{review} a week of pineapples

*dusts off blog cobwebs*

'Georgy,' Mr Pasmore asks, 'may we come in?' He was already in. 'I’ve brought you two delightful visitors. They have been exploring the possibility of the pineapple. Do you like that? The possibility of? I mean we all know the positivity of, don't we? What we want, oh, what we all so want want want is the possibility of? Georgy, do you believe in the possibility of the pineapple?' (Thea Astley, Hunting the Wild Pineapple)

Last week I only read books with 'pineapple' in the title. This offered a wider variety than one might expect, and I think I did rather well and read some things I might not otherwise have tackled. So what did I read?

 

M. C. Beaton At the Sign of the Golden Pineapple (1987)

Charlotte Webster awoke during the night and lay shivering under her thin blankets. Food. Mountains of food. That’s what she had been dreaming of. A confectioner’s. She could see it now, the golden pineapple over the door, the piles of oranges and pineapples and dainty cakes. The smells of hot chocolate and coffee. Her stomach growled ferociously.

M. C. Beaton is terrifyingly prolific. This Regency series was originally published under the pen name Marion Chesney. I discovered this series thanks to Another Look Book's review of Beaton/Chesney's Minerva, which I thought could fill a Heyer-sized gap in my reading life. It was less-mannered, more overtly - perhaps one might suggest 'unbelievably' - socially boundary-pushing, and rather more risqué than a Heyer, but a fun - and quick - read. Likewise At the Sign of the Golden Pineapple: our heroine ("We are all kept in chains by the fact that we are genteel women") decides to make her own way by opening a confectionery shop/ices-and-tea-room in London with two lady acquaintances from unhappy homes - but can "ladies" ever resume their previous social and marital ambitions after working in a shop? 

The pineapple connection is that a pineapple was an emblem of the confectionery trade in the Georgian era (lots more on this here and a wonderful recreated pineapple 'ice' here). This is a (hmmm... tries to think of some relevant analogies...) wafer-thin read, stuffed sugarplum-like with sweet historical details, and easily digestible in one sitting. Not sure I'm hungry for more of the genre though, but that might be a result of the sugar overdose of read number two...

Betty Neels Pineapple Girl (1977)

  

And Mrs White, with a swift movement worthy of a magician, heaved at something under the blankets and produced a pineapple. ‘Oh!’ said Eloise, startled, and then: ‘Mrs White, what a simply lovely present—thank you, and your husband. I’ve—I’ve never had such a delightful surprise.’ She clasped the fruit to her person...

I've actually read this Mills & Boon before, and written briefly about it. Nurse falls down steps onto handsome foreign doctor while holding a pineapple; doctor replaces pineapple with THREE from Fortnum & Mason; coincidentally, poor nurse meets handsome doctor in foreign parts while on a job; does he love her or is he a bastard ("How could he talk about kippers when only a moment ago he had been kissing her as though he really enjoyed it?")? Will her clothes be good enough ("an elderly velvet dress the colour of a mole")? ... yada yada yada... You get the picture. I'm here for the pineapples, mostly, I guess. The period details (grimy 70s London) are great, and often rendered rather funny by time-passed:

‘Someone gave me a pineapple,’ she informed the table at large, and added apologetically: ‘I would have brought it down with me, but I thought it would have been nice to take home…’ There was a chorus of assent; everyone there knew that Eloise lived in a poky little flat behind the Imperial War Museum—true, it was on the fringe of a quite respectable middle-class district, but with, as it were, an undesirable neighbourhood breathing down its neck...

My favourite line is when the heroine is tossing and turning at night thinking about the mysterious doctor: "a fruitless exercise". I think NOT!

But I haven't only read pineapple 'fluff':

 

Thea Astley Hunting the Wild Pineapple (1979)

Once in Fixer’s cabin, one hour, one year, Fixer and I worked out the new coat of arms - a beer can rampant on a social security form couchant. Do we make it different, the people up here?

I don't read as much Australian literature as I feel I ought: I think this is a combination of the feeling that I "ought" (which makes me irrationally stubbornly resistant to doing so); a lack of empathy or resonance with the "bush" (I blame family camping holidays and a loathing of tropical weather), and a love of reading about places not as familiar as the home turf. Perhaps there's a bit of a block too because of difficult reading experiences with Australian lit at school and university? But I do keep trying. 

I can't say that I felt any sense of breakthrough after reading Thea Astley's take on Far North Queensland - hot, wet, uncomfortable, primitive, dangerous - a "soft porn" of a landscape - and filled with the lost and those not wanting to be found. This is a land where social boundaries break easily: "Carl’s fingers have been scratching the spines of Mac’s books. He wants to borrow a couple. I explain they’re not mine, but he’s oblivious to the protocol that goes with possession."

Astley's writing is absolutely superb, although sometimes one feels on the verge of drowning in it. (Whispering Gums discusses why Astley's language can also be confronting.) The book is a series of interlinked short stories about the inhabitants of the tropical Far North. Her descriptions of place can be claustrophobia-inducing - small artificially created physical and metaphorical spaces within which we imprison ourselves, and then the equally terrible world without: "a postcard tropadise (the greens are too green! the blues too blue!)". 

Then there are moments of pure comedy (like the 'hunt' for the wild pineapple of the title) or the little vignettes of everyday life such as the blind date: "He was much older than she had expected. So was she." Elsewhere: "She always appeared formidably silked and hatted and her bust was frightening. ‘Breasts’ is somehow too pretty, too delicate a word to describe that shelf of righteousness on which many a local upstart had foundered."

