28-year-old war widow. Mrs Hawkins recalls how she lived in a Kensington boarding house with an assortment of fellow lodgers and worked in a small publishing house, Ullswater Press.

Mrs Hawkins (or Nancy as we eventually discover) has the ability to reassure people. Perhaps this is due to her matronly figure, or perhaps it’s due to the fact that she listens and freely dispenses advice (to become thin “you eat and drink the same as always, only half,” and to improve concentration, you need to adopt a cat). She has a responsible position at work, appears to be much older than she actually is, and at the boarding house, she’s perceived as reliable.

However all that may be, in the year 1954 I was comfortable in my fatness, known as a ‘wonderful woman’ although I had never done anything wonderful at all. I was admired for my largeness and that all-motherly look. A young woman who I imagine was older than myself once got up in a bus to offer me a seat. I declined. She insisted. I realized she thought I was pregnant and accepted graciously. I enjoyed universal affection. I was Mrs Hawkins.

Mrs Hawkins may be a source of comfort to those around her, but she’s also a woman of firm principles, and those principles are tested, mainly through her professional life. There’s something fishy afoot at Ullswater Press, and it’s here that Mrs Hawkins first falls foul of the very shady character, Hector Bartlett. They become enemies, and this is a relationship that plagues Mrs Hawkins for some time and follows her on to future employment.

A Far Cry from Kensington is full of Muriel Spark’s dark, off-kilter humour, and her novels have the tendency to skewer hypocrisy while exploring beneath the surface of everyday, seemingly respectable life. Here’s Mrs Hawkins and her landlady, Milly, at night, standing on the landing watching the “Cypriot husband and his English wife” next door fighting.

Suddenly they appeared on the stairs, the second half of their staircase, before our eyes, as on a stage. Milly, always with her sense of the appropriate, dashed down to her bedroom and reappeared with a near-full box of chocolates. we sat side by side, eating chocolates, and watching the show. so far, no blows, no fisticuffs; but much waving of arms and menacing. Then the husband seized his wife by the hair and dragged her up a few stairs, she meanwhile beating his body and caterwauling.

 

Eventually I phoned the police, for the fight was becoming more serious. A policeman arrived at our door within ten minutes. He seemed to take a less urgent view of the din going on in the next-door house and was reluctant to interfere. He joined us on the staircase from where we could now only see the couple’s feet as they wrestled. The policeman crowded beside us, for there was no convenient place for him to sit. My hips took up all the spare space. but finally our neighbours descended their staircase so that we could see them in full.

 

“Can’t you stop them?” said Milly, passing the chocolates.

The policeman accepted a chocolate. “Mustn’t come between husband and wife,” he said. “Inadvisable. You get no thanks, and they both turn on you.”

The British publishing industry which may first appear to be a bastion of respectability in the novel, becomes the target of Sparks’s merciless humour. Mrs Hawkins works for the small, ever-shrinking publisher, Ullswater Press, a publisher of “serious books.” One of the partners is largely absent, and that leaves the younger partner, Martin York in charge with various creative financing plans to revitalize the business which include his knowledge about how to ”throw off” the Income Tax inspectors. Mrs Hawkins moves on to the publishers Mackintosh and Tooley, and while this firm appears to be eminently more respectable than Ullswater Press, again there are darker forces lurking beneath the surface. With one of the office mottos, “the best author is a dead author,” the culture at Mackintosh and Tooley appears to be pro-reader and pro-employee, but as always Muriel Spark shows us that appearances can be deceiving.

As fate would have it, all of the strands of Mrs Hawkins’s life connect with a “glint of a thin trail, like something a snail leaves in its slow path,”  and eventually, she finds herself mixed up in blackmail, anonymous letters and suicide as she determinedly confronts evil for the first time in her life. Ever stalwart, Mrs Hawkins sticks to her principles simply because she can do no less:

I can’t help it. Sometimes the words just come out and I can’t stop them. It feels like preaching the gospel.

A Far Cry From Kensington is one of my favourite Spark novels–a must-read for fans, and a great place to start if you’ve never read this brilliantly entertaining and vastly amusing author.

Blue Monday by Nicci French

“Everyone hates Mondays. It’s the low point of the week. When the alarm clock goes off on Monday morning and it’s still dark outside, and you know you have to haul yourself out of bed and begin all over again.”

I’ve seen a couple of made-for-television films based on Nicci French books–Without You and  Secret Smile to be specific. I’ve intended to read one of the novels for some time, and I was lucky enough to get a review copy of Blue Monday, a book I wanted to read after seeing reviews on Caroline’s blog and also on Reading Matters. Blue Monday is, according to the authors, Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, a husband and wife team–the first in a series of eight, so sign me up for the long haul; I’m hooked.

