{misc.} trains and buttered toast

John Betjeman Trains and Buttered Toast (2006)

(more info on the cover)

Trains and Buttered Toast is my current on-the-go non-fiction book. I haven't actually finished it, but last night I read a chapter that I can't resist mentioning here. The book is a collection of Betjeman's radio talks for the BBC mostly from the 1930s to 1950s. The talks cover a nice range of interests - modern architecture, urban planning, the pleasures of the seaside, churches, famous men and women, wartime life, and so on. It is a lovely book to dip in to, and quite funny in places (his views on modern town-planning are pretty snarky). 

But the chapter which caught my eye was the transcript of a talk called 'Yesterday's Fiction', delivered on the Home Service on Monday 21st August 1944:

Instead of telling you about the best of this week's latest books, because there are so very few being published just now, I am going to review some old favourites. I am going to review some Edwardian novelists - the sort of people who were very popular before the last war.

Of course my ears immediately pricked up at that!

The names I shall mention are probably to be found on the back of a book within three miles, possibly within three yards, of everyone listening this evening who lives in these islands. I shall choose authors who have never produced a wholly bad book and often produced a very good one. And while you are are going away to get a pencil to take down the new names I mention, I will indulge in a short background sketch of Edwardian novelists.

So who does Betjeman rate? First up is Anthony Hope ("top of my list... for consistent high standards") - I do indeed have him on my shelves within three yards (or close!), as I really rate his The Prisoner of Zenda as a classic tale of adventure and chivalry. I have also read the sequel Rupert of Hentzau (Rupert is a very naughty young man indeed), but the rest of Hope's novels have passed me by. Betjeman already notes that only these two seem to be still read, and recommends The King's Mirror and The Dolly Dialogues (the latter he suggests is a combination of Kipling and Wilde!).  

source

And then - another favourite I want to explore further - George Gissing. His The Odd Women is indeed as Betjeman describes, "a deeply agonizing book". He suggests Gissing's The House of Cobwebs (short-stories) as a taste of something different. 

Next? Someone I've not heard of, but surely some of you keen explorers of lost classics will know the name of the "lighter and totally forgotten author" Miss S. MacNaughton [sic - it is in fact MacNaughtan]. Betjeman tells us he was recommended her books by "Miss Elizabeth Bowen and Miss Rose Macaulay", which is a pretty good recommendation!

Miss MacNaughton specializes in good, kindly people in fairly easy circumstances and her novels have happy and probable endings.

(He suggests A Lame Dog's Diary, available free at project gutenberg; but the one which caught my eye was "The Fortune of Christina McNab, the story of a raw Scottish heiress let loose on smart London society" - that sounds just my cup of tea.) 

Who else?

...Conan Doyle, Booth Tarkington, Leonard Merrick (always good), E. F. Benson (nearly always), N. and A. M. Williamson, Rider Haggard, Stanley Weyman (according to taste), Seton Merriman (often good), 'Q', Somerville and Ross (to me, always good), H. A. Vachell, A. E. W. Mason and many, many more.

Of these, Conan Doyle will likely never be out of favour. I thought Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Amberson's was a good read (I reviewed it here). Benson still has plenty of fans (myself included). I've not read any Rider Haggard for what feels like a century, and really should revisit him. 'Q', of course, was reintroduced to a new generation by 84 Charing Cross Road. The only other one who rings a bell is Mason, with his The Four Feathers (and who knew there'd been what sounds like a ghastly Heath Ledger remake?).

Betjeman notes two other highly recommended reads: Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands as a classic spy story (true: but too much messing about on boats, and anything involving reading maps or train timetables is always wasted on me! - "there has probably never been written so alluring an account of the delights of the amateur yachtsman"); and - unknown to me - Mary Cholmondeley's (I assume that's a "Chumly" pronunciation?) Red Pottage. He adds the rather telling comment that "autobiographical novels are often an author's - and in particular an authoress's - best novel": apparently Red Pottage is "a picture of rectory life and mental cruelty and frustration and stupidity therein among the lush, lovely and uncaring landscape of Shropshire." Oh dear... 

