{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.

{weekend words}

'Remember the chappie who fell into the drum?' asked Mr Gibson tenderly.
They had met for the first time at a Chelsea Arts Ball - Dolores dressed as a Spanish Dancer, Mr Gibson as a brown paper parcel.
...
'Of course I remember,' whispered Dolores.
'Remember those young devils who started to unwrap me?'
'It didn't matter. You'd pyjamas underneath...'
'I shall never forget how wonderful you looked, pulling me out of the cardboard...
'I couldn't bear to see you laughed at,' murmured Dolores. 'You were too big...' 

Margery Sharp (1957)

The Eye of Love

REVIEWED HERE

{weekend words}

'I've brought a lodger,' said Martha casually. 'I got him from Ma Battleaxe's.'

'The name is Phillips,' Mr Phillips said.

'I thought it was,' agreed Martha. 'He gave notice himself,' she added to Dolores. 'Shall I get my supper?' - and without waiting for a reply stumped through to the kitchen and there as a reward for her exertions opened the last three tins in the larder - a tin of salmon, a tin of pineapple, and a tin of baked beans. It was so long since she'd felt a little sick after a meal, the sensation was rather agreeable; and she easily settled herself down with a few plain biscuits.

Margery Sharp The Eye of Love (1957)

{review} the eye of love

Margery Sharp The Eye of Love (1957)

The Eye of Love is a Virago Modern Classic and a blessed return to the light of day for a wonderful Margery Sharp book. As the world's biggest Cluny Brown fan {REVIEW}, I leapt on this book and devoured it. The Eye of Love is set in 1932 and traces the relationships of two long-term lovers who are forced to part in order for the male partner to save his business from bankruptcy and his mother from penury. Harry Gibson must marry the "unmarriageable daughter" of the business rival who has taken over his failing fur salon. The 'eye of love' enables a quite prosaic couple to see each other not as the scrawny ageing Miss Dolores Diver and the pudgy dull Mr Gibson, but rather as star-crossed lovers, "my Spanish Rose" and "my King Hal". To each other they have remained as ageless and fascinating as at their first meeting:

'Remember the chappie who fell into the drum?' asked Mr Gibson tenderly.
They had met for the first time at a Chelsea Arts Ball - Dolores dressed as a Spanish Dancer, Mr Gibson as a brown paper parcel.
...
'Of course I remember,' whispered Dolores.
'Remember those young devils who started to unwrap me?'
'It didn't matter. You'd pyjamas underneath...'
'I shall never forget how wonderful you looked, pulling me out of the cardboard...
'I couldn't bear to see you laughed at,' murmured Dolores. 'You were too big...'

Their lives, after their melancholy farewell ("They clung in genuine and ridiculous grief, collapsed together on the Rexine settee"), are filled with despair. Dolores, no longer a kept woman, must take in a lodger who attempts to ingratiate himself into her charms, assuming that the house - decorated as befits a middle-class mistress - is evidence that his landlady is a wealthy woman. Mr Gibson fares little better engaged to the jealous and hideously affectionate Miranda ("he felt he could hardly trust himself with Miranda at the top of the steep office flight"):

Kissing her had been like kissing a sea-horse. Mr Gibson knocked back his drink thankfully. ('I shall turn into a sozzler,' thought Mr Gibson - dispassionate as a physician diagnosing the course of a disease.)

He is fortunate to find companionship with Miranda's father. Mr Joyce has taken over Harry's failing business and made a success of it and got his daughter off his hands. Both provide each other with some much-needed masculine support amid the wedding chaos - "the millinery inferno" as Sharp brilliantly describes it.

But Dolores, having spent the past ten years devoted to her lover, has lost all of her friends, and sinks further into despair. The (ghastly) sitting-room which the lovers furnished together remains a shrine to her lost love:

'King Hal!' for instance, Dolores would cry - before the bronze lady: an obvious piece of nonsensicality. Or 'Big Harry!' ejaculated Miss Diver, caressing a stuffed ermine.

The observer of Dolores' depression is her odd young orphaned niece Martha who too has an 'eye of love' - she has the ability to see beauty in the everyday objects of daily life which she tries to draw: the gas oven, a street grating which looks like a Greek temple to her, a saucepan:

Martha suddenly perceived that the whole shape of the saucepan, foreshortened pan-part and straight handle, fitted into another, invisible shape: a long oval. It was a very happy moment.

Everything works out in the end, of course and the right people get their comeuppance. It is a sad and funny book, a bit Miss Pettigrew in parts. Highly recommended.

Rating: 10/10.

Words I'm going to use from now on: cantrip; ruddled; gage.

Typo: p.98 - natural]y

If you liked this... Cluny Brown or Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Tangenitally, I was also a little reminded, by the constrained life of Mr Gibson in the stuffy Knightsbridge flat of his fiancée's family, where everyone tries to be very English and shed their (hidden) Continental ways, of, I think it is, Anita Brookner's Family and Friends. (I say 'I think' as it's sometimes hard to distinguish one Brookner from another and I've packed mine away so I can't check).

  

{review} cluny brown

Margery Sharp Cluny Brown (1944)

 Source: coverbrowser

"The trouble with young Cluny," said Mr. Porritt, "is she don't seem to know her place."

