"The Buddha in the Attic" by Julie Otsuka

This remarkable book dispenses with the norms of writing in order to express the experiences of a community.

It starts with a boat-full of Japanese women heading to the USA to marry the husbands as selected by the matchmakers. It describes their disillusioned dreams as they follow the full immigrant experience, working as agricultural labourers and domestic servants, working their way up to self-employment. And babies, lots of babies. And tragedy, a lot of that too. And then, as most of them reach prosperity, the aftermath of Pearl Harbour sees the whole community interned as enemy aliens and transported to labour camps.

I knew something about the Japanese-American experience having read, years ago, Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. But 'The Buddha ...' is told in a completely different way. There are no individual character arcs. History happens but there is little in the way of a conventional plot. Instead the experiences of the women are listed in sentence after sentence, creating a powerful chanting effect. Here are two examples: 

• “Some of us on the boat were from Kyoto, and were delicate and fair, and had lived our entire lives in darkened rooms at the back of the house. Some of us were from Nara, and prayed to our ancestors three times a day, and swore could still hear the temple bells ringing. Some of us were farmers' daughters from Yamaguchi with thick wrists and broad shoulders who had never gone to bed after nine. Some of us were from a small mountain hamlet in the Yamanashi and had only recently seen our first train. Some of us were from Tokyo, and had seen everything, and spoke beautiful Japanese, and did not mix much with any of the others. Many more of us were from Kagoshima ...” (Come, Japanese!)
• “Home was a bit of straw in John Lyman's barn alongside his prize horses and cows. Home was a corner of the washhouse in Stockton's Cannery Ranch. Home was a bunk in a rusty boxcar in Lompoc. Home was an old chicken coop in Willows that the Chinese had lived in before us. Home was a flea-ridden mattress in a corner of a packing shed in Dixon. Home was a bit of hay atop three apple crates beneath an apple tree in Fred Stadelman’s apple orchard ...” (Whites)

The whole book is like this. It is mesmerisingly effective.

Nouveau roman? Certainly it reminded me of Natalie Sarraute's Tropismes. But whereas that book feels like an impressionist painting, whose message lies in the creation of an ambience, this is a collage of fragments with the punch of pop art.

Selected quotes:

• “In our dreams she would always be three and as she was when we last saw her: a tiny figure in a dark red kimono squatting at the edge of a puddle, utterly entranced by the sight of a dead floating bee.” (Come, Japanese!)
• “They gave us new names. They called us Helen and Lily. They called us Margaret. They called us Pearl.” (Whites) As ‘Whites’ might suggest, three of these four names refer directly to skin colour: lilies and pearls are white and Margaret is a name derived from the Latin word for pearl.
• “We threw out their cheese by mistake. ‘I thought it was rotten,’ we tried to explain. ‘That's how it's supposed to smell,’ we were told.” (Whites)

It was a New York Times bestseller but don't let that put you off (some truly dreadful books have achieved the same accolade)

It was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and won the 2012 Pen Faulkner Award. 

January 2025; 129 pages

First published in the US by Knopf in 2011

My paperback edition issued in the UK by Penguin in 2013

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Adam's Breed" by Radclyffe Hall

 

A bildungsroman about a member of the Italian immigrant community in London. Winner of the 1926 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Gian-Luca is a lonely little boy. His father is unknown, his mother died in childbirth as a result of which his grandmother, though she helps raise him, cannot show him affection. Technically English, he is sent to an English school but the boys there see him as Italian. He loves reading but he can't write. He isn't a member of the Catholic church and can't believe in God. After school he works as a waiter so he is an observer of but not a participant in high society. This is the story of someone who feels himself to be an outsider.

I swiftly developed a strong bond of empathy for Gian-Luca, suffering in his trials, always afraid of what might happen to him in the future. Many of the other characters were also beautifully brought to life: Teresa his grandmother, hollowed by grief, driven and determined; Fabio his compliant grandfather; the wonderful Mario whose hopes always exceed his abilities, boastful even when humiliated - “Mario bragged from self-abasement; Mario had long ago realised himself, and he lied from the humidity of failure.”; 1.11); the butcher Rocco who always misunderstands; and Maddalena who loves GL as a wife and maternally even though GL can never quite love her back.