Mr Waterman was, also, a foundation member of the metric society. He was the first in the district to think in millimetres of rain, kilometres of road, kilograms of body fat and the metric statistics of wanted criminals. When he and Mrs Waterman did their biennial culture junket to Europe, he took enormous pleasure in supplying details for his passport. ‘One point eight five four three metres,’ he wrote against ‘height’; ‘eyes’ – ‘blue’. He would chide his wife mildly. ‘No, dear. No, no. You are one point six four one two metres.’ Against ‘colour of eyes’ she wrote ‘glazed’.

A difficult but valuable read.

Kaori O'Connor Pineapple: A Global History (2013)

Pineapple is great. She is almost too transcendent - a delight if not sinful, yet so like sinning that really a tender conscienced person would do well to pause - too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips that approach her - like lovers’ kisses she biteth - she is a pleasure bordering on pain, from the fierceness and insanity of her relish. (Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia [1823])

I have a copy of Fran Beauman's The Pineapple on my shelf, but I decided to read this shorter history first. It's part of a series of books devoted to single foodstuffs - nuts, pancakes, pies, soup, offal, etc. (Incidentally, Pie is by the always fascinating blogger Old Foodie.) Pineapple is basically all you need to know about the pineapple in the short form: where it came from, how it got everywhere, its role as a prestige and royal object, the craziness of growing it in England, the popularization of the fruit through canning, and so on.

Indeed, the gulf between the pineapple’s fame and the difficulty in satisfying curiosity as to its taste came to epitomize the nature of knowledge itself for the serious-minded. In his On Human Understanding, published in 1690, the empiricist philosopher John Locke used the pineapple to argue that true knowledge can only be based on experience. In Locke’s words: If you doubt this, see whether you can by words give anyone who has never tasted pineapple an idea of the taste of that fruit. He may approach a grasp of it by being told of its resemblance to other tastes of which he already has the ideas in his memory, imprinted there by things he has taken into his mouth; but this isn’t giving him that idea by a definition, but merely raising up in him other simple ideas that will still be very different from the true taste of pineapple.

I thought this a very readable book, although I think it dealt rather tentatively (but without omission) with some of the unpleasant aspects of the pineapple trade, for instance the connection with the slave trade. It was also weak, I thought, on the place of the pineapple in Australia. I am looking forward to finding out if Fran Beauman's book is better on this. I am also looking forward to an exhibition on the pineapple's importance to Queensland that will open in Brisbane this year. *plans a little holiday*

So, what did I get from my week of 'pineapple' reads? Predictable romance is enhanced by pineapples. Pineapple skin demonstrates the Fibonacci sequence. "In organoleptic terms, the pineapple’s great contribution has been the unique ‘sweet-and-sour’ taste." Pineapples have permeated all levels of society, and now I know why and how. Isn't abacaxi a great word? Pineapples feature in philosophical discourse. I can never holiday anywhere north of Brisbane. I'd really like a pineapple upside-down cake now. Here's one I made earlier...

{review} helen macinnes: the hidden target & cloak of darkness

Helen MacInnes The Hidden Target (1980)

Helen MacInnes Cloak of Darkness (1982)

I love Helen MacInnes' books, but I hadn't read (well, re-re-re-read) any for ages as they were packed in a box in the shed. Then I saw there were quite a few available for kindle -- but not, of course, the one about the hippie-trail that was teasing my memory. So, out to the shed... 

(these are the actual, badly photographed covers of my copies: 

the blueish one is foil-striped in silver, blue and white. 

These books have smallest writing I have read for years. 

Almost smaller than this writing...)

These two are actually part of a trilogy featuring the same character, Robert Renwick, and it is probably worth reading them in order, but as a re-reader I didn't feel it mattered this time around. The first one in the trilogy (Prelude to Terror) is very good indeed and has that amazing chest-squeezing mix of espionage terror and romantic torment that MacInnes is magnificent about carrying off. You're never quite sure with MacInnes about whether her protagonists will make it to a happy ending, and she is good at revealing glimpses of absolute darkness that wrack up the tension for the reader. 

Robert Renwick is one of the sort of old-school espionage champs that you really want on your side if you are stuck in the middle of Europe somewhere and something bad is going down. Because the books are set at the end of the 70s and early 80s there's still enough good ol' Cold War villainy around (and some leftovers of WW2), as well as problems with travelling through the continent (anyone nostalgic for when everyone had a different currency? - no, personally not), crossing all those frontiers, and just getting everywhere SO SLOWLY. Then there's the leftovers of the 70s to play with: relics of Baader-Meinhof and anarchists and terrorists plus NATO and Interpol and so on. 

Renwick, American but mostly Europe-based, has set up an agency, tacitly supported by various western intelligence organizations, to gather and analyse intel on terrorism which can then be sent to the relevant agencies. But Renwick is unable to shake off his field agent past, and always ends up out in the field and in great danger. He is a brilliant analyst and it is remarkable that his omniscience never makes one want to shake him until his teeth rattle: he just comes across as remarkably good at his job. 

I love these sort of 'hunt down the baddie' books where there's a real lo-tech feel: no pulling up a satellite -- you've got to get off your bum and go to deepest where-ever and use your binoculars and your bare hands. 

