"Manservant and Maidservant" by Ivy Compton-Burnett

 

This is a classic ICB novel. It is set in a large house with an extended family (husband and paterfamilias, Horace, wife, Charlotte, five children, cousin, Mortimer, and aunt) and a cast of servants of whom the main ones are Bullivant the butler, Mrs Selden the cook, workhouse boy George being trained as a manservant and orphanage girl Miriam, being trained as a cook's assistant. Horace is a domestic tyrant, imposing penny-pinching economies despite (or because of) the fact that he depends on his wife's money. The servants have low wages, the fires are starved of coal and therefore inadequate against the cold, the children have tattered clothing. But tyranny fosters rebellion from servants who refuse to 'know their place' to Mortimer who plans to replace Horace in Charlotte's affections. Even after Horace mends his ways, the resentment he has caused still festers.

The story is presented in ICB's utterly individual style. It is very heavy on dialogue. (She once said: “I do not see why exposition and description are a necessary part of a novel. They are not of a play, and both deal with imaginary human beings and their lives.”) The dialogue that there is is highly formal. Even the children, down to the youngest, speak in perfectly parsed sentences: “Is father gone now? I don't want him to come here. He is always in all the places. I don't want him to come where I sleep. I don't like to think he might look at me in the night.” (Ch 2) The butler observes of the Cook: "You have language, Mrs Selden, beyond what would be looked for." (Ch 3) They all have. But on the analogy of a play, one could argue that Shakespeare rarely gave his characters realistic dialogue and yet ...

There's plenty of plot. One of the wonderful things about ICB novels is that her forensic scrutiny of everyday life can provide plenty of excitement. "We only have to look at what is near us, to find the drama of existence," says Charlotte in chapter 11. Everywhere, in this novel, is conflict. George, a young trainee servant recruited from the workhouse (a consequence of Horace's cheese-paring ways) and coming into daily contact with the idle rich finds it hard to accept his subservience; as a result he clashes with the older servants who recognise the futile frustration of challenging the status quo. Mortimer, the poor relation, is nettled by his dependency, though he affects urbanity. The children fear and hate their father. 

But there's humour too, often detected in the gap between what people say and what they mean and what they do:

• “‘She is the most blameless creature. I'm sure she has never heard a fly.’ ‘Well, that is nice of her. Most of us do begin by hurting flies.’” (Ch 6)
• “‘The truth is the kindest thing.’ ‘Is that so? I wonder what would be the unkindest.’” (Ch 6)
• “‘Dear, dear, dear!’ said Cook. ‘Well, well, well!’ said Bullivant. ‘Come, come’ said Miss Buchanan, suppressing an impulse to say the word a third time.” (Ch 8)
• “You said you were not going to speak about it ... and you keep on all the time.” (Ch 10)

You need to concentrate to read an ICB novel but the effort is rewarding for the fun, the humour, and especially for the way her dissection of everyday life allows her to make penetrating insights into human nature as it must be twisted to fit into our hierarchical society.

Selected quotes:

• “Horace had married her for money, hoping to serve his impoverished estate, and she had married him for love, hoping to fulfil herself. The love had gone and the money remained, so that the advantage lay with Horace.” (Ch 1)
• “We cannot ask Bullivant about it ... because he is not paid quite enough himself. Of course we do not dare to pay him much too little. We only oppress the weak.” (Ch 1)
• “I wonder who began this treating of people as fellow creatures ... It is never a success.” (Ch 1)
• “Her look at her father might have been one of aversion, if it had been possible; and it was possible.” (Ch 2)
• “‘We are waiting for time to pass.’ ‘What a way to talk about time, the most precious thing there is! Those are terrible words to use.’ ‘There seems to be plenty, and it is not much good. We don't know what to do with it.’” (Ch 2)
• “Horace felt that an argument ended in his favour, when his opponent wept, and as he always pursued one to this point, had no experience of defeat in words.” (Ch 2)
• “I wish they would not think ... Their thinking can be done for them.” (Ch 2) Apropos the servants.
• “This one is afraid of himself, and I am always afraid of people then. it shows there is something to be afraid of.” (Ch 3)
• “Well, Miriam, does staring teach you anything? In which case you must be attaining a standard by now.” (Ch 3)
• “‘The gentry follow their own ways more than others do,’ said Bullivant. ‘ The higher they are, the more is that the case.’ ‘ They have less call to conform,’ said Cook.” (Ch 3)
• “‘Isn't it better to be high up?’ said Miriam. ‘It is not always better for the people themselves,’ said Bullivant. ‘ From royalty downwards that is the trend.’ ‘We are a good way down from royalty,’ said George. ‘Well, there are intervening steps,’ said Cook. ‘But those who are further down still, can hardly estimate the matter. it is for them to do their duty at their point of the scale.’” (Ch 3)
• “‘I see no advantage in delay, if it is the destined thing.’ ‘Well, we will hope it is not.’ ‘What good will that do? People talk as if their hopes will influence the future.’ ‘And also as though their prophecies will.’” (Ch 5)
• “I see no reason for forgoing a good thing, because some people abuse it.” (Ch 8)
• “I have not behaved like a man. Or rather I expect that is what I have done. The words, ‘behave like a man,’ seem to have assumed the sense of behaving like a god.” (Ch 9)

October 2024; 299 pages

Published in 1947, this was said to be ICB's favourite book. 