This is also a fascinating portrait of an immigrant community employed in the way such communities often are: as shopkeepers and restaurateurs. There is poverty, there are tribulations, but there is support from the other members of the community. In the end, there is mutual love, respect and understanding.

It is peppered with Italian words which add a further layer of verisimilitude to what already seems hugely realistic. Congratulations to the publishers, Renard Press, for including full translations as end-notes (footnotes would have been even better, avoiding the need for two bookmarks and flicking back and forth).

It was written in 1926, a time when the novel was rapidly evolving (for example: James Joyce's Ulysses was published in 1922, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in 1925, and Pastors and Masters by Ivy Compton-Burnett in 1925) but stylistically it dates back to the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. It reminded me of New Grub Street by George Gissing and the H G Wells social novels such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly. But is is not nearly as heavy-going as some of that style of book can be; it is beautifully written and I kept turning the pages to learn more about poor Gian-Luca. 

And in book 3 chapter 2 a brilliant twist that I never saw coming at all.

The author gives the recipe for success in Book One, Chapter 13: “There are three very vital things: quality, variety and originality ... A dinner should have, like a book or a picture, good workmanship, plenty of light and shade, and above all that individual touch, that original central idea.” (1.13) On these criteria this novel is very much a hit. 

Further congratulations to the publisher from running the chapter numbers at the top of each page which is so much more useful than just being repeatedly told of the title of the book.

Selected quotes:

• “His natal village had consisted of one street, whose chief characteristic was a smell.” (1.4)
• “He was very much a Latin - he kept two distinct Gian-Lucas: one for beauty, one for business; and so far they had never collided.” (1.9)
• “It is said that in each man there lurks the hunter: the hunter of money, the hunter of lions, the hunter of fame, the hunter of women.” (1.13)
• “In the spite of his success he would feel so very lonely, so very much in need of being loved.” (2.2)
• “The spring is perhaps the time of all others when the lonely most realise their loneliness.” (2.3)
• “She was piously shrewd and shrewdly pious; she gave, as a rule, that she might receive.” (2.3)
• “Sisto had so many sins to confess that he needed the church very badly; indeed, he used it as a spiritual lifebuoy to keep his soul from total immersion.” (3.7)
• “He was seeing the hideous struggle for existence, with its cruelty, its meanness and its lusts.” (3.12)

Radclyffe Hall's stepfather was from Dalmatia so she must have known something about immigrant communities. Her mother made it clear that she was an unwanted child. Adam's Breed was a critical and commercial success but it was overshadowed by the scandal surrounding Hall's next novel, The Well of Loneliness, a novel about lesbian love, which was banned in the UK as obscene.

First published in the UK in 1926 by Cassell

My edition issued by Renard Press in 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Juice" by Tim Winton

 Searching for refuge in a post-apocalyptic world, a man is forced to tell his life story, hoping to convince a bowman not to kill him.

This is a much applauded cli-fi epic whose has been twice short-listed for the Booker prize (1995 and 2002). The publishers say it is perfect for fans of Station Eleven and The Road; I really didn't like Station Eleven. 

Winton's writing is undeniably powerful. He has some wonderful descriptions. For example, at the start: “The sun appears. Molten. Slumped at the edges. Liquefying before us like a burning blimp.” (2) In the final paragraph: “A constellation of hovering birds. They were black and white and grey. Suspended in nothing, sculling air.” (513) And his writing style of short, punchy sentences or sentence fragments perfectly matches the edge-of-the-seat plot. This is a classy thriller.

But for me, as with Station Eleven, the basic story didn't work. I had no problem with the basic premise that the world has almost destroyed itself through climate change leading to massive depopulation during a period of Terror followed by a stable world of villagers and farmers eking out a precarious and fundamentally communal living from the scorched landscape. The problem arose when the hero was called and, despite reluctance, answered the call (very Hero's Journey). He is recruited by one of those super-efficient but utterly clandestine organisations that supervillains always seem to control in more contemporary thrillers. This organisation, the Service, train him and then send him on meticulously organised missions after which he is lavishly rewarded. It's all a little but too perfect. And does the Service serve the people? Do they help improve the agriculture or provide medical services? No. Each mission is dedicated to assassinating descendants of the families who used to own the wicked petrochemical (and other) companies that caused the climate to change. 