MacInnes is great on detail: in Prelude to Terror, there's a great art history plot going on under all the spy stuff, and plenty of lovely spots like Vienna take centre stage. In The Hidden Target we set off on the hippie-trail from Amsterdam, across Europe, Turkey and over to India in a camper (my idea of hell) with a very smart young woman who finds herself rapidly out of her depth -- could she really be the unwitting companion of one of the most dangerous terrorists of the time, and why does he need her? And in Cloak of Darkness we jump from the Africa to the US then Europe in a race against time to save Renwick from assassination by mysterious forces intent on trafficking weapons to anyone who can pay. Renwick is supported by some great colleagues, and there is always the well-planted seed in MacInnes' plots that someone here is not all they seem. 

If you're looking for a classic go at Cold War espionage, then she's well worth a read. You have to take on board that women -- despite female authorship -- have relatively secondary roles and often these are painfully traditional (they are pretty and they need saving, for instance), but certainly in the trilogy some of the woman do have significant roles in the plot (as they do in other of MacInnes' books). The Hidden Target is the most appealing in that sense, and also I think for its really varied scene-setting. It is also fascinating because it is set at a time when the hippie-trail is breaking down: the route is by the end of the 70s particularly dangerous, indeed deadly in parts, and the Afghanistan region is about to entirely disintegrate as the Russians move in. The (presumed) innocence of earlier journeys has been lost forever. 

Surely the hippie-trail is due a revival as a narrative theme: or have I missed this? There is one book that I would compare with The Hidden Target in this regard and that is Charles Mccarry's brilliant take (and astonishingly accomplished debut novel) on a carload of are-they-aren't-they-spies travelling from Europe to the Sudan in the 50s in The Miernik Dossier, one of the best spy stories I have ever read (his Tears of Autumn could well qualify as the best).

Anyway...: Helen MacInnes - great spy-craft, great settings, a spot of romance (but not as soft or happy as Mary Stewart, for instance), and that slight ambiguity about whether good really ever fully vanquishes evil without itself becoming tainted. 

{review} the fortune of christina m'nab

Sarah Macnaughtan The Fortune of Christina M'Nab (1901)

(this is only moderately more yellow than the original)

I haven't posted for ages - no good reasons, just lazy. I have to mention this book though.

I wrote a while back that I'd found a reference to Sarah Macnaughtan in John Betjeman's Trains and Buttered Toast here. Betjeman wrote that he'd been recommended "Miss MacNaughton" (the spelling isn't correct) by "Miss Elizabeth Bowen and Miss Rose Macaulay" (he does seem hung up on "Miss", doesn't he?). Obviously my ears pricked up at this. Betjeman recommended Macnaughtan's A Lame Dog's Diary, but also mentioned "The Fortune of Christina McNab, the story of a raw Scottish heiress let loose on smart London society". 

I rushed off to download this, only to discover it wasn't available and had to go all old school and order a copy out of the store-room of my university library. The copy that turned up dates from 1904. It entered the library from a local circulating library in 1954, so it has had quite a career. It is in terrible condition - loose pages, a quite obnoxious smell, and a number of suspicious looking spots as though someone had bled into it. I really felt like donning some sort of protective suit before next inhaling.

There's also the interesting question of "M'Nab" vs. "McNab". After I'd read the foetid book I then found I could have read a nice hygienic electronic copy if only I hadn't been an ignorant Australian who'd not experienced this Scottish contraction (Mac / Mc / M'). 

Anyway, Betjeman writes - do we think a little patronizingly? - that "Miss MacNaughton specializes in good, kindly people in fairly easy circumstances and her novels have happy and probable endings." 

So what did I think?

'It's an awful lot of money,' said Colin.
'Comfortable,' replied Christina, with a smirk.
''Deed, I think it's more than comforts you will be able to purchase now,' said Colin dryly; and he added as a logical conclusion, 'I suppose you will be marrying some swell, eh?'
'I suppose so,' quoth Christina, matter-of-fact and brief, as is the manner of her nation.
'What sort of man are you thinking to get?' asked her companion.
'A lord,' replied Cristina comprehensively.
May I ask you to imagine that the conversation between these two persons was carried on in the Scottish tongue, of which the accent was broad and a little uncouth, but emphatic. So that when Christina announced her intention to marry a lord she pronounced the word 'lorrrd' and it rolled from her lips with a fine convincing resonance.

Isn't it gorgeous? I was a fan from page one.

Christina M'Nab has inherited 18,000 pounds a year from her father. All her life she was ignorant of his enormous wealth and was brought up in near poverty - although educated - by her miserly father, "an elder of the Free Kirk of Scotland." She is engaged by near default to Colin M'Crae who is a poor "electrical engineer". Colin is quite something (get ready to fan yourselves, dear reader):

He was dressed in workman's clothes, and his boots were big and his hands horny. His face, as nearly as possible, resembled that of the Apollo Belvedere, and his great square shoulders and splendid limbs were those of a graceful young giant.

I'm almost certain one can't use "horny" like that nowadays...

 

The Apollo Belvedere

Later on he appears in a kilt too... Colin, I mean. 

OK, where was I?

Christina is determined to move in the highest circles - and her massive fortune is sure to be a draw-card for every impoverished son of the nobility. Colin - Colin really is lovely - is happy to stand to one side and let her have her head. But first - that accent! The English nobility won't be able to understand a word she says. And her clothes are not good. Luckily Colin is distantly related via a dubious runaway marriage to the wife of an Earl, and that Earl is desperately short of money. Will Lady Anne Drummond be able to perform a Pygmalion make-over on the rough-tongued Scot? Will she ever..!

