{miscellaneous} summing up

Ah, the time of the year for summing up.

In no particular order, my top five ten twelve favourite books of 2011 are:

No Orchids for Miss Blandish - James Hadley Chase {REVIEW}

The Blue Castle - L. M. Montgomery {REVIEW}

The Turn of the Screw - Henry James {REVIEW}

The Boys from Brazil - Ira Levin {REVIEW}

How to Be a Woman - Caitlin Moran {REVIEW}

The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West {REVIEW}

The Ghost Map - Steven Johnson {REVIEW}

The Debt to Pleasure - John Lanchester {REVIEW}

In a Lonely Place - Dorothy B. Hughes {REVIEW}

The Shuttle - Frances Hodgson Burnett 

Nella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 49 - R. Broad & S. Fleming (eds.)

The Eye of Love - Margery Sharp {REVIEW}

I read just over 170 books this year. I keep getting a different figure owing to not having enough fingers, toes and concentration (the cricket was on in the background), but, roughly, it breaks down into fiction of the respectable literary type (37), crime/mystery/stuff I should be slightly ashamed of but am not in the least (113), non-fiction (23). Two more stats: e-books (128 - !!!!), re-reads (25). 

At this time last year I was packing away my library as I thought I might be moving. As it turned out, I didn't move. I also didn't unpack. As a result, I have done rather less re-reading this year of old favourites (um, unless I bought them again - bad person, bad person).

The single biggest change to my reading habits this year was caused by buying a Kindle. This has resulted in a dramatic reduction in the number of physical books entering the home and requiring homes of their own. This is both excellent - since space is always an issue - but, I do confess, a little sad, as I LOVE BEING SURROUNDED BY BOOKS. Books are beautiful, tactile, comforting, dusty, furnish a room; my library is part of me. But, I also love being able to highlight bits of text (I don't write on real books); I love being able to search electronically for something I only half remember; I love that e-books are cheaper than tree-books (a big consideration for an Australian as books are ludicrously expensive here); I love getting them instantly; I love travelling without a case so full of books I can't fit in a giant box of macarons. I miss: sharing books; the smell of books; not being able to get everything I want electronically (but that's (a) just greedy and (b) kinder on my bank balance).

A couple of new discoveries this year have brought me much reading pleasure - Mary Stewart, Tess Gerritsen, Ira Levin, Alan Hollinghurst, Anne Zouroudi, Jo Nesbø. There were a couple of good sequels in favourite series - Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce, Carol K Carr's India Black. I don't go in much for 'challenges' but I really enjoyed International Anita Brookner Day (I reviewed Lewis Percy) and Paris in July (Zazie in the Metro and Chéri were highlights). I also had a HUGE binge on Patricia Wentworth, some of which were re-reads (favourite: The Case of William Smith).

2012? I want to: read more non-fiction (I feel as though I've read less than usual) and more noir and try to resist starting a new series as I cannot stop myself from reading ALL OF THE SERIES AND STUFFING UP MY READING PLANS. Yes, well, good luck.

{review} what maisie knew

Henry James What Maisie Knew (1897)

I've always wanted to know what it was that Maisie knew.

Maisie is a child caught in the middle of her parents' vicious divorce:

"Poor little monkey!" she at last exclaimed; and the words were an epitaph for the tomb of Maisie's childhood. She was abandoned to her fate. What was clear to any spectator was that the only link binding her to either parent was this lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed. They had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other.

Her parents are ordered to share her care, with Maisie to spend six months of the year with each parent. Her parents play every aspect of Maisie's life off against each other, leaving her in a constant state of instability, and with the impression that neither of her parents care much for anyone but themselves. Whenever Maisie thinks that she has found someone with whom to build a stable home ("But it was like being perched on a prancing horse, and she made a movement to hold on to something" [Oh dear, unwitting stable/horse pun there, sorry]), she is almost immediately torn from her temporary peace of mind by one or other of her selfish parents.

...in the carriage, her mother, all kisses, ribbons, eyes, arms, strange sounds and sweet smells, said to her: "And did your beastly papa, my precious angel, send any message to your own loving mamma?" Then it was that she found the words spoken by her beastly papa to be, after all, in her little bewildered ears, from which, at her mother's appeal, they passed, in her clear shrill voice, straight to her little innocent lips. "He said I was to tell you, from him," she faithfully reported, "that you're a nasty horrid pig!" 

Her "periodical uprootings", in which she is parted from her beloved governesses who provide the only constants in her life, are described in terms of brutal dentistry: "Embedded in Mrs. Wix's nature as her tooth had been socketed in her gum, the operation of extracting her would really have been a case for chloroform."