(the Cholmondeley cover is an Arthur Rackham drawing and you can buy it for a mere $1750)

This was a nice little essay, which gave me quite a few ideas for future reading, and I am happy to note that the next chapter is 'Wartime Tastes in Reading', which I hope to find just as useful.

{review} incidents in the rue laugier

hosted by Karen (Bookbath)
& Tamara (Thyme for Tea).

hosted by Ali at Heavenali

Argh! What happened to July? I've been reading a lot and writing near to zero. Fortunately in this post I can cunningly cover the two bases of Paris in July and Brookner in July. I feel wonderfully efficient...  

Anita Brookner Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995) 

    

It took me a while to warm to this book, I have to say, and I think that this was due to my expectations about the structure being somewhat confounded from the beginning. When I finally became swept up in the narrative, something clicked, and by the time I had finished I rather thought I had just read something remarkable. 

At its most simple (which it isn't), Incidents in the Rue Laugier tells the story of the meeting and marriage of Maud Gonthier of Dijon and Edward Harrison of London. Since this is a Brookner, one expects - and finds - little evidence of great passion, profound happiness or exciting events. (I should say, at this point, that I would be horribly disturbed to find these in a Brookner.) 

It is 1971: Edward is trying to escape the burden of an unexpected inheritance (appropriately enough, a bookshop) that will put an end to his dreams of travelling the world. His Cambridge chum, the rich, charismatic and predatory Tyler (Apolline is an apt description his "atavistic" nature) has put him on to a good thing - he can stay in a room of an acquaintance's empty apartment in the Rue Laugier in Paris (for people like me who love to know if a place really exists, yes it does, in the 17th arrondissement near Place des Ternes). Then comes another invitation from Tyler - to join him at another house near Meaux. And it is at La Gaillarderie near Meaux that Maud is visiting her aunt and falls for... Well, I'm not going to give that away, am I?! 

There are a number of familiar threads running through this novel - the main characters possess a great deal of reserve (Edward "would not be adverse to celibacy"; Maud has inherited her mother's "natural hauteur"; she desires her "prelapsarian integrity"), both are trapped by a need to maintain a personal, almost physical integrity, and forced to do what is expected rather than enter into risk (risk is such a point of vulnerability in a Brookner). Hope must always be sacrificed to reality. Passion is to be sacrificed to respectability. Silence replaces communication. Love cannot save one from loneliness.

They were not marrying for love, whatever he might think. She had only to glance across the table and meet his unhappy smile to understand that. They were marrying because of one false step, one regrettable encounter, one shared shock; they were marrying because their lives were already going wrong, because they understood how and when they had gone wrong, because events that had taken place in the rue Laugier had bound them together, while at the same time making them incapable of explaining those events, and their prehistory, to a third party.

This is such an interesting quotation for me, because of what I have thus far omitted to tell you about the structure of the book. At the beginning and the end of the book, Brookner provides a framing device that overarches the narrative -- of Maud and Edward's daughter packing away her late mother's possessions and finding a notebook:

The notebook was old, slightly bent at the corner, the pages stuck together. There were only a few notations, apparently written on the same day. 'Dames Blanches. La Gaillarderie. Place des Ternes. Sang. Edward.' Further down the same page, and written with a different pen, a recipe for Sauce mousseline. Then a short list of book titles. Last of all Proust's opening line: 'Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.'

The daughter contemplates the impossibility "that a life could be covered by those so brief notations" -- this lack of knowledge is "frustrating": "Something predated me, and I had no idea what it was." What is this mysterious, missing "prehistory", from which the daughter is excluded, given that the "indelible" nature of her parents' histories is also an indelible part of who she is today? She wants their memories:

And the lives of those we love must hold some meaning for us, and if that meaning is withheld, who can blame the survivor for his or her curiosity, even if that curiosity holds as much mourning as celebration?