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

Other books by Ivy Compton-Burnett

• 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)

A biography of ICB:

• Ivy by Hilary Spurling

"She Stoops to Conquer" by Oliver Goldsmith

She Stoops to Conquer was first performed in 1773 at the Covent Garden Theatre in London. I have seen it as a Digital Theatre presentation of the  National Theatre/ Out of Joint co-production performed at the Theatre Royal Bath in 2003.

It's a classic farce, founded on the premise that two travellers are made to believe that Mr Hardcastle's house is an inn and he is an innkeeper. Subplots include two courting couples.

The characters: 

• Mr Hardcastle is the homeowner who loves telling stories about the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene who fought together during the War of Spanish Succession in the early 1700s; if Mr H was with them as a young man, the play must be set no later than 1750.
• Mrs Hardcastle, his wife, longs to go to fashionable London. She also wants her son, Tony, to marry her niece, Constance, so that the girl's jewels (which she keeps) are kept in the family.
• Tony Lumpkin, Mrs Hardcastle's son by her first marriage, spends his time down the local pub, The Three Pigeons, hunting and playing practical jokes. He does NOT want to marry Constance.
• Kate Hardcastle, the daughter of the house. Mr H has arranged for her to meet, with a view to marrying, Mr Marlow, son of his old friend Sir Charles Marlow.
• Mr Marlow's problem is that, although he enjoys seducing lower class women, he is tremendously shy with women of his own class: "Among women of reputation and virtue he is the modestest man alive; but his acquaintance give him a very different character among creatures of another stamp: you understand me." (Act 1)
• George Hastings, travelling companion of Charles Marlow, who loves Constance and plans to elope with her.
• Constance Neville wants to elope with Hastings but only if she can get hold of her fortune (in the shape of the jewels kept by Mrs H) first.
• Assorted servants, revellers and Marlow's father.

Selected quotes:

• "Here we live in an old rumbling mansion, that looks for all the world like an inn, but that we never see company." (Act 1): Mrs Hardcastle almost immediately foreshadows the main plot.
• "I love everything that's old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine; and I believe, Dorothy (taking her hand), you'll own I have been pretty fond of an old wife." (Act 1)
• "You may be a Darby, but I'll be no Joan" (Act 1) This was already a proverbial phrase. It seems to have originated in 1735 when Henry Woodfall, who had been apprenticed to printer John Darby, wrote a peom called The Joys of Love Never Forgot which talked about the love of "Old Darby, with Joan by his side."
• "MARLOW: We were told it was but forty miles across the country, and we have come above threescore. HASTINGS: And all, Marlow, from that unaccountable reserve of yours, that would not let us inquire more frequently on the way." (Act 1) Some things never change!
• "Zounds, man! we could as soon find out the longitude!" (Act 1) This comment, expressing the difficulty of following Tony Lumpkin's directions, was hugely topical. Determining longitude was a difficult navigational problem (latitude was easy) which had led to shipwrecks such as in 1707 when four large naval ships under the command of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell were wrecked on the Isles of Scilly with the loss of nearly 2,000 men as a result of not knowing their position accurately. This triggered the British government to offer a prize for whoever could determine an accurate way of determining longitude, which was won by John Harrison with his invention of the chronometer, the prize being awarded in 1773, the year this play was first performed.
• "I have often seen a good sideboard, or a marble chimney-piece, though not actually put in the bill, inflame a reckoning confoundedly." (Act 2)
• "An impudent fellow may counterfeit modesty; but I'll be hanged if a modest man can ever counterfeit impudence." (Act 2)
• "One of the duchesses of Drury-lane." (Act 2) Drury Lane is a street very close to Covent Garden where this play was first performed; the 'duchesses' would have been prostitutes plying their trade among the theatregoers.
• "This is Liberty-hall, gentlemen. You may do just as you please here." (Act 2) The phrase 'Liberty-hall' first appeared in a song written in 1770 by George Alexander Stevens, an actor who performed at the Covent Garden Theatre. The song imagines the construction of 'Liberty-Hall', framed by (King) Alfred (the Great), whose corner-stone is Magna-Charta, threatened by "Courtlings of ribband and lace, The spaniels of power" (almost certainly a reference to the later Stuart kings Charles II, who loved spaniels, and James II), whose doors were "thrown open" after "Revolution had settl'd the crown" (probably referring to the 'Glorious Revolution' when James II was chased out of England and replaced with William of Orange and his wife Mary, another action settled by the Duke of Marlborough when, as plain John Churchill, leading the troops blocking the road to London, he defected to William.   
• "I no more trouble my head about Hyder Ally, or Ally Cawn, than about Ally Croker." (Act 2) Hyder Ali was the Sultan, military leader and de facto ruler of Mysore, an Indian Kingdom, who fought two wars against the East India Company at the time they were trying to establish British colonial rule in India. Ali Cawn (or Khan) is difficult to track down. There was a complaint made by his widow against Warren Hastings, Governor General of India, in which she claims that he was a Prince who was imprisoned by Hastings and, after she had ransomed him, hanged and delivered to her dead, but her published Remonstrance refers to the impeachment trial of Hastings which took place after the play was first performed (although the scandal might have predated the play). Ally Croker was an Irish ballad composed about 1725 by Larry Grogan in which the narrator rails against the girl who dumped him, whose real name is Alicia Crocker. 
• "Bully Dawson was but a fool to him." (Act 3) Bully Dawson was a swaggering gambler in London at the time of Charles II. He appears in the Newgate Calendar after he was robbed at gunpoint of 18 guineas won at the gaming tables by one Davy Morgan. He was supposed to be a model for the character Captain Hackhum in The Squire of Alsatia, a restoration comedy by Thomas Shadwell written in 1688. He was also mentioned in the 2nd number of the Spectator, the magazine written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in 1711. 
• "when a girl finds a fellow's outside to her taste, she then sets about guessing the rest of his furniture. With her, a smooth face stands for good sense, and a genteel figure for every virtue." (Act 3)
• "Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no fibs." (Act 3) This is believed to be the origin of the saying (more usually: Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies)
• "They say women and music should never be dated." (Act 3)
• "Please your honour, liberty and Fleet-street for ever!" (Act 4)
• "What think you of the Rake's Progress, for your own apartment?" (Act 4) Hogarth's 'A Rake's Progress', a series of prints showing the consequences of a libertine's lifestyle engraved by William Hogarth, was published in 1735.
• "The Dullisimo Maccaroni." (Act 4) A 'macaroni' was a dandy, a fop, a young man dressed in extravagant fashion. The name derived from the membership of the Macaroni Club, founded in 1764 for those returning from the Grand Tour. There are suggestions that these young men had, in their travels abroad, developed a taste for macaroni, the Italian pasta but they might also have acquired their name from the Italian word for a fool: 'maccarone'. Alternatively they could have been called after the word 'macaronic', an adjective describing verse that is written in a mixture of two or more languages; perhaps they regularly used words from abroad as an affectation.
• "this is all but the whining end of a modern novel." (Act 5)

October 2024;

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

"The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" by John Le Carre

 The classic Cold War espionage story written by a master of the trade.

Following the collapse of the spy network that he has been running, Alec Leamas retires from the British Secret Service. His life spirals downhill through a succession of meaningless jobs, his disillusionment numbed with whisky. Even new girlfriend Liz can't reach him. After he hits rock bottom, in prison, he is courted by the East Germans and agrees to tell them his secrets. But things aren't as they seem. This is a game of bluff and double bluff, of trick and be tricked. And as things collapse towards a disastrous conclusion, there is still one more twist to the story.

It is narrated in the 'omniscient' third person past tense (with occasional authorial glosses) but the reader only has access to the thoughts of the principal characters, Leamas and Liz. This keeps the narration tightly focused.

But I think the main reason why this novel stands head and shoulders over most of its genre is that Le Carre takes time to build up the characters and the settings and that he keeps everything so everyday and therefore so believable. Despite his vast experience and his repertoire of skills, Leamas is no James Bond (although Ian Fleming's original Bond is more vulnerable and grittier and credible than his film alter ego). This is real world spying and the reader can imagine themselves in the role and identify with Leamas without falling into fantasy. 

The other separation between this and its many imitators is the morality question. I compared this with Rip Tide by Stella Rimington (in real life a spymaster) in which the action is performed against a backdrop of 'us' and 'them': whatever we do is good and whatever they do is bad. But Leamas operates in a world where he can scarcely justify his actions even to himself (he seems mostly motivated by anger and hate). It's a seedy, sordid world of deception which corrodes the souls of the often pathetic actors who play in it. And it is perfectly matched to the background: the pathetic fallacy reigns supreme.

This makes this novel is one of the greatest spy stories of all time. The film starring Richard Burton is superb too.