Maisie soon learns to be silent and to observe. Gaining a reputation for dullness serves to protect her from her parents' desire to use her to hurt each other. But her parents also take on new partners - and then new lovers too - and Maisie is forced to establish her own footing with these new step-parents and hangers-on. The world inhabited by the adults is one of gross immorality, where the individual lives to please only him- or herself. (I assume that there is also some sort of Biblical force in the idea of what Maisie 'knows'.)

When Maisie's step-parents - her mother's new husband the charming Sir Claude and her father's beautiful new wife, who was also Maisie's governess - fall for each other they too manipulate the proximity of Maisie to further their relationship. Maisie again becomes "a jolly good pretext... for their game" in which the two people she thought she could trust will again betray her. 

What Maisie Knew is filled with so many instances of heartbreaking cruelty towards its observant but silent young protagonist. Maisie's mother enjoys 'scenes':

"It must be either one thing or the other; if he takes you, you know, he takes you. I've struck my last blow for you; I can follow you no longer from pillar to post. I must live for myself at last, while there's still a handful left of me. I'm very, very ill; I'm very, very tired; I'm very, very determined. There you have it. Make the most of it. Your frock's too filthy; but I came to sacrifice myself." Maisie looked at the peccant places; there were moments when it was a relief to her to drop her eyes even on anything so sordid.

"Peccant places": it is phrases like that which bring me back to Henry James, despite his sentences making my head hurt.

The reader becomes aware that while all of the adult characters in the book claim to be making sacrifices and doing everything in their power for Maisie, it is clear that all are motivated by self-interest, even Maisie's hero the lovely Sir Claude. As Sir Claude's paramour - and Maisie's old governess/stepmother - notes of his actions, he is now,

"Free, first, to divorce his own fiend."
The benefit that, these last days, she had felt she owed a certain person left Maisie a moment so ill-prepared for recognising this lurid label that she hesitated long enough to risk: "Mamma?"
"She isn't your mamma any longer," Mrs. Beale returned. "Sir Claude has paid her money to cease to be." Then as if remembering how little, to the child, a pecuniary transaction must represent: "She lets him off supporting her if he'll let her off supporting you." Mrs. Beale appeared, however, to have done injustice to her daughter's financial grasp.
"And support me himself?" Maisie asked.
"Take the whole bother and burden of you and never let her hear of you again. It's a regular signed contract."
"Why that's lovely of her!" Maisie cried.
"It's not so lovely, my dear, but that he'll get his divorce."

And there is, of course, the final betrayal, with Maisie a poor second to her friend Sir Claude's new love. But Maisie 'knows' a lot by now about life's betrayals and chooses to leave the lovers and make her own way with the only person who has never willingly abandoned her - the old, faithful governess Mrs Wix:

"I didn't look back, did you?"
"Yes. He wasn't there," said Maisie.
"Not on the balcony?"
Maisie waited a moment; then "He wasn't there" she simply said again.
Mrs. Wix also was silent a while. "He went to HER," she finally observed.
"Oh I know!" the child replied.
Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew. 

Poor Maisie, who knows full well that her guardian and erstwhile friend Sir Claude is so wrapped up in his lover that he cannot even afford his child a farewell wave.

Favourite lines: when Maisie is letter-writing, she is described as answering "with an enthusiasm controlled only by orthographical doubts"! On a rare occasion when she pleases her mother, Maisie is wrenched into a hug: "The next moment she was on her mother's breast, where, amid a wilderness of trinkets, she felt as if she had suddenly been thrust, with a smash of glass, into a jeweller's shop-front, but only to be as suddenly ejected..."

Almost everyone in this book was quite unlikeable, but it seemed to work, somehow. I really enjoyed What Maisie Knew - though I suspect that "enjoyed" is a bit perky-sounding for a book filled with so much misery and destruction. The writing saves this from being sheer melodrama.

Rating: 7/10

If you liked this... I wondered if Maisie would grow up into a Jamesian or a Hodgson Burnett type of heroine?

{review} the turn of the screw

Henry James The Turn of the Screw (1898)

   

An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred...

Seriously, I'd forgotten the scariness contained within The Turn of the Screw and I beg you not to follow my example and reread it alone in an old dark house at night...

I keep persevering with Henry James although his sentence structure MAKES MY HEAD HURT. In an effort to work myself into a Jamesian mood, I picked up this novella again, after many years, and was reminded both why I want to persevere with James and why I find it so hard to do so.

Why I want to persevere: this novella is so spooky and most of the time you have no idea if it's because things are happening in the novella or things are happening in your head. It's a perfect mixture of obliquity of characterisation, not-quite-enough-information, and unreliable narrating, working to make the reader doubt every word on the page, then doubt herself for doubting.