And, so, the reader comes to understand that the lives s/he has followed may well be "fantasy", the product of a self-proclaimed unreliable narrator; and this adds another level of uneasiness to the narrative itself. For it is, I think, an uneasy read when one remembers the structure and starts to think about who is really narrating these events: then the hints of sexual aggression, the strangely angry silences, the sense of entrapment take on other, darker shades of meaning. And how do we feel about recreating a parent's life when they've deliberately revealed nothing?

There's another little joy to be found in the text -- references to books. Apart from Proust -- of immense importance and likely the key to this book -- we are offered an image of the ideal European lady transposed to England reading "her Elizabeth Bowen and her Rosamond Lehmann and her Elizabeth Taylor". And Edward, owner of a bookshop, brings his wife home books with women's names:

Out of a delicate feeling for his wife, the feeling that subsisted when all others seemed stale and crude, he concentrated on French books, putting on one side for her books with the names of women, La Cousine Bette, or La Petite Fadette, or Germinie Lacerteux, books he thought suitable to her frail composure, having forgotten what quiet horrors such titles concealed...

I've gone on a bit longer than I anticipated, as I always think I need to defend Brookner from her detractors who note how little happens, how literary everyone is, how much the heroines needs a kick, how everyone seems a good twenty to forty years behind the times (there's sex, post-natal depression and aeroplanes in here you people!!). But what about how limpidly beautiful are her sentences, how quietly insightful and incisive her descriptions, how brilliantly constructed her narratives [and so on!]? I suspect that this particular Brookner will not convert anyone, but I came to think that it might be one of her best. 

Thanks to Ali for hosting Brookner in July and to Karen & Tamara for hosting Paris in July. I've thoroughly enjoyed this month of reading.

{review} creepy, noir, & memoir

What have I been reading? 

Michel Faber Under the Skin (2000)

I cannot actually say anything about this book as almost anything could be a spoiler! Um, it's about Scotland, hitchhikers, and a woman with a lot of scars. The setting is contemporary. I loved it. Anything else? It is nothing like The Crimson Petal and the White. If you like well-written, creepy books with slow and horrible revelations, this is for you. (Hmm. That rather sums up The Crimson Petal as well!)

Dorothy B. Hughes The Blackbirder (1943)

A fine, albeit highly melodramatic read for noir fans. The Blackbirder is someone who smuggles people and other cargo in and out of the United States during the Second World War. If you can afford the service, the blackbirder will organize your escape – whether that be from Nazi occupied France, or from justice.

"I didn't even know there was a Blackbirder, not really. It's all been whispers, a legend, something a refugee believes in because he needs to believe in it, because he might have a desperate need for such a man some day."

"To escape a murder charge?" Schein pointed.

Her mouth hardened. "To escape Gestapo agents who somehow manage to reach this country despite the F.B.I."

Blaike's voice was quiet. "Couldn't it be they enter by such a method as blackbirding?"

This was why the F.B.I. was searching for the Blackbirder. They couldn't chance the entrance of dangerous aliens among honest refugees. Nor the escape dangerous aliens over the same route. Somehow she hadn't thought of it that way. The Blackbirder to her had been only a shadowy figure of refuge. He was still that but a sinister blackness darkened his shadow. His helping wings could be abused. She shook away the tremor.

The heroine of Hughes' gripping thriller has been in hiding in the States since her perilous escape from France. She cannot take her safety for granted, for she is connected to some very powerful and very bad people. Moreover, she has lost contact with the love of her life. Then, one night in New York, she is recognised, and must flee for her life – south to New Mexico to find the blackbirder and search for her lover. But the FBI is on her track, and it looks like the Gestapo is catching up too… 

The atmosphere of a country that may not be sanctuary it seems is brilliantly evoked by Hughes – who can you trust? If you want to read some Hughes, I suggest In a Lonely Place {REVIEW} -- one of the best books I read in 2011.