Stylistically, it fits well with its near contemporaries: the work of Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and John Osborne etc: the 'kitchen sink' dramas and novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Selected quotes:

• “He developed small dishonesties, borrowed insignificant sums from secretaries and neglected to return them, arrived late or left early under some mumbled pretext. At first his colleagues treated him with indulgence; perhaps his decline scared them in the same way as we are scared by cripples, beggars and invalids because we fear we could ourselves become them.” (Ch 3)
• “Liz wanted to weep at the crabbed delusion of their dreams.” (Ch 5)
• “They hated him because he succeeded in being what each in his heart longed to be: a mystery.” (Ch 6)
• “Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat.” (Ch 6)
• “He had the drunkard’s habit of ducking his mouth towards the rim of his glass just before he drank, as if his hand might fail him and the drink escape.” (Ch 7)
• “Liz made a rather exaggerated shrug, the kind of overstressed gesture people do make when they are excited and alone.” (Ch 16)
• “It was like mid-week evensong when she used to go to church - the same dutiful, little group of lost faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people.” (Ch 19)
• “What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” (Ch 25)
• “It's far more terrible, what they are doing; to find the humanity in people, in me and whoever else they use, to turn it like a weapon in their hands, and use it to hurt and kill ...” (Ch 25)

October 2024; 240 pages

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

"Ivy: the Life of I. Compton-Burnett" by Hilary Spurling

Ivy Compton-Burnett wrote short, heavily-mannered novels. Their settings are traditional, often revolving around an upper-middle-class family in a big house, with servants. But her style was revolutionary. An early reviewer (Raymond Mortimer in the New Statesman in  1935) said: “At first sight her work strikes you as clumsy and heavy-fisted; her figures, though solid, are not what is called ‘life-like’, and she composes her books on highly defined and artificial designs. In fact, she is open to all the reproaches laid upon the founders of post-impressionism.” Natalie Sarraute (author of Tropismes and one of the pioneers of nouveau roman) ranked her with Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka. She is almost completely forgotten today.

She was born as the eldest child from the second marriage of her father, an extraordinary man who rose from humble beginnings to become England's leading homoeopathic doctor. She had five surviving half-siblings and five full-siblings; not one of the children had children of their own. She herself died an unmarried virgin (her books show an early tolerance of homosexuality but there is no evidence that she herself was a lesbian). She was educated in Hove and in Bedford before attending university at Royal Holloway College. Her first novel Dolores showed the influence of George Eliot and Victorian writers, then the First World War intervened, bringing the break up of her family home (which Ivy had ruled like a tyrant after the death of her mother), the death of favourite brother and the death by suicide of her two youngest sisters. She set up home with another woman, Margaret Jourdain, "a published poet and prose poet, an editor and essayist, translator and disciple of Baudelaire and the symbolists, as well as a regular reviewer for the literary weeklies.” who specialised in books about the decorative arts. Then, in 1925, she published Pastors and Masters and her new style was born. Over the next forty years she wrote another eighteen books. She died a Dame and widely revered by other writers such as L P Hartley (author of The Go-Between), Rosamund Lehmann (Invitation to the Waltz), Elizabeth Bowen (The Heat of the Day) and Elizabeth Taylor (Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont).  

This biography gives a real flavour of her life and places it squarely in the context of her childhood; her work is referred to wherever possible (which means that the books sometimes appear in non-chronological order). There are a lot of characters (Ivy's ten siblings, Margaret's nine - and none of them reproduced either - not to mention friends, other relations, and other writers, and I sometimes had to make notes to keep track of them all. But the book seems to manage the trick of being exhaustive while not exhausting, comprehensive while not over-detailed, thorough and yet readable. I doubt it will be read by anyone who is not one of ICB's small and dwindling number of fans, but the effort is more than worthwhile.

Selected quotes:

• “Ivy seems to have been a [page break] resolutely reticent small girl, learning early that principle of concealment which was afterwards invariably central to her theory of survival.” (Ch 2)
• "Ignorance ... enables the insensitive safely and with a good conscience to practise all forms of meanness.” (Ch 3)
• “We weren't allowed bicycles in case we will run over, we weren't allowed to swim in case we drowned, we weren't allowed to ride in case we had a fall.” (Ch 5)
• “Margaret herself sided emphatically with the spinsters in Ivy's books who are apt to reply to any suggestion that marriage might mean a fuller life: ‘ I don't want the things it would be full of’.” (Ch 11)
• "Reading ‘Elders and Betters’ was like sucking a lemon ... she often felt inclined to hurl the lemon to the far end of the room but was aware that she would have to get up and pick it up again.” (Ch 14)

October 2024; 545 pages

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

ICB Bibliography

• 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)

"The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side" by Agatha Christie

A masterpiece. Not literature. It isn't meant to be. It is a puzzle.

Were I judging this in the same way as other books I would note the two-dimensionality of the characters (some of them paper-thin marionettes), the weaknesses of the plot (two characters intimately connected with the distant past of the supposed murder victim just happen to be within a few yards of her when the murder is committed; exactly how did the butler die?) and the overall lack of verisimilitude. But this isn't meant to be read like this. It is a barebones murder mystery, intended to bamboozle the reader, and as such it is a masterpiece.