I am pretty sure you can all predict what will happen without any difficulty: Christina is done over and revealed to be a stunning red-head with a magnificent figure. She quickly becomes the latest fad to hit society, and winds up established in Grosvenor Square, with a Duke lined up to marry her, and dear, faithful Colin all set to do the elaborate electrical lighting for her splendid ball...

No more spoilers from me. (Also I should cut back on my use of ellipses.)

My only slight criticism of this book is how long it takes to bring what we all know must happen to a happy conclusion. The narrative could be a bit tighter in that respect, though that would lose a number of amusing by-ways such as minor character assassinations of the great and good of society:

Anne thoroughly believed in Alice. She was supposed to have an excellent influence over young girls, and was fond of reading The Christian Year aloud in her bedroom on Sunday afternoons. Her lighter accomplishment was that of 'yodeling.' It was considered by her friends that no one could equal Alice in imitating the well-known cries of the Swiss mountaineers. She was generally asked for a demonstration of her talent before she had been very long in a country house; but if no one made this request, Alice would yodel in her bedroom with the door open, and 'hope that she disturbed nobody.'

Needless to say, I've already downloaded all the Macnaughtan titles I could find, including the enticingly entitled The Expensive Miss du Cane. Incidentally, the back pages of the diseased library book yielded some reading suggestions from the era that one might also file under the same category as 'horny':

{review} the gabriel hounds

Mary Stewart The Gabriel Hounds (1967)

This is a post for Mary Stewart Week, the brainchild of Anbolyn at Gudrun's Tights.

I went back to the bookshelf. It would be nice to be able to record that I was the kind of person who would pick up the Dostoevsky or the Huxley or even The Golden Bough and curl up with it for a glorious evening’s read. But when eventually Mr Lethman came for me as he had promised, he found me a few chapters into The Tiger in the Smoke, and half-wishing I had chosen something less exciting for a night in the deserted wing of a ruined palace.

     

Let me confess: the first image matches the lovely vintage edition 1967 Hodder & Stoughton edition I bought for this week. Then I opened it to discover the print was agonisingly small. So I bought the kindle edition with the ridiculously anachronistic cover. The book is set in the late 1960s, for heaven's sake! That camel will eat your hat and nosegay.

Apart from being a teensy bit incestuous for my tastes, The Gabriel Hounds is very much a classic Mary Stewart romantic suspense book:

Wonderful setting? – tick!

Adventure? – tick!

Proper old-school bad guys? - tick!

Some sort of morally abhorrent crime? – tick!

Heroine with lovely expensive mostly linen clothing which undergoes almost complete destruction without ever affecting the integrity of her innate daintiness? - tick?

Romance – tick!

The years rolled back more swiftly even than the crimson silk as he said, with exactly the same intonation with which a small boy had daily greeted his even smaller worshipper: ‘Oh, hullo! It’s you!’ I wasn’t a small girl any more, I was twenty-two, and this was only my cousin Charles, whom of course I didn’t worship any more. For some reason it seemed important to make this clear.

Let's get this out of the way first. Cousins! Any cousins here? How about you get out more and meet other people? Dilute that gene pool! Go on... You're both young, rich, gorgeous and set loose in an exotic location in the Middle East - go fall for someone to whom you're not related. Especially if you're also the off-spring of parents who were twins (not with each other, but you get the picture). Ick and yuck and aren’t there laws about that?

Anyway...

Christy (Christabel) Mansel is a "stinking rich" girl of independent mind on a tour of the Middle East when she runs into her cousin Charles, whom she has not seen for several years. As a child she had worshipped him. The two make a plan to meet up in Beirut after her tour and visit their wildly eccentric and rarely seen great-aunt Harriet, who has adopted the manner and the lifestyle of the early nineteenth century lady traveller Lady Hester Stanhope. Great-Aunt Harriet is holed up in a ruinous palace outside Beirut and is living the life of an orientalised nabob. Charles was a favourite of the dog-loving old lady, who wishes him to have her pair of Ming dynasty china dogs – the eponymous Gabriel Hounds.

There is a bit of a travel mix-up and Christy - always strong-minded – decides to visit her aged relative alone. The palace is falling to pieces and a personable but vague young man is living there with the great-aunt. When Christy eventually gains admittance, she is wholly horrified by exactly how crazy her great-aunt appears:

Her skin had a sallow pallor and her lips were bloodless and sunken, but the black eyes and well-marked brows gave life to the fullish, oval face, and showed none of the fading signs of old age. She had daubed powder lavishly and carelessly, and some of it had spilled over the scarlet velvet. Above this curiously epicene face she had twined a towering turban of white, which, slipping a little to one side, exposed what for a shocked moment I took to be a bald skull; then I realised she must have shaved her head. This, if she habitually wore a thick turban, was only to be expected, but it was somehow the final touch of grotesqueness.

But beyond this theatrical horror show, Christy fears that something is badly wrong in the palace. What is going on in the old dungeons (I do love a dungeon in a book!)? What was in those really very aromatic cigarettes? Where are the missing Gabriel Hounds? And, as the nearby river rises and she is cut off from civilization, is it too late for rescue? Well, of course not - this is a Mary Stewart book, after all – but how will Christy extract herself from danger? And what has happened to handsome Cousin Charles?