Molly Lefebure Murder on the Home Front: A true story of morgues, murderers and mystery in the Blitz (1954 [2013])

I had very high hopes for this book, hoping it might be a bit of a World War Two meets CSI with better frocks. And it is that. Molly Lefebure was a journalist in the early 1940s when she accepted a secretarial post with the not-quite-as-famous-as-Spilsbury pathologist Dr Keith Simpson. She took her type-writer and shorthand pad into the mortuaries of London and the surrounding areas to take down Dr Simpson's autopsy findings verbatim. Throughout the war she was witness to some of the most famous investigations of horrible crimes; then, in 1954 she published this book as a record of her wartime service. 

The reissue comes at an interesting time, I think – as the romanticized vision of Londoners in the Blitz is being subject to a bit of a more or less candid debunking. Yes, people were tremendously brave – but the war also allowed a lot of clandestine activity to flourish under the blackout. It was also often hard to bring criminals to justice – given the ease with which they might be shipped out or return overseas or be blown to bits before they could be charged. Lefebure's narrative is perhaps not for the squeamish, though I was more troubled by something else, namely her constant air of occupying the higher moral ground to her victims: she has little sympathy for a fifteen year good-time girl who is strangled by two US soldiers, "more a matter of sordid accident than murder". The same judgement is not applied to a fourteen year old innocent, assaulted on her way home from Sunday School. Her remarks on prostitutes (that 'ancient but abysmal profession'), the lower classes, and the poor in general are achingly snobbish ("I wondered… why the State cannot prosecute people for being dirty"). She's quite a fan of hanging. 

However, if you can swallow that as a product of its time (and as part of a journalistic love of sensation, where everything is to be regarded as 'material'), the book is a fascinating insight into the daily dangers of life in the Blitz for a professional woman. Her writing is occasionally absolutely striking – such as the shrapnel at Southend which "fell in little showers, more cruelly than the summer rain", or the corpses of babies, "like weary imitation flowers". This memoir is apparently being turned into a TV series, and I shall be fascinated to see if our heroine becomes more empathetic and less judgmental in the transition.

Oh, and some July things... I'm gearing up for my third year of Paris in July, hosted by Karen at BookBath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea. Sadly this year I won't actually be in Paris, as I was last year. But I'm prepared to make the best of it... ;-)  And HeavenAli is hosting Anita Brookner Reading Month too: I'm hoping to find a Brookner I haven't read, but, it's long been my problem that they all seem to similar (in a good way) that I can't remember what I've read... Something to work on!

{review} barbara pym reading week

‘Reading, were you?’ Rupert picked up the book which lay on the little table by the fire. It turned out to be the poems of Tennyson, bound in green morocco. Could she really have been reading that? he wondered, looking around for the novel stuffed behind a cushion.

‘Yes, but I was just going to make some coffee,’ said Ianthe. ‘Would you like some?’

How convenient women were, Rupert thought, accepting her offer, the way they were always ‘just going’ to make coffee or tea or perhaps had just roasted a joint in the oven or made a cheese soufflé. (A Suitable Attachment)

I'm very late to the (tea?) party - though I have been playing along on twitter a little - but I have been so enjoying reading everyone's posts for Barbara Pym Reading Week, the brilliant idea of Thomas at My Porch and Amanda of Fig & Thistle. However, my new computer finally arrived yesterday (the whole saga is worthy of an entry to white whine, but I shan't bore you), so I'm back in blogging action now.

But, hey, plenty of time for reading without all those distractions provided by functioning technology, and I was really pleased that I managed to read five books by Barbara Pym this week. I loved them all, although I think that Excellent Women is my favourite (so far!).

So which ones did I read?