I've read it before (I think I've read Miss Christie's entire oeuvre). I've seen the film at least once. But I had to read it again for the Grove Book Club before watching a stage performance at the Grove Theatre, Eastbourne so I thought I'd try reading it from the back, first reminding myself of the murderer, the means, the motive and the opportunity and then seeing how the author dropped clues and/or misled us.

I hadn't realised how much we are told, clearly, how the crime was committed, why, and by whom.

Everything else after this is a spoiler.

The victim is a Heather Badcock. Why was she killed? The first time the Mrs B encounters Miss Marple (Ch 2), our classic amateur detective, she tells her the story which will provide the motive. Miss Marple then tells her that she reminds her of someone who “always saw her own point of view so clearly that she didn’t always see how things might appear to, or affect, other people.” This person then died. The foreshadowing is blatant.

The actual death occurs just before the 25% turning point. It is reported to Miss Marple by her cleaner, Cherry. "Heather Badcock's kind all right ... Overkind, some people say. They call it interfering. Well, anyway, she up and died." (Ch 6) We are reminded of the character of the victim immediately before we hear of her death. Then, exactly at the 25% mark, to the page, Miss Marple’s very first discussion with her policeman nephew contains these lines: “Supposing you went into a shop, say, and you knew the proprietress had a son who was the spivvy young juvenile delinquent type. He was there listening while you told his mother about some money you had in the house, or some silver or a piece of jewellery. It was something you were excited and pleased about and you wanted to talk about it. And you also perhaps mention and even that you were going out. you even say that you never lock the house. You're interested in what you're saying, what you're telling her, because it's so very much in your mind. And then, say, on that particular evening you come home because you’ve forgotten something and there's this bad lot of a boy in your house, caught in the act, and he turns around and coshes you.” (Ch 6.2) The motive has been nailed down ... but immediately Miss C blows smoke into our eyes with an alternative theory: “I wondered if it might have been the wrong murder”. (Ch 6) This leads to considering the people that Marina might have seen over Mrs Badcock’s shoulder ... and we have a list of suspects. The usual detective inquiry proceeds.

Now we focus on the means and the opportunity. Mr Badcock remembers that Mrs B’s elbow was jogged so she spilt her cocktail all over her dress and that Marina gave Mrs B her untouched glass BUT this is framed by the detective (and therefore the reader) as the way in which the ‘wrong’ murder was committed. This 'wrong murder' theory swells. Marina herself gets in on the ‘wrong murder act’ in chapter 9.2 Jason Rudd tells the detective about Mrs B having flu when she met his wife years ago ... and within a page he ‘accepts’ the theory advanced for him that the intended victim was his wife “you’re quite right, Chief Inspector, I have been sure of it all along.” (Ch 10) The climax comes a page before the 50% mark when Inspector Craddock tells Miss Marple “I think the intended victim was Marina Gregg” and Miss Marple replies “that would seem almost certain, wouldn't it?” (Ch 12) The red herring has now been sanctified. And a red herring suspect is immediately introduced in the shaped of Marina’s adopted children, having dismissed the biological child (the actual motive) a paragraph before.

Now we spend several chapters running the red herrings in the form of blackmailers and further deaths. It is assumed that these are further poorly aimed attempts to kill Marina although soon we are reminded that Heather Badcock was “a woman who invariably talked about herself.” (Ch 14)

The next real clue comes from Gladys in Ch 16 just before the 75% turning point. She says that it was “funny” because “when she spilt the cocktail ... I’m almost sure she did it on purpose.” This is a masterful piece of misdirection because the ‘she’ and the ‘she’ are intended to be different people. This might be unfair of Agatha if she hadn’t already, several times, referred us to the problem of people misusing pronouns (when the carer keeps calling Miss Marple ‘we’). We are told in three pages (exactly at the 75% mark) that some one must have seen the murder being committed although the Inspector is referring to adding the drug to the cocktail glass. And on the next page one of the detectives says “All right ... The moron saw it, the moron didn’t grasp what the action meant.” Rather rude about Gladys but nevertheless ...

But the very final piece of evidence doesn’t come till the chapter before the denouement when Miss Marple is told that Heather Badcock covered up her illness with face powder, so it wouldn’t have been whooping cough. The page before the local doctor had talked about “real doctoring. Eight to ten cases of German measles, half a dozen whooping coughs, and a suspected scarlet fever.” (Ch 22)

I am utterly impressed by the way Agatha Christie hides her clues in plain sight while misdirecting masterfully. A classic of the genre.