This is an enjoyable read with typical Stewart touches of darkness and mild horror. Her language is a joy: "Eastern-looking sheep" are "spatchcocked with black"; the iron bedstead "came across the cracked marble with a dot-and-carry-one screech of broken castors"; when drugged, one's thoughts "dislimned". I have quoted a passage on the intriguing contents of a bookcase in the palace, and there are plenty of small touches that increase the suspense. Among these I would particularly note: the atmosphere of being trapped in a proper old-school harem seraglio with all its white-slaving implications for nice young English ladies; the heroine's name, Christabel, with its Gothicky poetic overtones (I didn't figure this out for myself – Stewart likes to quote from Coleridge's spooky poem); and, of course, the mysterious Gabriel Hounds themselves – named after the pack of Hounds of Hell "that run with death, and when someone's going to die you hear them howling over the house at night."

An additional sense of melancholy suffused this reader too, thinking about Christy's mostly idyllic Syria and Lebanon and the terrible devastation those countries have suffered since.

I have previously been facetious about elements of the sameness in Mary Stewart's romantic suspense books. Nevertheless, I am a 100% believer that well-constructed beautifully written sameness can be one of the most comforting things about reading a beloved author.

If you liked this... I have now moved on to another Mary Stewart – Thornyhold – which I am enjoying, although it offers quite a change of pace to The Gabriel Hounds, and may be a tad witchy for my tastes. I think that my favourite Stewart (so far!) is The Ivy Tree (definitely one for fans of Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar), with My Brother Michael battling it out for the next spot with the exciting Avignon-set (but unpleasantly domestically-violent) Madam Will You Talk. I have also commented briefly on Airs above the Ground, Wildfire at Midnight, and Touch Not the Cat (cousins again!). Curiously I have not reviewed any of my favourites. 

I hope everyone is enjoying Mary Stewart Reading Week, 

and thanks again to Anbolyn for hosting!

 

{review} taylor, ferguson, carter; crime, fairytale, WTF?

I'm not sure what happened to the first half of May. Gone in a flash... I thought I'd do a 3-in-1 review today, as at the snail-like pace I'm reviewing at the moment, who knows when I'd ever write them up properly. 

Andrew Taylor Waiting for the End of the World (1984)

This is the second in the William Dougal series. I had high hopes that it would reach the heights of the exquisite and excellent no. 1 (Caroline Minuscule: my review), and while I found it an enjoyable read, I thought it lacked something of the attractive amorality of its predecessor. Dougal's pursuit of "uncomplicated hedonism" is once again compromised by his Nemesis-cum-mentor Hanbury, who blackmails him into spying on an Apocalypse-survival cult-leader who wants to make inroads into the UK doomsday market. This is a simple description which in no way can do justice to Taylor's ability to make hilarious chaos from the seemingly simple - and soon Dougal finds himself in well over his head. Taylor's writing is witty and dry, and I would definitely add the next one in the series to my TBR. Note: the age of mobile phones has really destroyed forever little scenes like this one:

The telephone began to emit a continuous whine. Dougal put down the receiver. There were six people waiting outside now; the first in the queue, a Hell's Angel with I LOVE E II R tattooed on his naked chest, was kicking red paint from the kiosk with an immense jackboot. Dougal emerged and held the door open for him. The Angel unexpectedly said: 'Fanks, mate.'

 

Ruby Ferguson Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary (1937)

I read Ruby Ferguson's charming pony-mad 'Jill' books as a child as they were among my mother's favourite books from her childhood. This is an absolutely charming book for grown-ups or, rather, "a fairy tale for grown-ups": a Persephone, and what a gorgeous one. A group of tourists tour a rundown stately home in Scotland. Through flashbacks and memories supplied by the caretaker, Mrs Memmary, the tragic story of the last occupant of 'Keepfield' is revealed in a chronological narrative of Lady Rose's privileged but emotionally austere childhood, her schooldays, presentation to Queen Victoria, dutiful marriage, inheritance of her family's title, then a unexpected opportunity for love and happiness - and a tremendous sacrifice. Ferguson creates a magical atmosphere, but one that simultaneously presents us with the possibility that this will be the fairytale without the happy ending. I was so sad when this story was finished: not just because it was a sad tale, but also because I did not want the story to end. Highly recommended!

"Take my advice," said the Duchess, "and stop the girl from reading novels. Girls of eighteen have no business to read love scenes in print; it puts false ideas into their heads. Operas at Covent Garden are bad enough, heaven knows, with persons actually romantically embracing each other on the stage. But I hastened to impress on Rose and Hermione Southwood that it all happened hundreds of years ago, and that in any case it is extremely doubtful whether Dido and Aeneas actually existed. I myself will lock Tennyson in my bureau; and if you see Rose reading any other poetry I do implore you, Margaret, for your own sake, to substitute something wholesome. A young girl needs to read nothing but her Bible; and only carefully selected portions of that!"

 

Angela Carter The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972)

"There was once a young man named Desiderio who set out upon a journey and very soon lost himself completely." I think this book has decided me, finally, that I don't enjoy dystopian fiction and magical realism. I do, however, really like Angela Carter's writing (with Nights at the Circus being my favourite). This one is set in a post-war world, a little Metropolis-like in places. The narrator-hero, Desiderio, must overcome the evil Doctor Hoffman, who "was waging a massive campaign against human reason itself" with mass hallucinogenic mirages to which the narrator is seemingly immune. ("The only form of transport the Minister permitted in the city was the bicycle, since it can only be ridden by that constant effort of will which precludes the imagination.") 