Excellent Women (1952) as I noted: wonderful, so funny and so sharp and quietly catty. And I was so happy to see Mildred Lathbury pop up (in name) in two other of my reads, so I found out what happened to her. This was my first Barbara Pym read, and I am now hooked. I may even like her more than Anita Brookner. Oh, perhaps not, but it is close...

Which is interesting, as my second read, Quartet in Autumn (1977) was a book with really Brooknerish resonances - about people who fail to "make contact" - although also reminiscent of another magnificent book about ageing, friendship and loneliness, Muriel Spark's Memento Mori {REVIEW}. It also captured the hideous ugliness of the 1970s really well.

Of the four only Letty used the library for her own pleasure and possible edification. She had always been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realize that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.

  

An Unsuitable Attachment (1963 - famously rejected by the publisher and not published until 1982) had a wonderful heroine in Ianthe, with her perfect little house and quiet careful life who is nevertheless prepared to take a chance on a happy ending rather than seek a safer alternative.

The man who had offered the seat had seen Ianthe as a tall fragile-looking woman in a pretty blue hat that matched her eyes. He might also have noticed that her dark hair was touched with grey and that although she was not exactly smart there was a kind of elegance about her. She saw herself perhaps as an Elizabeth Bowen heroine – for one did not openly identify oneself with Jane Austen’s heroines – and To The North was her favourite novel.

However, it was, obviously, the cat Faustina who really grabbed me in this one!

‘Yes – is that her coming now? I thought I saw somebody pass the window,’ said Sophia. Her tone was a little agitated for she had also just seen Faustina mount the refreshment table and pick her way delicately among the dishes of the cakes and savouries, sniffing the air, ready to pause and pounce when she came upon something that took her fancy.

After this I read Pym's first work, Some Tame Gazelle (1950), which was much more - like Excellent Women - obviously humorous in tone. I loved the sisters: Harriet, who likes to feed pale curates ("They were so immature and always made the same kind of conversation"), and the thoughtful Belinda who has loved the Archdeacon next door for thirty barren years.

She felt she could hardly agree that Agatha was elderly when she herself was a year older and thought of herself as only middle-aged. And yet, middle-aged or elderly, what was the difference really? Calm of mind, all passion spent … she had known that before she was thirty.

...

Belinda had decided to wear her blue chiffon. Henry had once said that he liked her in pale colours, and although that had been over thirty years ago it was possible that he still might.

The wicked one-liners in this book were quite wonderful. As a classicist, I am thinking of having this put on a t-shirt (perhaps in embroidery?): "I had a classical education and it isn’t a very good training for scintillating conversation."

‘Now, Ricardo, you mustn’t lose hope,’ said Belinda comfortably. ‘I know she is fond of you and even if she will not love you, always remember’ – her eyes lighted on the works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson – ‘that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I always think those lines are such a great comfort; so many of us have loved and lost.’ She frowned: nobody wanted to be one of many, and she did not like this picture of herself, only one of a great crowd of dreary women. Perhaps Tennyson was rather hackneyed after all.

Finally, I read Jane and Prudence (1953) about two university women whose lives have taken quite different paths, while their friendship has remained true. Can Jane find Prudence a suitable husband from the unmarried men (perhaps the handsome leonine philandering widower Fabian who has a large photo of himself on his wife's grave!) in the village where she tries but always fails to live up to her (literary) expectations of the appropriate activities for a vicar's wife?

‘Yes, of course,’ Jane agreed. ‘The church is going to look very nice, I think.’

‘Oh, Mother, you always say that,’ said Flora, Mrs Glaze having left them alone together. ‘And you never really notice.’

‘No, I notice the things one shouldn’t,’ said Jane.

I quite liked how a little bit of life at the time crept into this book - rationed food, for instance. I love reading about food in books, and Pym's books certainly offered me a lot of treats (apart from liver). I felt like a nice very dry sherry quite a bit as I read too; but not, I think, a madeira:

‘This is Madeira,’ said Mervyn. ‘It seems a suitable present for a respectable unmarried lady who might be visited by the clergy.’