Talk about a dish best served cold. Even the Count of Monte Cristo spared the children of the those who had done him wrong. Even the Lord only visits the sins of the fathers upon the sons to the third or fourth generation. 

Three characters stand out: the protagonist, whose bildungsroman this is, his mother and his wife. Unfortunately the carefully crafted characters of the latter two were undermined by the twist close to the end.

It's a beautifully written thriller. There's a huge amount of world-building (which slows down the narrative) which results in the creation of huge amounts of verisimilitude when it comes to the cli-fi element. But in the end, the superhero and his Service are as absurd as any space opera. It seemed a shame. This is a man who can write powerfully but he was undermined by his ridiculous plot.

Selected quotes:

• “Once you've seen the posture of forced labour, you never forget it.” (8)
• “Each of us needs a little something of what the other has - food, water, building materials, parts, doctoring, scholarship, labour. Even the bards and jokers have their place.” (21)
• “Wringing your hands won't make water.” (27)
• “The great mystery of people lies in the many ways in which they'll deceive themselves.” (37)
• “Isn't there more to courage than suffering?” 165
• “Don't we take dead people's words? I said. Their stories? Skills? Ideas?” (207)
• “You’re like some wild-eyed pilgrim looking for paradise. No. Not me. They're searching for the end, those folks. I'm looking to start something.” (237)

January 2025; 513 pages

Published in 2024 in Australia by Hamish Hamilton

My edition, to which page number refer, is the Picador hardback issued in the UK by Picador

In the Winter Dark by Tim Winton is also reviewed on this blog. Other Australian fiction reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Death in a Shetland Lane" by Marsali Taylor

 

Another brilliant murder mystery set in Shetland and starring sleuth and sailor Cass Lynch.

Shortly after her band's triumphs in the Shetland heats of a national talent show, the gorgeous backing singer falls to her death. But was she pushed? And has this anything to do with the singer's boyfriend, accused of scuttling a rival's fishing boat, or a recently exhumed Book of the Black Arts?

As ever, Cass is on the spot. The usual characters are all here: Gavin the policeman boyfriend, Cat and the newly pregnant Kitten, Maman and Magnie and Peerie Charlie. And behind the investigation lies all the everyday life of Shetland and the big question: can Cass settle down with Gavin for a life on shore or is their love doomed?

The joy of this beautifully written series is the feeling of verisimilitude. Whether Cass is performing CPR, sailing with killer whales, playing with a four-year-old or helping at a food bank, this author takes the time and trouble to make me feel part of the Shetland community. As always there is the dialect, carefully crafted so that even a soothmoother like myself can understand what the locals are saying (and there's a glossary in case I struggle). This is so much more than a murder mystery: it is a welcome to another world. 

There are also some beautiful descriptions:

• "I went out to sniff the air and was met by an outrage of cheeping from within the flowering currant bushes" (Ch 4) Outrage!
• "The sea was back to winter cobalt, the hills dusted with icing sugar." (Ch 23)

Selected quotes:

• "the speed o’ him was like the sun upon the wall." (Prologue)
• "all the aerodynamic qualities of a flattened-out sugar bag." (Ch 3)
• "the former Hilltop bar, where we’d tried to buy an underage pint (we’d failed because the sneaky folk of Mid Yell had got an ex-teacher on the bar for regatta night, who could tell the age of teenagers to the second)" (Ch 17)
• "Merran nodded, but continued telling her story backside foremost." (Ch 21)

January 2025

Published in 2023; I read the kindle edition

This is the eleventh novel in a crime fiction series that gets better and better. The first ten books, in order, are:

• Death on a Longship
• The Trowie Mound Murders
• A Handful of Ash
• The Body in the Bracken
• Ghosts of the Vikings
• Death in Shetland Waters
• Death on a Shetland Isle
• Death from a Shetland Cliff
• The Shetland Sea Murders
• A Shetland Winter Mystery

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Parade" by Rachel Cusk

Meditations on art and gender differences in a series of linked stories. Winner of the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize for fiction at its most novel.