The book explores, on one level, what it is to be a hero - "I became a hero only because I survived". The redeeming feature of this tale was, for me, Carter's beautiful writing, lush descriptions, and quite astonishingly imaginative scene-settings - it is completely possible to become word-drunk on her writing. Carter also weaves in echoes from other texts (for instance, Don Quixote and the picaresque tradition; ethnographic and travel writing; witch-trials; the Odyssey; and many more) which create a further unsettledness for the reader who may well bring a certain set of expectations along with these other texts. It is sometimes overwhelmingly postmodern. This was not an easy book, as it deliberately breaks narrative rules, occasionally baffles with theory, and was, in general, far too surreal for my enjoyment. But, to be fair, it was also a lush and gorgeous exploration of a "subtly hostile", rampantly foliaged, dystopian landscape where "everything it is possible to imagine can also exist".

And the very birds of the air seemed possessed by devils. Some grew to the size and acquired the temperament of winged jaguars. Fanged sparrows plucked out the eyes of little children. Snarling flocks of starlings swooped down upon some starving wretch picking over a mess of dreams and refuse in a gutter and tore what remained of his flesh from his bones. The pigeons lolloped from illusory pediment to window-ledge like volatile, feathered madmen, chattering vile rhymes and laughing in hoarse, throaty voices, or perched upon chimney stacks shouting quotations from Hegel. But often, in actual mid-air, the birds would forget the techniques and mechanics of the very act of flight and then they fell down, so that every morning dead birds lay in drifts on the pavements like autumn leaves or brown, wind-blown snow.

So? In sum, one absolutely loved, one reasonable sequel, and one Oh My Eyes My Eyes! Too Weird! (birds quoting Hegel is my new nightmare...).

{review} heartburn

Nora Ephron Heartburn (1983)

If I had it to do over again, I would have made a different kind of pie. The pie I threw at Mark made a terrific mess, but a blueberry pie would have been even better, since it would have permanently ruined his new blazer, the one he bought with Thelma. But Betty said bring a Key lime pie, so I did.

A marker of how much I like a book is the irritating appearance of this little note when I check my Kindle highlights: "You have reached the clipping limit for this item". With Nora Ephron's Heartburn, this appeared well, well, well before I'd reached the end.

Why did I love it? Funny, heart-breaking, cynical, gorgeously written. Did I say funny? A survival text for picking yourself up and moving on. And it also has recipes! If you love tales of love, loss, lust and gluttony, this is for you.

My edition has a foreword by Ephron explaining that she wrote it after the break-up of her own marriage to the journalist Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame). It caused quite a scandal at the time, being a thinly disguised semi-autobiographical account of how a wife discovers her husband's affair at a moment when she is seven months pregnant. 

Ephron's heroine is not strictly herself - as she notes, "One of the things I’m proudest of is that I managed to convert an event that seemed to me hideously tragic at the time to a comedy – and if that’s not fiction, I don’t know what is." 

Or, as her narrator puts it:

Vera said: ‘Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?’
So I told her why:
Because if I tell the story, I control the version.
Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.
Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much.
Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.

Ephron's protagonist Rachel Samstat is a television cook and very much a New York girl ("‘Too New York’ is what the last network that was approached about me responded, which is a cute way of being anti-Semitic, but who cares?"). The failing marriage is not her first. And the responsibility for what has happened, as we see as the novel unfolds, is perhaps not as clear-cut as we are initially led to believe. There is a good deal of sheer selfishness, on both sides. But it is a tragedy, even if so wittily upcycled into comedy.  

If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters. The beginning is glorious, especially if you’re lucky enough not to have morning sickness and if, like me, you’ve had small breasts all your life. Suddenly they begin to grow, and you’ve got them, you’ve really got them, breasts, darling breasts, and when you walk down the street they bounce, truly they do, they bounce bounce bounce. You find yourself staring in the mirror for long stretches of time, playing with them, cupping them in your hands, pushing them this way and that, making cleavage, making cleavage vanish, standing sideways, leaning over, sticking them out as far as they’ll go, breasts, fantastic tender apricot breasts, then charming plucky firm tangerines, and then, just as you were on the verge of peaches, oranges, grapefruit, cantaloupes, God knows what other blue-ribbon county-fair specimens, your stomach starts to grow, and the other fruits are suddenly irrelevant because they’re outdistanced by an honest-to-God watermelon. You look more idiotically out of proportion than ever in your life. You feel such nostalgia for the scrawny, imperfect body you left behind; and the commonsense knowledge that you will eventually end up shaped approximately the way you began is all but obliterated by the discomfort of not being able to sleep on your stomach and of peeing ever so slightly every time you cough and of leaking droplets from your breasts onto your good silk blouses and of suddenly finding yourself expert in mysteries you hadn’t expected to comprehend until middle age, mysteries like swollen feet, varicose veins, neuritis, neuralgia, acid indigestion and heartburn. Heartburn. That, it seemed to me as I lay in bed, was what I was suffering from. That summed up the whole mess: heartburn. Compound heartburn. Double-digit heartburn. Terminal heartburn.

The narrative structure works extremely well, cutting back and forwards and into the middle of her two major relationships. The action shifts between her beloved New York (home of all foodie delights) and her husband Mark's base in Washington ("a city where you can’t even buy a decent bagel"). Food - and what food can mean in relation to love and giving and sensuousness and sex - is terrifically important to the book.