The 'excellent women' ("It was not the excellent women who got married...") who carried the parish / village / suburb / street along in all these books thoroughly resonated with me (over-educated spinster, perhaps even "comfortably indifferent to dress?"!).

Prudence’s flat was in the kind of block where Jane imagined people might be found dead, though she had never said this to Prudence herself; it seemed rather a macabre fancy and not one to be confided to an unmarried woman living alone.

I also loved the literary allusions scattered so aptly through the texts. In addition, I was reminded that I enjoy books where nothing much seems to happen (so, my passion for Anita Brookner) and what does happen happens so quietly that it hardly creates a ripple. Of course, one doesn't want this in every book, but it is really very relaxing at times! It also amused me quite a lot that so many inhabitants of these books seemed to have jobs that no one quite knew what they were, including the employees, in a "vague cultural organisation" (J&P), or "something to do with records or filing, it was thought, nobody knew for certain" (Q in A). The ordinary, the everyday - these are the stars of these books.

I am so happy that I have the pleasure of eight more of Barbara Pym's books to enjoy in the future. Many thanks to Thomas and Amanda for creating Barbara Pym Reading Week!

Barbara Pym with cat

{misc.} give a book?

Source: theanimalarium.blogspot.com.au via skiourophile

The artist is Gerard Rowe, sometime in the 1950s.

{review} wildfire at midnight

Argh! My internet has been playing up at home. I've set up some posts to go out automatically, but my commenting will likely be sporadic. Frustrating...

Mary Stewart Wildfire at Midnight (1956)

So we faced each other, the murderer and I, marooned together… alone together, above the silent world, on the mountain where already he had sent three people to their deaths.

He was smiling still… He liked me, and he was going to kill me. He was sorry, but he was going to kill me.

Another satisfying Mary Stewart book, with plenty of red herrings, a spot of old and new romance, lovely scenery (Skye), some nasty murders, and a smart, beautifully dressed heroine (Titian hair, exotic name) who isn't afraid to do that INCREDIBLY ANNOYING THING WHERE YOU WANDER OFF BY YOURSELF EVEN THOUGH THERE'S A MANIAC ON THE LOOSE. 

Oh, sorry, spoiler...

Rating: Sometimes well-done predictability is what one wants in a book.

If you liked this... I liked this one much more than Nine Coaches Waiting and Touch Not the Cat and nearly as much as The Moonspinners or My Brother Michael. I've reviewed some of them here. Then again, I'm currently reading The Ivy Tree and wondering if that is going to be my absolute favourite.

{weekend words}

The waiters hovered beside us, the courses came, delicious and appetizing, and the empty plates vanished as if by magic. I remember red mullet, done somehow with lemons, and a succulent golden-brown fowl bursting with truffles and flanked by tiny peas, then a froth of ice and whipped cream dashed with kirsch, and the fine smooth caress of the wine through it all. Then, finally, apricots and big black grapes, and coffee. The waiter removed the little silver filtres, and vanished, leaving us alone in our alcove. The liqueur brandy was swimming in its own fragrance in the enormous iridescent glasses, and for a moment I watched it idly, enjoying its rich smooth gleam, then I leaned back against the cushions and looked about me with the eyes of a patient who has just woken from the first long natural sleep after an anaesthetic. Where before the colours had been blurred and heightened, and the outlines undefined, proportions unstable, and sounds hollow and wavering, now the focus had shifted sharply, and drawn the bright little restaurant into sharp dramatic outline.

Mary Stewart (1954)  

Madam, Will You Talk?

{weekend words}

That a woman should look right in the country is always very important to Englishmen; another thing to which they often attach considerable importance is legs. Richard Atherley now observed that Hetta’s legs, stuck out carelessly in front of her on the sand, though strong and shapely were rather thick, as Central European legs are apt to be; they were not in the least like Julia Probyn’s long lovely ones. And with a sort of pang of surprised emotion the young man realised that in this girl, at any rate, he could even love thick legs.