Selected quotes:

“Old Laycock then displayed his particular genius which was that of enthusiastic agreement and subsequent lack of performance.” (Ch 1)

October 2024; 224 pages

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

 

"The Hollow Man" by John Dickson Carr

In 1981, this was selected as the best locked room mystery of all time by a panel of mystery authors and reviewers.

A man, threatened by his brother, a stage illusionist, is found dying with a bullet in him after the police break into a locked room. Just before a shot was heard, an eyewitness stationed in the room opposite saw a second man ('the hollow man') enter and be received by the victim. But there is no sign of the second man. There is no escape from the room and the only window leads to a sheer drop and the recently fallen snow shows no sign of footprints.

The dying man manages to utter a few cryptic words and phrases which have to be reconstructed from two witnesses: "Your list. Hover. Not suicide. He couldn’t use rope. Roof. Snow. Fox. Too much light. ‘My list. Bath. Salt. Wine. He couldn’t use rope. Roof. Snow. Too much light. Got gun. Don’t blame poor—" (Ch 5) 

Almost as soon as the dying man has been whisked away to hospital, word comes in of a second crime. A man trudging through the snow  down the middle of a nearby cul de sac drops dead of another bullet fired into his back from very close range; the revolver is found nearby. From the position of the wound it cannot have been suicide and yet three independent witness saw it all happen and testify that there was no-one else near him.

Two impossible crimes, linked to mysterious happenings in Transylvania. Dr Gideon Fell, assisted by his tame Scotland Yard detective, investigates.

In chapter 17, the detective treats the reader to a lecture on the different types of locked room mystery, prefaced with the words: "we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not."Already, another character has explained about conjuring tricks and explains that most of the audience are disappointed if the trick is explained to them, often because it is so simple. Well I wasn't disappointed by the denouement. The hallmarks of a classic of this genre is that the solution to the mystery IS obvious in hindsight but that the reader DIDN'T guess it. I guessed the 'who' but the 'how' left me baffled. But the author played fair. Looking back, I can see that he left any number of clues in plain sight. Yes, there were plenty of red herrings but that's the misdirection of the conjurer. There is no doubt that this  whodunnit was most ingeniously constructed. 

It was hugely atmospheric too. 

Selected quotes:

• "The first deadly walking of the hollow man took place on that last-named night, when the side streets of London were quiet with snow and the three coffins of the prophecy were filled at last." (Ch 1)
• "If PQ = pq, it is therefore quite obvious that PQ = pq + pß + qa + aß." (Ch 3)
• "The word ‘electric’ is meaningless, yet it conveys the wave that came with her; something of crackle and heat and power, like a blow." (Ch 4)
• "She moved towards them, her shoes creaking." (Ch 4)
• "In my experience with locked-room murders, getting in and getting out are two very different things. It would throw my universe off balance if I found an impossible situation that worked sensibly both ways." (Ch 5)
• "the whole world goes skew-wiff because we like to pretend that people under twenty will never have any emotions, and people over forty never had." (Ch 5)
• "The doctor, Rampole knew, was firmly under the impression that he was a model of tact. Very often this tact resembled a load of bricks coming through a skylight. But his utter conviction that he was doing the thing handsomely, his vast good-nature and complete naïveté, had an effect that the most skilled tact could never have produced. It was as though he had slid down on the bricks himself to offer sympathy or shake hands." (Ch 6)
• "I remember that debate as ending in the most beautiful and appalling row I ever heard outside a Pacifist meeting." (Ch 6)
• "Did you ever hear of a schoolmaster being a blackmailer? No, no. They’re much too worried about what people might find out about them." (Ch 8)
• "Terror ceases to be terror if it has to be worked out like an algebra problem." (Ch 12)
• "The windows were at all stages of cleanliness, from the bright gloss of a jeweller’s farthest down on the right, to the grey murkiness of a tobacconist’s nearest on the right: a tobacconist’s that seemed to have dried up worse than ancient tobacco, shrunk together, and hidden itself behind news placards headlining news you never remembered having heard of." (Ch 13)
• "Most people are so damned disappointed when they know the secret. Either, in the first place, the thing is so smart and simple – so simple it’s funny – that they won’t believe they could have been fooled by it. ... Or, in the second place, it’s a trick worked with a confederate. That disappoints ’em even more. They say, 'Oh, well, if you’re going to have somebody to help—!’ as though anything was possible then." (Ch 14)
• "expressions were hollowed out as though snapped by a camera." (Ch 14)
• "the word 'improbable' is the very last which should ever be used to curse detective fiction in any case. A great part of our liking for detective fiction is based on a liking for improbability." (Ch 17)
• "Butlers have long gone out of fashion; the invalid in the wheel-chair is too suspect; and the placid middle-aged spinster has long ago given up homicidal mania in order to become a detective." (Ch 17)

A classic of the genre. October 2024

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

"My Book of Revelations" by Iain Hood

 

A metafictional time-travelling romp.