This was the first time I have read a book by Rachel Cusk. She is clearly an innovative and experimental writer of huge talent. This novel (is it a 'nouveau roman' novel or a series of linked vignettes?) reminded me of Natalie Sarraute's Tropismes. But I'm not sure that I understood it nor can I properly appreciate it on a first reading. This is a novelist I need to study. Nevertheless, this is an attempt at a review.

It seems to be an exploration of what it means to be an artist, particularly focusing on the difference between male and female artists. A number of artists are described, all called G. Some of them include:

• A male artist who paints upside down: "not the first man to have described women better than women seemed able to describe themselves."
• A female sculptor: “It seemed to lie within the power of G's femininity, to unsex the human form.” (The Stuntman)
• “A late-nineteenth-century woman painter dead of childbirth at the age of thirty-one.” who does nude self-portraits. (The Stuntman)
• A black artist who paints a cathedral. (The Stuntman)
• An incognito film-maker: “For those accustomed to the camera's penetration of social and physical boundaries and the strange authority of its prying eye, this absence of what might be called leadership was noticeable.” (The Spy)

Despite sometimes suggesting that male art is valid, the author seems on the whole to believe that male artists are exploitative: “The creativity of men, which is not creativity at all but a mode of conquest, disgusts him.” (The Spy)

Other storylines include:

• A woman is punched to the ground by another woman and develops the urge to do the same to someone else.
• A man commits suicide by jumping from the top floor of an art gallery to the marble of the vestibule.
• A couple spend time in a holiday cottage on a failing farm in the countryside.

It is structured into four sections, titled The Stuntman, The Midwife, The Parade, and The Spy. I wondered whether the author was proposing these as attributes of an artist. But the stories are fragmented and some of them appear in more than one section. It was as if the author had deliberately embraced incoherence, as in the novels of William Burroughs (such as Naked Lunch). 

There is the occasional unsupported declarative statement, such as “To be a mother is to live piercingly and inescapably in the moment.” (The Stuntman) but on the whole the author seems to prefer exploration to discovery. Ideas percolate through the chaos: I suspect this means that every reader will construct their own meanings. I'm not sure that I have constructed anything meaningful.

Nevertheless, I gathered pleasure from her writing. If the plots are tangled, the characters seem even more complex, which I enjoy. The stories are rooted in the everyday (of an educated modern middle class) and had immense verisimilitude. There were some wonderful descriptive passages:

• “Her form glimmered strangely among the slashing diagonals of light that reached it from the window.” (The Stuntman)
• “Goats stood motionless In the contorted boughs of the olive trees amid the shrieking of cicadas. The reeds made a hissing sound as the winds surged through them. The shrill heat scoured the land and sky and rendered them senseless.” (The Midwife)
• “The days passed slowly and indistinguishably ... as though they were the same day examined from different angles, like the sparkling facets of a diamond.” (The Midwife)
• “After the parade, a snow of litter and broken glass covered the streets.” (The parade)

The third section, The Parade, reminded me of the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, such as Parents and Children or Manservant and Maidservant.  It is a meal in a restaurant, described mostly in dialogue. There are wonderful ICBisms such as:

• “Why don't you order some wine? Julia said to him. It will make your audience more appreciative.” (The Parade)
• “How strange it is, how actually bizarre, that some people take it into their heads to create objects for the rest of us to look at.” (The Parade)
• “There are plenty of men who are afraid of men, Mauro said.” (The Parade)

Selected quotes:

• “G began to paint large, intricate landscapes in which nature ... basked in a wordless moral plenitude, innocent and unconscious of the complete inversion it had undergone.” (The Stuntman)
• “The exhibition was a memorial in thread and cloth, a knitted cathedral.” (The Stuntman)
• “Her children are adults now, and she looks back on her history with them in a fatigued kind of amazement, like a retired general recalling past battles.” (The Stuntman)
• “An architect had designed the country place for them, and it sometimes felt as though they were inhabiting his notion of how they should spend their time.” (The Midwife)
• “Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did - the rest of her remained obstinately alive.” (The Spy)
• “His ambition, so long held that it had the character of an assumption, was to be a writer, and it had seemed to him that teaching would naturally fit with that goal. but in fact there could have been nothing worse than to encumber himself with the obligation to form and control children.” (The Spy)
• “He wasn't interested in change. He was interested in the fragments that change leaves behind in its storming passage to the future.” (The Spy)
• “The sense of being seen was fundamental to the construction of civilized behaviour, to the extent that most people continue to behave in that way even when they were alone. Why did they? If not the eye of God, was it simply the gaze of authority they felt upon them?” (The Spy)
• “Some of these feelings were presentable enough to show in public; others were left to roam the attics and cellars.” (The Spy)

I am excited to discover this author and fully conscious that I don't understand what is going on. I must reread this book soon (unfortunately it is due back at the library imminently) and explore more of Cusk's work. In the meantime, if any of the readers of this blog would like to help my understanding of Cusk, please add your comments below.

January 2025; 198 pages

Published in 2024 by Faber & Faber

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A Favourite of the Gods" by Sybille Bedford

 A princess, her daughter and her granddaughter, their lives and lovers.

Anna is a rich American heiress who marries an Italian prince, living a life of cultured luxury in Rome, until she leaves him over his infidelities, taking her daughter Constanza to London. Constanza is a remarkable young lady, highly intelligent and stunningly well read who enjoys the company of young men in and out of bed. She marries, briefly, and has a daughter, Flavia, another remarkably bright young lady. 

The prose was beautifully elegant. The story was interesting and the characters are beautifully drawn, with three-dimensional complexity. This almost makes them realistic, were it not for the fact that, as the title implies, they are so extraordinary. Not only do they not need to work, flitting from hotel to rented villa, surrounded by servants, but also  gifts of beauty and intellect that would make a typical wish-fulfilment hero green with envy. “She had what all mortals pray for and unfortunately few are given. She had health, she had looks, she had money for her needs.” (3.1) But she has more, far more than that. All of the girls are stunningly beautiful and Constanza takes a stream of lovers without a hint of scandal, unwanted pregnancy or sexually transmitted infection. She is stunningly intelligent and unbelievably cultured. Between the ages of 12 and 15 she reads “ Gibbon, Voltaire, Swift, Shelley, Racine, Tourgenieff, Tocqueville and George Eliot” (1.1) She has impeccable taste and boasts of her palate: “I can tell if two leaves out of a dish of spinach have been picked the day before yesterday.” (2.4) 

I felt that this was where the book fell down. If it were about highly privileged people who had human failings it might have been a beautifully written commentary in which I could have believed. But they were so gifted that it became fantasy. It was entertaining but never credible. And there was no hint that the author herself was aware of this. When Constanza reaches London her social circle includes “Every kind of people, new people, points of view, tones of voice: undergraduates, riding partners, authors in their prime, colonels who had loved her mother, young men who went off to work in the City and young men who already spoke of nursing a constituency, KCs, radicals, fast girls, spectacular old women, aesthetes, dons.” (2.1) ‘Every kind of people'? What about the milkmen, the road sweepers, the shop assistants, the ignorant, the illiterate?

The book is infused with snobbery. Part of this is woven into the fabric of the book. I have raged before in this blog about authors who include words and phrases in another language without translation as if they are assuming that their readers are either multilingual or, if not, not worth translating for. There is clearly class-based snobbery, and if the princess is nice to her maid, she still uses her as a maid. And there is enormous intellectual snobbery: “Most people are stupid and many things that are printed are stupid and stupid people always read the stupid things, so what you get is a more stupid world. When the stupid peasant has rid the stupid newspaper, he feels he is a clever man and knows everything.” (1.5)

It was a better-written version of A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, another book with a too-perfect hero. If you're seeking entertainment and you enjoy perfection in your protagonists, then I recommend A Favourite of the Gods. But I prefer something with which I can connect.