Ann Bridge (1958)  

The Portuguese Escape

{review} memento mori

Muriel Spark Momento Mori (1959)

This is a post for Muriel Spark Reading Week, hosted by Simon (stuck in a book) and Harriet (harriet devine), with lovely logo by Thomas (my porch). I have really enjoyed reading everyone's posts and adding lots of titles to my TBR. Thank you Simon and Harriet for hosting! My first review for this week was of Robinson, here.

This is the dustwrapper on my 1980 Macmillan hardback, which I see - based on the number of tickets and receipts which fell out of it when I opened it up - that I bought on a trip to Perth (Western Australia) a few years ago.  

I quite like this cover: the starkness is a good reflection of the book's contents, as is the mock epigraphic typeface suggesting sepulchral inscription. I could even suggest that the Imperial purple nicely plays with the Latin title, and the lilac background is suitably stereotypically old ladyish. I may be getting carried away, of course. 

To business: Memento Mori is hands-down my favourite Muriel Spark book so far. I could not put it down. Its blend of characterisation, drama, pathos, poignancy and wit was spot on. This will be a book that definitely goes on my Books of the Year list.

Someone is ringing a group of senior citizens and leaving the message, "Remember you must die". Is it a mischievous friend or a disgruntled relative? Is it mass hysteria? Perhaps it is Death himself.

   

People talk about the precision of Spark's writing (especially in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). In Memento Mori this precision is coupled with the most remarkable sense of seriocomic timing: "Mrs. Anthony knew instinctively that Mrs. Pettigrew was a kindly woman. Her instinct was wrong." Memento Mori has some really quite notable instances of this effect (it isn't paraprosdokian but I am sure there's a word for this type of startling effect):

At eleven o'clock next morning Miss Valvona and Miss Taylor were wheeled into the hospital chapel. They were accompanied by three other grannies, not Catholics, from the Maud Long Ward who had been attached to Granny Barnacle in various ways, including those of love, scorn, resentment and pity.

Or:

Mabel Pettigrew thought: I can read him like a book. She had not read a book for over forty years, could never concentrate on reading, but this nevertheless was her thought…

   

Memento Mori is a remarkable book. The subject matter is so terribly sad and poignant: the terrors of senescence; loss of independence; neglect; the failing mind and body; the loss of friends and lovers and memories and fame; the "lacerating familiarity" and depersonalisation and over-scientification of aged-care; the fight to retain one's dignity in the ruins of one's body; living too long; the impossibility of simple tasks; abuse of the elderly; helplessness; poverty; loneliness; the fear of what is to come; the constant presence of death. However, the plot and the delivery border on the carnivalesque. I have no idea why it works so well. 

This is a terribly moving book. I suspect many readers will find it appallingly depressing, despite its tone, for it is indeed a memento mori - a literal reminder that we all must die.

"Granny Green has gone," said Miss Taylor.
"Ah yes, I noticed a stranger occupying her bed. Now what was Granny Green?"
"Arterio-sclerosis. It affected her heart in the end."
"Yes, well, it is said we are all as old as our arteries. Did she make a good death?"
"I don't know."
"You were asleep at the time," he said.
"No, I was awake. There was a certain amount of fuss."
"She didn't have a peaceful end?"
"No, not peaceful for us."
"I always like to know," he said, "whether a death is a good or bad one. Do keep a look-out."
For a moment she utterly hated him. "A good death," she said, "doesn't reside in the dignity of bearing but in the disposition of the soul."
Suddenly he hated her. "Prove it," he said.
"Disprove it," she said wearily.

Rating: 10/10. Fantastic.

If you liked this... another Muriel Spark book I liked almost as much as this was The Girls of Slender Means, which I read ages ago but never managed to review. As a number of people have noted this week, Spark's books can be hard to nail down!