A so-called Y2K expert is hired to prepare a Scottish electronics company for the 'Millennium Bug'. But what will happen when the year 2000 arrives? The deadline looms.

But this plot is just the framework on which to hang an exploration of the novel. The chapters are themselves a countdown, from 'Fifteen centuries to go'  which is followed by 'Fifteen decades to go' all the way until 'Fifteen years after' (which is subversively followed by 'Fifteen years after': it seems that the end of the novel is also the end of time). The first few chapters are a lecture on chronology and the making of calendars; the reader soon becomes aware that this is a presentation for a job interview. As the book continues, and the end of 1999 gets closer and closer, we learn how good the new employee is at his job. The pressure's on. His behaviour becomes stranger. As does the book itself.

Hood is playing with different forms of narrative, as James Joyce did in Ulysses. There is the lecture on history in chapter 1, an email dialogue in chapter 7, an homage to a classic of time-travelling sci-fi in chapter 8, and a conversation between two authors in chapter 9. As time becomes compressed the words are printed on top of one another creating a black rectangle or, with still further compression, a white space, reminding me of Tristram Shandy. The penultimate chapter is made of quatrains of repeated headlines, merging; the final chapter is a string of hashtags. 

The author references his own work. At the millennial party in Edinburgh in chapter eight the narrator of this book meets characters from Hood's other novels: This Good Book (the main characters also being mentioned in chapter 5 as "those famous artists, whatshername and whatshisname") and Every Trick in the Book (as the narrator, merging himself into the author, says in chapter 3: “Love a book with ‘Book’ in the title, me.”). And one of the characters at the party in chapter 8 is, like the author, a Scot who lives in Cambridge.

Time becomes muddled. Chapter 7 is written in the form of a dialogue of emails straddling time zones (and thus the millennium event), except that they are in reverse chronology so that to make sense of them you have to read them in reverse order, except that one of the computers seems to stick in a certain time setting, and even when you correct for this there are some which seem to be out of order. In  chapter eight time stands still as the narrator does the "Billy Pilgrim" thing (Billy Pilgrim being the time-travelling unreliable narrator of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five) during a 1999 New Year's Eve party in Edinburgh. As one of the characters at the party points out: “What the greatest art, the greatest song or painting or film does, right, is stop time. ... You’re not in time anymore, you're in the song, or the painting, or the film. You're in the film's time, not in the time around you.” (Ch 8)

Still at the millennial party, things get ever weirder in chapter nine. The narrator encounters Muriel Spark ("famed for her omniscient narrators") and a sporadically Scottish-speaking Jean Cocteau in dialogue, although Cocteau died in 1963 and seems to have the ability to shape-shift, assuming the form of whichever famous person he is referencing, including Alasdair Gray, a Scottish author who is clearly an inspiration for Iain Hood. The point is made that this is fiction, or metafiction, and predictions from the point of view of the characters are history to the author: "A new character says, because I want her to, I don't know. Terrorists will start flying planes into buildings. The climate going nuts. Financial collapse. A virus, a new pox. A war." (Ch 9)

This is the climax and the author is now subverting the form as hard as he possibly can. It's not just Alasdair Gray we're referencing, it's also William Burroughs (specifically his Naked Lunch but it could refer to any other of his shuffled-narrative novels). This is where the author reveals his theme: “Well, let me tell you. Character is a fiction. Identity is a fiction. Chronology is a fiction. In here. Even fiction is a fiction. And a tautology is a tautology is a tautology is a tautology and smells of nothing. Ah, but a rose! A rose still smells sweet!” (And still the games continue; we seem to be merging Gertrude Stein’s ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’ with Shakespeare’s ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’.)

Like the society it is satirising, it's utterly chaotic and endlessly creative: Surrealism meets Monty Python. It's not a conventional novel by any means. But it's great fun.

Selected quotes:

• “Everyone knows the theory of memes now, that ideas or thoughts, rituals or practices, images or sounds follow evolutionary pathways down through time. They proliferate by replication, come about through mutation, experience natural selection to determine their survival or death. Eventually, there is variation which does not stop evolving, and there is no perfect meme, just as there is no perfect set of genes.” (Ch 4)
• “One day, God was going around, you know, being omnipotent, moving in a mysterious way and all that, when he fell into an existential crisis - God's second-biggest existential crisis after the I’M LONELY!!!!! cri de coeur of, you know, creating everything. ... He realised, with the number of miscarriages that occur in the natural course of things for all animals and in the human population, which was particularly on His mind, them being made in His image in all, meant that He, the maker all things, the prime mover, all that is, He was the greatest abortionist of all time.” (Ch 6)
• “Smiting sounded good, nice work if He could get it.” (Ch 6)
• “The moment caught in the camera's light’s flash. ... The freeze-frame. except with everything moving within the frame. The Brownian motion of the mad moment.” (Ch 8) Brown was a botanist who studied at the University of Edinburgh.
• “History, ye see, is a bunch ay truths which eventually turn oot to be lies, whilst the old mythology is a bunch ay lies that eventually come out true, become truths.” (Ch 9)

October 2024; 198 pages

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

"Tropisms" by Natalie Sarraute

 One of the classics of the nouveau roman movement.