But I realized as I stood there doing my demonstration in the middle of the Macy’s housewares department that I had been as dopey about food and love as any old-fashioned Jewish mother. I loved to cook, so I cooked. And then the cooking became a way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the easy way of saying I love you. And then the cooking became the only way of saying I love you. I was so busy perfecting the peach pie that I wasn’t paying attention. I had never even been able to imagine an alternative. Every so often I would look at my women friends who were happily married and didn’t cook, and I would always find myself wondering how they did it. Would anyone love me if I couldn’t cook? I always thought cooking was part of the package: Step right up, it’s Rachel Samstat, she’s bright, she’s funny, and she can cook!

Seriously, I laughed, cried and drooled.

We had driven miles to find the world’s creamiest cheesecake and the world’s largest pistachio nut and the world’s sweetest corn on the cob. We had spent hours in blind taste testings of kosher hot dogs and double chocolate chip ice cream. When Julie went home to Fort Worth, she flew back with spareribs from Angelo’s Beef Bar-B-Q, and when I went to New York, I flew back with smoked butterfish from Russ and Daughters. Once, in New Orleans, we all went to Mosca’s for dinner, and we ate marinated crab, baked oysters, barbecued shrimp, spaghetti bordelaise, chicken with garlic, sausage with potatoes, and on the way back to town, a dozen oysters each at the Acme and beignets and coffee with chicory on the wharf. Then Arthur said, ‘Let’s go to Chez Helene for the bread pudding,’ and we did, and we each had two. The owner of Chez Helene gave us the bread pudding recipe when we left, and I’m going to throw it in because it’s the best bread pudding I’ve ever eaten. It tastes like caramelized mush. Cream 2 cups sugar with 2 sticks butter. Then add 2½ cups milk, one 13-ounce can evaporated milk, 2 tablespoons nutmeg, 2 tablespoons vanilla, a loaf of wet bread in chunks and pieces (any bread will do, the worse the better) and 1 cup raisins. Stir to mix. Pour into a deep greased casserole and bake at 350° for 2 hours, stirring after the first hour. Serve warm with hard sauce.

Highly recommended. 

{by no means a review} china, heyerisms, 2013

2013 is already getting away from me. But I have no reading plans, which is lucky, since I've read almost nothing except Georgette Heyer books since the end of November. They're comfort reads, end-of-year-can't-face-anything-new reads, travel reads... Travel. That's what else I've been doing - 10 days in China and Hong Kong over Christmas.

Terracotta Warriors, Xi'an.

Amazing, aren't they? (And in the news again.) China was BRILLIANT. I know pretty much zero about her history and culture, and it was actually quite refreshing to be in that position where one is forced to be open to everything. Of course, as my sister has lived in Beijing for a dozen years or so, we were very well looked after and not overly exposed to any of the things that I'm not so keen on (squat toilets, for instance!). It also snowed a little, which was a Christmas treat. (We then returned to Adelaide where it was a 45 degree inferno. Bah.)

Ginger cats at the Great Wall, Mutianyu

I have added Marina Warner's The Dragon Empress (Life and Times of Tz'u-hsi, 1835-1908, Empress Dowager of China) to my TBR.

Empress Cixi was quite a piece of work - I think my favourite story is how she blew the naval budget on a massive (and immovable) stone barge for the Summer Palace.

Cixi's 'clear and peaceful boat, Summer Palace. Beijing

But, as I say, almost nothing else has been read until recently except Georgette Heyer. Her books are witty, charming and full of lovely little historical tidbits. If I have any aims in 2013, let this be the one: no more contemporary insults for me! It's going to be Heyer-isms all the way. I've made myself a little list...

• bear-garden jaw 
• behaved like a smidge 
• bird-witted 
• bleater 
• bracket-faced 
• brandy-faced, cork-brained 
• buffleheaded 
• bum squabbled 
• caper-witted creature 
• cawker 
• chicken-nabob 
• chuckfarthing fellow 
• confirmed sapskull 
• counter-coxcomb 
• cribbage-faced tooth-drawer 
• damned mincing puppy-dog 
• damned scattergood 
• dashed shabrag
• elbow-crooker… reeks of spirits 
• flat-sided screw 
• forty-jawed 
• Friday-faced creature 
• gigantic hobbledehoy
• giglet 
• gin-swilling, cross-eyed numskull 
• lily-livered… miserable man-milliner 
• mackerel-backed 
• man-milliner 
• old muckworm 
• old shagbag 
• pudding-heart
• pure popinjay 
• regular gabble-grinder 
• regular slow-top 
• sadly shatterbrained 
• shagbag 
• simpering, inching macaroni merchant 
• skitterbrain 
• skitterwitted 
• slibberslabber here-and-thereian 
• Stubble it, you old rumstick! 
• such a shuttlehead 
• tongue-valiant 
• trifle cucumberish 
• vile and an abominable young thatchgallows 
• whopstraw 
• windy-wallets 
• young sauce-box

Enjoy 2013!

{review} too many cousins?