Selected quotes:

• “Confronted by the evidence of battle-ship and sabre rattling from across the ocean, they had to revise their hopes ... based on the belief in progress and the perfectibility of man.” (1.1)
• “If the prince chose to live on the surface it was not because he lacked all equipment for the other course, it was because his oldest, most rooted instinct told him to remain where one was placed, to look no further, never to lift the lid - to skate.” (1.2)
• “A look as if butter would not be entirely safe in her mouth.” (1.5)
• “The great Italian split between sensuality and the church, between doing one thing and believing in another, of seeing yes to two views of life.” (2.1) This is by no means restricted to Italians.
• “By thirty-five or forty most men have become what they set out to be or fallen short of it.” (3.1)
• “I don't think I ever put spit to stamp before I came to live in England.” (2.3)
• “We all eat, even the ones who don't cook.” (2.4)
• “When their duetto had dwindled to recitative ...” (2.6)
• “Her grandmother used two distinct ways of communication. She either addressed a person or the air.” (3.1)

January 2025; 287 pages

First published in 1963 by William Collins & Sons

I read the Daunt paperback issued in 2011

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Behind the Scenes at the Museum" by Kate Atkinson

 

A wide-ranging family saga, alternating family history with the bildungsroman of a girl growing up above a pet shop in "one of the ancient streets that cower beneath the looming dominance of York Minster" (Ch 1).

The main thrust of the novel is narrated by Ruby in the present tense and describes her childhood (it starts at the moment of her conception in what is presumably a deliberate reference to Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, an author cited two pages later) into adulthood within a dysfunctional family consisting of father George who has repeated affairs, mother Bunty who is eternally fed-up and particularly dislikes Ruby, clever but disaffected eldest sister Patricia, and permanently angry and violent elder sister Gillian. The extensions of the family - uncles and aunts and cousins and in-laws - are equally eccentric. 

And so we embark on a roller-coaster ride from tragedy to comedy and back again. Ruby, as a little girl and the youngest of the family, never quite understands what's going on, particularly about the family secret that is dripped into the narrative. She's always one step behind and wondering why (she wonders about so many things, for example: "Why weren't we designed so that we can close our ears ...?  Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?"; Ch 9)

There are moments of hilarity. My favourites were the Scottish holiday from hell featuring two couples and an adultery, and a nightmarish wedding on the day that England won the FIFA Men's World Cup.

The main narrative is interleaved with what are called footnotes (although they range from a page or two to chapter length) told in the omniscient past tense. These are episodes in the family history. If you encounter Tristram Shandy at the start, I guess you must expect digression. I presume this added material is designed to show that even the behaviours of Ruby's family have genetic roots: the common themes seem to be adultery, disappearance and death and the fundamental uselessness of most of the menfolk. However, I found these excursions distracted me from the main narrative.

They weren't necessary. Ruby is a delightful character with a strong voice and an always-entertaining family. In the end I wasn't sure if I had finished a comic novel or a family saga (back to Sterne) but I was certain that I had enjoyed myself.

Selected quotes:

• "Given free choice from the catalogue offered by the empire of dreams on her first night as my mother, Bunty has chosen dustbins." (Ch 1)
• "Bunty feels there's something indulgent about parks, something wasteful - holes in existence filled with nothing but air and light and birds." (Ch 1)
• "Bunty's attitude to pain, or indeed, emotion of any kind,is to behave as if it sprang from a personality disorder." (Ch 1)
• "She likes the word 'acquaintance'. It sounds posh and doesn't have all the time-consuming consequences of friendship." (Ch 1)
• "Her eyebrows have risen so far they seem to be hovering above her head." (Ch 6)
• "Monsieur Armand mumbled something to the effect that she would only be able to sell her body if her lips were sewn together." (Fn 9)
• "Patricia ... is sitting by the bedside with a kind of stunned look on her face as if the last thing she was expecting from a death-bed was death itself." (Ch 13)
• "Sandra has put on a lot of weight in the intervening years and is throwing most of it about." (Ch 13)

The book won the 1995 Whitbread Debut Novel Award

January 2025; 382 pages

• Originally published by Doubleday in 1995
• My Black Swan paperback was issued in 1996

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"More Women than Men" by Ivy Compton-Burnett

This classic ICB novel, focused on the staff of a girls' school, repeatedly overturns expectations.