This extraordinary piece of experimental fiction consists of 24 vignettes. Many of these are written in such a cryptic form that it is difficult to decipher what is happening (you have to read it more than once). Not one of them contains a named character: they are all referred to by pronouns such as 'they' or 'she'. 

It's a bit like reading a book of poetry except that it is written in prose. It's a bit like looking at a work of abstract art. It reminded me of Erik Satie's music such as his Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes: short and mannered but haunting.

Sarraulte defined 'tropismes' thus: "ce sont des mouvements indéfinissables, qui glissent très rapidement aux limites de notre conscience ; ils sont à l'origine de nos gestes, de nos paroles, des sentiments que nous manifestons, que nous croyons éprouver et qu'il est possible de définir": they are the indefinable movements, which slither rapidly at the limits of our consciousness; they are the origins of our gestures, our words, the feelings that we show, that we think we experience and that it is possible to define". In plants, a tropism is a movement towards a stimulus, thus phototropism is when a plant turns towards the light and geotropism is when a root grows downwards under the influence of gravity.

So tropisms is like stream of consciousness except that it is dealing with preconsciousness. The book feels a little like reading James Joyce merged into the terse dialogue of Ivy Compton-Burnett.

The Guardian (21st October 1999) said "Sarraute's are tropisms with a human face, the buried, never quite conscious to-ings and fro-ings of the psyche that accompany all social contact, ... She is the unforgiving zoologist of our dissembling species, as observed in the habitat she shared with it, of 'civilised' Paris."

The first piece describes people window-shopping. In the 12th a teacher empties Proust and Rimbaud of their power. In the 21st a woman who used to be a "good" (ie docile) girl is now grown up and, submissively listening to others talk, she is overcome with an urge to feel, "shouting incoherencies".

A lot of the tropisms deal with relations between people and how the interior feelings are at odds with the external behaviours. There is often a sense of menace. For example, in the 19th when a man lets others crush and stamp on him and make him blunder into things; it is difficult to know whether he is deriving masochistic pleasure from this or is just too weak to stand up for himself. In the 4th piece there is a strange, sexual and cruel verbal ballet taking place between a man and some women: he seems to enjoy his power in directing the conversation. In the 5th a woman is lying in bed, absolutely still. ‘She hears someone come into the house and go into the study. Her husband? She dares not move. She senses that “the slightest act” might be a “provocation”. In the 15th “she so loved old gentlemen like him” but he grabs her and squeezes “harder and harder” and she can’t get away until her parents arrive.

It reminded me of Fleurs du mal by Baudelaire. 

It's a remarkable book.

Selected quotes:

• “And the quiet little children, whose hands they held, weary of looking, listless, weighted patiently beside them.” (Ch 1)
• “And he sensed percolating from the kitchen, humble, squalid human thought, shuffling, shuffling in one spot, always in one spot, going round and round, in circles, as if they were dizzy but couldn't stop, as if they were nauseated but couldn't stop, the way we bite our nails, the way we tear off dead skin when we’re peeling, the way we scratch ourselves when we have hives, the way we toss in our beds when we can't sleep, to give ourselves pleasure and make ourselves suffer, until we are exhausted, until we've taken our breath away ...” (Ch 2)
• “And they talked and talked, repeating the same things, going over them, then going over them again, from one side then from the other, kneading and kneading them, continually rolling them between their fingers this unsatisfactory, mean substance that they had extracted from their lives ... kneading it, pulling it, rolling it and until it ceased to form anything between their fingers but a little pile, a little grey pellet.” (Ch 10)
• “There were a great many like her, hungry, pitiless parasites, leeches, firmly settled on the articles that appeared, slugs stuck everywhere, spreading their mucus on corners of Rimbaud, sucking on Mallarmé lending one another Ulysses or The Notebook of Malte Laurids Bigge, which they slimed with their low understanding.” (Ch 11)
• “But they asked for nothing more, this was it, they knew it well, you shouldn't expect anything, you shouldn't demand anything, that's how it was, there was nothing more, this was it, ‘life’.” (Ch 16)
• "Here we are at last all together, good as gold, doing what our parents would have approved of, here we all are then, well behaved, singing together like good little children that an invisible adult is looking after, well they walked gently around in a circle giving one another their sad, moist little hands.” (Ch 23)

Tropisms was voted 73rd in Le Monde's most memorable books of the twentieth century. 

October 2024; 84 pages

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