Coupled with this is the classic set-up of an apparently innocent young woman sent into the country by a handsome but aloof employer to a spooky old castellated mansion to mind some freaky children (with "false little lovely eyes") with only the assistance of a seemingly loyal house-keeper. Oh, and the young woman is but the latest in a series of staff who've departed under mysterious circumstances. And there's plenty of candlelight...   

The apparition had reached the landing halfway up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window, where at sight of me, it stopped short and fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower and from the garden. He knew me as well as I knew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve this distinction for quite another circumstance: the circumstance that dread had unmistakably quitted me and that there was nothing in me there that didn't meet and measure him. I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had, thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not—I found myself at the end of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease—for the time, at least—to have him to reckon with; and during the minute, accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview: hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have met alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed, in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved. The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to make me doubt if even I were in life. I can't express what followed it save by saying that the silence itself—which was indeed in a manner an attestation of my strength—became the element into which I saw the figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness in which the next bend was lost.

Why I'm not so sure: as I would suggest is illustrated by the above passage, James' sentences are such hard work. My God, would it have killed him to shorten a clause or two?

Rating: 10/10

If you liked this... hard-core gothic, I think, rather than more James. Maybe some Poe?

   

{review} the line of beauty

Alan Hollinghurst The Line of Beauty (2004)

‘I’m just looking up Lebanon,’ she said, after a minute.
‘Oh yes …’ said Nick.
‘It sounds marvellous. Mediterranean climate, well we knew that, and it says homosexuality is a delight.’
‘Really,’ said Nick.
‘It does. “L’homosexualité est un délit”,’ she read, sounding like General de Gaulle.
‘Yes, délit is a crime, unfortunately.’
‘Oh, is it?’
‘Delight is délice, délit is a misdemeanour.’
‘Well, it’s bloody close …’
‘Well, they often are,’ said Nick, and felt rather pleased with himself.

It seems wrong to cover a Booker Prize winning novel in a few sentences, but I couldn't warm to this one. I thought the writing was gorgeous and Hollinghurst's ability to capture Thatcher's 1980s quite extraordinarily fine (as was his ability to nail the early 1980s in The Swimming Pool Library). But was I meant to like any of the characters in The Line of Beauty?

Nick was always a favourite with mothers, he was known to be a nice young man, and he liked the unthreatening company of older people. He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity.

Nick, the protagonist, is a young man who enters into a parasitic relationship with a wealthy family closely connected with the aristocracy and the ruling Conservative government. Nick is also taking his first steps into the world of homosexuality. He considers himself an extremely bright and self-aware young man who can make a good pass at walking the walk with his upper-crust friends. Yet nothing is quite right. 

The reader comes to realise that, like many people who consider themselves to be good readers of others' characters, Nick's own self-awareness is quite flawed. He is neither fish nor fowl: not part of the aristocratic circle he so enjoys; not part of the family with whom he lives; unable to get over an unreciprocated passion for the son of the family; not able to be open about his relationship with the closeted scion of a wealthy Lebanese family; almost unable to fend for himself in the real world without the cushion of comfort provided by others.

It is very telling that one insight he gains from cocaine is that, "He felt he could act himself all night." And Nick is, ultimately, a coward who possesses nothing that he has earned. When he returns to his home village in a car given by his lover, we read:

Now he revved round it, the lads looked up, and he savoured the triumph of coming home in a throaty little runaround. It was as though the achievements of sex and equities and titles and drugs blew out in a long scarf behind him. No, it was real superiority, it was almost lonely, a world of pleasures and privileges these boys couldn’t imagine, and thus beyond their envy.

The problem is, of course, that it is not his world. 

I find it very difficult to maintain the energy to the end - of what was quite a long book - without some sort of either empathy or implicit assumption in redemption. Of course, I guess that's the problem with the 1980s: there seem to be no redeeming features amid all the Tories, easy money, corruption, parliamentary sex scandals, fast cars, the immense privilege vs. shocking poverty of Thatcher's Britain, the beautiful lines of cocaine and the spectre of AIDS.

In sum: wonderfully written (and I'd definitely persevere with more Hollinghurst), but it dragged for me. I think I have Booker issues. Fear of the books being too smart for me, I suspect. Silly, isn't it? Maybe I also need to read more of the Hollinghurst's inspiration in The Line of Beauty, Henry James. I could relate to this [on Trollope]:

‘To be honest, there’s a lot of him I haven’t yet read.’
‘You must know that one, though,’ said Lord Kessler.
‘No, this one is pretty good,’ Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half-forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion.

Rating: 7/10

If you liked this... I enjoyed The Swimming Pool Library. 