The novel begins very strongly with the disappearance of a five-year-old child. It’s 1987, a Monday and two little girls, sisters Joanna and Rosa walk home from school together, but when Rosa loses sight of her sister for just an instance, Joanna disappears. The novel charts the case with gripping intensity and poignant moments: the initial intense investigation, the suspects, the guilt, the grief, and then finally the acceptance that this child has vanished. Joanna’s father, the main suspect at one point, is a wreck of man who compares  Joanna’s disappearance and the subsequent fallout to the unravelling of piece of knitting:

“Everything simply comes undone and in just a few moments nothing’s left to show anything was ever there.”

Fast forward twenty-two years; it’s another Monday and psychotherapist Frieda Klein is introduced into the story. She runs a small practice in London, lives alone, and is given to solitary walks at night–a habit that suits her insomnia and allows her to think through her many problems–both personal and professional. Her latest patient is Alan Dekker, a married man in his 40s. Lately Alan doesn’t feel quite well and suffers from nameless anxieties, panic attacks and the feeling that “a storm’s coming.” He admits to a “sense of being in the wrong life,” and wonders if he’s having some sort of mid-life crisis. Plagued by nightmares and strange visions, he consents to therapy and through circumstance, ends up sitting in front of Frieda. Although Alan is tightly wound and an introvert, he admits to longing for a child, a little red-haired boy, and then Frieda realises that Alan’s description uncannily matches the description of a missing five-year-old boy. Frieda faces a moral dilemma–should she tell the police or are her client’s fantasies harmless and coincidental? This moral dilemma leads Frieda to step outside of the patient-therapist boundaries and into the investigations of two missing children.

The authors successfully mesh the investigation of the missing boy with Frieda’s private and personal life. She struggles with her relationship with her one-time mentor, Reuben, who now finds himself bored by his patients and unable to concentrate on his cases, and Frieda must also come to a decision regarding Sandy, a man she’s finally allowed into her life. Then there’s her needy sister-in-law and her self-mutilating niece who aren’t above using a little emotional blackmail to exact a bigger slice of Frieda’s time. This is a lot for Frieda to absorb in her personal life while maintaining balance enough to help patients. Here’s Reuben on being burned out as a therapist:

You wouldn’t believe where I’ve gone. You wouldn’t believe the shit that flows through my human brain, and I’ve walked through it up to my neck. Men have told me things about children and women have told me things about their fathers and their uncles, and I don’t know why they didn’t just go out of the room and blow their fucking brains out, and I thought if I went on the journey with them, if I showed them that they weren’t alone, that someone could share it, then maybe they could come back and make something of their lives. And you know what? After thirty years of it, I’ve had it.

Frieda makes a marvellous series character; she’s intense, incredibly mentally tough, a loner, and committed to her job. Her main premise is that her job is ”helping people sort the story of their lives. Give them a narrative,” yet in true therapist fashion (and I have a weakness with stories that feature therapists as characters), Frieda is often weighed down with her own problems. There are hints of Frieda’s problems with her mostly invisible family, and she readily admits she’s not sure of her own narrative. But Frieda isn’t the only fascinating character here, and there are plenty of hints that we’re going to see more of Ukrainian Josef,  Detective Inspector Yvette Long and her boss, divorced Detective Chief Inspector Malcolm Karlsson. While I guessed two of the plots twists and turns (one of which caused me to become somewhat annoyed with the police investigation), Blue Monday, comparable to the best of Ruth Rendell is full of engaging, sympathetic characters who demand sustained attention, and is an excellent beginning to a new series of page-turning psychological suspense novels. Given the ending, I’d hazard a guess that there’s some unfinished business in this story that will reemerge somewhere in the next seven novels.  

Finally here’s a quote from Frieda, an observation on one of her walks which ties in very subtly with the disappearance of a child twenty-two years before and whose traces remain only in the minds of those who loved her:

But Frieda was walking along the course of an old river. She had always been drawn to it. Once it had flowed through fields and orchards down to the Thames. It had been a place for people to sit by, to fish in, What would they have thought, men and women sitting on a summer evening, dangling their feet in the water, if they had seen its future? It had become a rubbish dump, a sewer, a ditch clogged with shit and dead animals and everything else that people couldn’t be bothered to do anything with. Finally it had been built over and forgotten about. How could a river be forgotten about? When she walked this way, Frieda always stopped by a grating where you could still hear the river flowing deep below like an echo of something. And when you had left that behind, you could still walk between the banks rising on either side. Even the occasional street name hinted at the wharves where barges had been unloaded and before that the rises, the grass slopes where people sat and just watched the crystal water flow down into the Thames. That was London. Things built upon things built upon things, each in their turn forgotten about but each somehow leaving a trace, if only a rush of water heard through a grating.