ICB's novels are mostly about the downfall of a domestic tyrant. Typically, they are dialogue-heavy and that dialogue is extremely formal. Despite the precision of the language, it can be hard to decode exactly what is being said; nevertheless one gets an appreciation of the characters. The plot is unstructured and sometimes seems contrived.

MWTM more or less conforms to type. Josephine Napier is owner and headmistress of a girls' school and, although everything she does is out of solicitude for her staff, she is a benevolent despot. This extends to her family sphere where she rules her ineffectual husband and her informally adopted son, Gabriel, her brother Jonathan's child. Meanwhile the elderly and impecunious Jonathan lives nearby with, and on, his "intimate", the much younger Felix, a delicate and unemployed young man who becomes drawing-master at Josephine's school. Josephine's old friend Mrs Gifford (who knew Josephine's husband before their marriage) turns up with her daughter Ruth, successfully seeking employment at the school. Marriages and deaths ensue.

This plot is very much 'one thing happens after another', a bit like real life, rather than the narrative designed by God or fate to punish baddies and reward goodies. Instead, the plot seems designed to pose challenges for the characters; conveniently these challenges occur at exactly the right times. This absence of a 'proper' plot is a reason why some (including Natalie Sarraute,author of Tropismes) see ICB's work as a precursor to the 'nouveau roman' movement in France.

The heavy reliance on formal dialogue undermines the verisimilitude of the novel, reminding me of the alienation techniques practised by Bertolt Brecht in his plays. ICB's characters say what they are thinking, in perfectly formed and very grammatical sentences. Despite the formality, it is remarkable how this gives a full and rounded portrait of those characters, at least the major ones. 

I'm not sure if MWTM is full of ambiguity or whether I just failed to understand some of the sometimes tortuous but always apparently precise sentences. Possibly I am interpreting the hints in the light of more modern thinking. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there are repeated hints about same-sex relationships, for example between Miss Luke and Miss Rosetti, which is described by Miss Chattaway as "a wonderful case of devotion" (Ch 1) and between Felix and Jonathan, upon whose knee he sits in chapter 2. However, the subsequent behaviour of these characters does not conform to these initial assumptions. ICB seems to be saying that human beings are more complicated creatures than we allow, that sexuality is not binary but can shift according to circumstance.

The novel has some typical ICB moments of comedy when one of her characters questions a saying used by another. For example, when Simon used the phrase "his work would not keep the wolf from the door", Gabriel wonders aloud: "The wolf is always represented as at such close quarters ... Why may he not lurk at the outer gate?" (Ch 5)

Selected quotes:

• “Things like poverty and old age and death are shameful. We cannot help them; but that is the humiliation. To accept conditions that would not be your choice must be a disgrace.” (Ch 1)
• “I cannot imagine any useful and self-respecting person of either sex wishing to belong to the other.” (Ch 3)
• “A leopard does not change its spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.” (Ch 4)
• “I am sure your clothes are admirable. I cannot imagine you without them - without your own kind of them, I mean.” (Ch 13)

January 2025; 231 pages

• First published in 1933
• My paperback edition issued by Allison & Busby in 1983

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

An Ivy Compton-Burnett bibliography with links to those works reviewed in this blog:

• Dolores (1911)
• Pastors and Masters (1925)
• Brothers and Sisters (1929)
• Men and Wives (1931)
• More Women Than Men (1933)
• A House and Its Head (1935)
• Daughters and Sons (1937)
• A Family and a Fortune (1939)
• Parents and Children (1941)
• Elders and Betters (1944)
• Manservant and Maidservant (1947)
• Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949)
• Darkness and Day (1951)
• The Present and the Past (1953)
• Mother and Son (1955)
• A Father and His Fate (1957)
• A Heritage and Its History (1959)
• The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
• A God and His Gifts (1963)
• The Last and the First (posthumous, 1971)

Ivy by Hilary Spurling is a biography of ICB