{review} the magnificent ambersons

Booth Tarkington The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)

 

And in his reverie he saw like a pageant before him the magnificence of the Ambersons--its passing, and the passing of the Ambersons themselves. They had been slowly engulfed without knowing how to prevent it, and almost without knowing what was happening to them.

The Magnificent Ambersons won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. Orson Welles adapted it into (and directed) the 1942 movie of the same name (imdb). The novel has a wonderful and quite unmistakable American voice (as one might hope from a Pulitzer winner). 

The story involves the slow demise of a wealthy American family, the Ambersons, and in particular the actions of the grandson and heir to the once great fortune. George Amberson Minafer is the son of Isabel Amberson and the nondescript Wilbur Minafer. From boyhood, George is spoiled rotten by his mother and grandfather and grows up with the knowledge that he is to be the master of all he surveys. He has no plans but to be a gentleman. However, the world is changing quickly at the end of the nineteenth century and the Ambersons are out of step with the new world of automobiles, factories and expanding cityscapes which swallow their semi-rural suburban paradise in an unnamed Midland city (likely inspired by Indianapolis according to everyone's friend wikipedia). George is aware only of his own needs and desires and has been riding for a fall from boyhood. Everyone he meets swears that he must eventually get his comeuppance. He is certainly a horrid little boy: "there was added to the prestige of his gilded position that diabolical glamour which must inevitably attend a boy who has told a minister to go to hell."

George's father dies and he is taken aback when a parental friend from the past courts his mother. He is obsessed with maintaining the good family name and aghast that this upstart - the sympathetic Eugene who is to make a fortune with 'horseless carriages' - should couple his name with that of the Ambersons. 

He saw little essential difference between thirty-eight and eighty-eight, and his mother was to him not a woman but wholly a mother. He had no perception of her other than as an adjunct to himself, his mother; nor could he imagine her thinking or doing anything--falling in love, walking with a friend, or reading a book-- as a woman, and not as his mother.

But George is also in love with Eugene's beautiful daughter Lucy. When George intervenes in his mother's courtship, tragedy is not far away, and he has to learn a number of difficult lessons - including losing everything - in the gaining of his promised comeuppance. 

...as he saw her, thus close at hand, and coming nearer, a regret that was dumfounding took possession of him. For the first time he had the sense of having lost something of overwhelming importance.

I loved The Magnificent Ambersons. The narrator's voice is so striking (Orson Welles took this role in the film) and the verbal pictures of the passing of time in the Midland town ("For, as the town grew, it grew dirty with an incredible completeness.") are vivid and lively:

...the "aesthetic movement" had reached thus far from London, and terrible things were being done to honest old furniture. Maidens sawed what-nots in two, and gilded the remains. They took the rockers from rocking-chairs and gilded the inadequate legs; they gilded the easels that supported the crayon portraits of their deceased uncles. In the new spirit of art they sold old clocks for new, and threw wax flowers and wax fruit, and the protecting glass domes, out upon the trash-heap. They filled vases with peacock feathers, or cattails, or sumac, or sunflowers, and set the vases upon mantelpieces and marble- topped tables. They embroidered daisies (which they called "marguerites") and sunflowers and sumac and cat-tails and owls and peacock feathers upon plush screens and upon heavy cushions, then strewed these cushions upon floors where fathers fell over them in the dark. In the teeth of sinful oratory, the daughters went on embroidering: they embroidered daisies and sunflowers and sumac and cat-tails and owls and peacock feathers upon "throws" which they had the courage to drape upon horsehair sofas; they painted owls and daisies and sunflowers and sumac and cat-tails and peacock feathers upon tambourines. They hung Chinese umbrellas of paper to the chandeliers; they nailed paper fans to the walls. They "studied" painting on china, these girls; they sang Tosti's new songs; they sometimes still practiced the old, genteel habit of lady-fainting, and were most charming of all when they drove forth, three or four in a basket phaeton, on a spring morning.

The characters in The Magnificent Amberson are marvellously drawn. I love George's lovelorn aunt Fanny who sets him off on the path to disaster. And George's characterisation is spot-on. He is stubborn as a mule even when he dimly perceives that he may have been wrong:

He would not have altered what had been done: he was satisfied with all that--satisfied that it was right, and that his own course was right.

A quintessential American classic.

Rating: 10/10

I read this on my Kindle, free from manybooks.net (a really useful and well-organised site). It was a Project Gutenberg text originally.

Worst drink ever? "'Please let me have a few drops of aromatic spirits of ammonia in a glass of water,' she said, with the utmost composure."

 

If you liked this... hmmm. American voices? I'm going to take the plunge and read Henry James' What Maisie Knew (1897).