Louisa May Alcott Eight Cousins, or The Aunt-Hill (1875)

Louisa May Alcott Rose in Bloom (1876)

(I downloaded both of these for free from girlebooks)

"Well, now, there is one very excellent, necessary, and womanly accomplishment that no girl should be without, for it is a help to rich and poor, and the comfort of families depends upon it. This fine talent is neglected nowadays, and considered old-fashioned, which is a sad mistake, and one that I don't mean to make in bringing up my girl. It should be a part of every girl's education, and I know of a most accomplished lady who will teach you in the best and pleasantest manner."
"Oh, what is it?" cried Rose eagerly, charmed to be met in this helpful and cordial way.
"Housekeeping!" answered Dr. Alec.
"Is that an accomplishment?" asked Rose, while her face fell, for she had indulged in all sorts of vague, delightful dreams.
"Yes; it is one of the most beautiful as well as useful of all the arts a woman can learn. Not so romantic, perhaps, as singing, painting, writing, or teaching, even; but one that makes many happy and comfortable, and home the sweetest place in the world. Yes, you may open your big eyes; but it is a fact that I had rather see you a good housekeeper than the greatest belle in the city. It need not interfere with any talent you may possess, but it is a necessary part of your training, and I hope that you will set about it at once, now that you are well and strong."

In general, I do like old sentimental, morally improving young adult books with a touch of romance. I sometimes suspect that one gets more from them as an adult, too. Yet, for me, these two classics of nineteenth century American fiction did not jell. I felt, as I was reading, that I had passed too far beyond youthful innocence to believe in the characters' intensely black-and-white morality. The tactile relationship of Rose with her guardian and uncle Alec also seemed a little icky. Although I understand that different times have different customs - and also factor in the sentimentalization of children and infantilization of women - I started to get quite cross with myself for not being able to suspend judgement and for being so horribly cynical. It crossed a line for me - something which, of course, certainly says more about me than about Eight Cousins. 

Diving into one of the trunks that stood in a corner, he brought up, after a brisk rummage, a silken cushion, prettily embroidered, and a quaint cup of dark carved wood. "This will do for a start," he said, as he plumped up the cushion and dusted the cup. "It won't do to begin too energetically, or Rose will be frightened. I must beguile her gently and pleasantly along till I've won her confidence, and then she will be ready for anything."

Eight Cousins is the story of 13 year old orphan and heiress Rose Campbell, who comes to live with her guardian Uncle Alec (a doctor) in a town (Boston?) with - as the title (and subtitle The Aunt-Hill) suggests - a large number of aunts and cousins. Rose is a sickly specimen and Uncle Alec experiments on her with all his ideas of how young girls ought to be turned into healthy women. No tight undies, simple clothes, lots of running around, no coffee (she is to milk the cow for her morning milk), and definitely no racy French novels.   

"Upon my word, Rosy, I begin to feel like the man who bought an elephant, and then didn't know what to do with him. I thought I had got a pet and plaything for years to come; but here you are growing up like a bean-stalk, and I shall find I've got a strong-minded little woman on my hands before I can turn round. There's predicament for a man and an uncle!"

I finally found something to agree with, however:

"If you dear little girls would only learn what real beauty is, and not pinch and starve and bleach yourselves out so, you'd save an immense deal of time and money and pain. A happy soul in a healthy body makes the best sort of beauty for man or woman. Do you understand that, my dear?"

Rose gets into tiny bits of strife (I prefer L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables for properly excellent and amusing strife), all of which teach her to become a more giving (i.e. sacrificing) person (in the sick-room, for instance). She is "rather fond of telling instructive tales". The message of sacrifice (women's sacrifice) is blunt (the talented singer - and former kitchen-maid Phebe - will sacrifice her career for love).

But Uncle Alec lifted up the bent head and, looking into the eyes that met his frankly, though either held a tear, he said, with the energy that always made his words remembered: "My little girl, I would face a dozen storms far worse than this to keep your soul as stainless as snow, for it is the small temptations which undermine integrity unless we watch and pray and never think them too trivial to be resisted." Some people would consider Dr. Alec an overcareful man, but Rose felt that he was right, and when she said her prayers that night, added a meek petition to be kept from yielding to three of the small temptations which beset a rich, pretty, and romantic girl extravagance, coquetry, and novel reading.

Source

Rose in Bloom has a different feel from Eight Cousins. This may be because Eight Cousins was published serially, but also perhaps because it is more overtly romantic in tenor. Rose returns home after a few years abroad with Uncle Alec. She is now turning twenty-one and is a good catch for a young man in search of a fortune. Her uncle has put the kibosh on her studying medicine, as he "thought it wouldn't do to have so many M.D.'s in one family" (hmmm...). Again, the morality is spectacularly strait-laced (one naughty suitor is killed off for liking a drink or two) as we follow Rose as she tries to make herself into a philanthropist (learning she should not expect gratitude for "saving Magdalens and teaching convicts") and attempts to find a mate who embodies moral perfection, can write poetry, and looks like her uncle. (Consanguinity is not a problem...)

"Dear love! I will. But I have no fear, except that you will fly too high for me to follow, because I have no wings."
"You shall live the poetry, and I will write it, so my little gift will celebrate your greater one."
"No you shall have all the fame, and I'll be content to be known only as the poet's wife."
"And I'll be proud to own that my best inspiration comes from the beneficent life of a sweet and noble woman."
"Oh, [redacted]! We'll work together and try to make the world better by the music and the love we leave behind us when we go."

In sum... My criticism of the Rose books has been shallow, I know. I wish I'd read these as a teen. A lot of stuff would have passed happily over my head, and I suspect I would have retained the same fondness that I have for Anne of Green Gables. I don't remember feeling this uncomfortable about Little Women, although the sacrificial elements did annoy the hell out of me. 

Incidentally... I have no aunts, uncles or cousins. None.

If you liked this...  anything by L. M. Montgomery. (I adored The Blue Castle {REVIEW}). Also, while reading Rose in Bloom, I thought that I was sadly lacking any Thoreau street cred. Good Thoreau advice: "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all."