At last it was out, Cluny Brown's crime; and her uncle could never have put into words -- not even to a stranger, not even in a park -- the uneasiness it caused him. To know one's place was to Arnold Porritt the basis of all civilised, all rational life; keep to your class, and you couldn't go wrong. A good plumber, backed by his Union, could look a duke in the eye; and a good dustman, backed by his Union, could look Mr. Porritt in the eye. Dukes, of course, had no Union, and it was Mr. Porritt's impression that they were lying pretty low.

I can't understand why Cluny Brown hasn't been picked up in the revival of 1930s/40s' fiction. It is screaming out to join The Bloomsbury Group. Track down a copy: it's a wonderful book and I keep returning to it as an old favourite.

Mr. Porritt's world -- circa 1938 -- his 'place' can be illustrated by one fine passage:

He sat down and removed his boots, placing them neatly on the lower shelf of a bamboo whatnot. The top of the whatnot bore a chenille mat, a brass tray, a brass pot, in the pot a fine rubber-plant; the whole standing just where it ought, plumb in the centre of the bow-window.

Poor Cluny Brown is a girl who doesn't know her place. Mr. Porritt, her plumber uncle, despairing of the naïveté and curiosity which lands her in a series of social scrapes (when, for instance, she decides to try her hand at plumbing and is led astray by scented soap and strong cocktails), despatches her "into service" in deepest Devonshire as a parlour-maid. After all, she's much too tall (though perfect for a parlour-maid) and not particularly good-looking either ("Mr. Ames... took one look at Cluny's nose and dismissing all frolicsome thoughts at once led the way into a small malodorous scullery."). But Cluny possesses the quality of unexpectedness, and all who encounter her are changed forever. First there's the Colonel who gives Cluny a ride from the station:

"Could I keep a dog at Friars Carmel?"
"I don't see why --" began the Colonel; and paused. For the last few minutes he had quite forgotten he was talking to a parlourmaid, but now he remembered. Well, of course she couldn't keep a dog; parlourmaids didn't. "I doubt it," said the Colonel hastily.
Cluny said nothing; but she turned her black eyes upon him and in a most mournful look. What a look it was! At once bright and liquid, tragic and brave, innocent and deep... And under the influence of Cluny's gaze a strangely unorthodox notion -- his first in ten years -- suddenly struck him: what was the use of treating servants well, giving 'em good food and all that, if you wouldn't let 'em keep a dog? He felt really disturbed.

Meanwhile, in hitherto peaceful Friars Carmel, the heir to the estate, has invited a exiled Polish intellectual who fell foul of the Nazis to stay indefinitely with his parents in the countryside. It's somewhat of an adventure to Andrew, offering shelter to this refugee, but he has no idea what unexpected trouble Adam Belinski will bring to his parents, his girlfriend and, of course, the new parlour-maid. Belinski, the 'Professor', is drawn wonderfully well:

"...Look at Paderewski -- the greatest musician in the world, we had to make him President as well. If you win a motor-race, you are made secretary to the Board of Trade. I have a success with my writings, so I must become a lecturer. Thank heaven they did not give me the Police Force..."

Cluny and the Professor represent the cracks appearing in the social and political fabric of England as Europe moves inevitably towards war. They both serve to bring a heightened sense of self-awareness to those around them. When Cluny-the-parlourmaid is allowed to visit the Colonel's dog, the housekeeper "remembered some of Mr. Andrew's sayings... about cracks in civilisation, the breaking-up of society, world revolution, the decay of the West; and for the first time, their meaning struck home."

Andrew's parents are wonderfully stereotypical mad aristocrats:

"How well you speak English," observed Lady Carmel.
"It is the universal tongue."
"Ha!" exclaimed Sir Henry, much pleased. "That's what I say. As a young man my dear parents sent me on a tour round the world. I left speaking English and I came back speaking English, and I never spoke a word of anything else the whole time. Didn't need to."
"And did you enjoy your travels, sir?"
"No," said Sir Henry.

Of Lady Carmel:

It made no difference to her reception of him whether Mr. Belinski had been the victim of appendicitis or of mob violence; but it made a great difference to Lady Carmel, who was mildly interested in the first, but could not bear to contemplate the second.

Will Cluny fall for the dull and sober charms of Mr. Wilson the chemist? Can Andrew wrestle his beloved away from the exotic Pole? Can parlourmaids keep dogs?

Several years before she had made quite a friend of an old man who took a tortoise into Kensington Gardens; and he told her he was never sure whether the tortoise enjoyed these outings or not, whether it didn't after all think, damn this grass.

This is a wonderful book, deliciously written and full of wicked self-knowledge: the lady chatting idly with Cluny's uncle in Kensington Gardens while she awaits her younger lover is already translating their mundane conversation into something more piquant:

Even as she smiled fragments of dialogue were forming in her mind -- "But people always talk to me!" she would say. "I feel like that man in Kipling who sat still and let the animals run over him." Or was Kipling just a little bit -- dating? "Like that man in the jungle," perhaps -- and leave his provenance vague...

BTW, there is a 1946 film of Cluny Brown with Charles Boyer as Adam Belinski and Jennifer Jones as Cluny. It is worth watching if it appears again, though it can't compete with the book.

Rating: 10/10

If you liked this... if you can imagine a book that combined the sense of ridiculous of a Just William book, the sparkly romance of a Georgette Heyer and the knowing eye of Zuleika Dobson, that'd be the book to read next.

Source: wikipedia