"The Europeans" by Henry James

This is a delightful little book, the fourth novel James wrote and rather reminiscent of Jane Austen.

The Baroness and her brother Felix have travelled from Europe where they were born to Boston to look up their American cousins. As the novel begins they are clearly short of money and presumably fortune hunting, Felix is an agreeable young man and the Baroness who has morganatic marriage with a minor European princeling is in the process of being divorced.

There is an immediate contrast between the sober, perhaps unhappy, introspective, virtually silent, reserved, buttoned-down Americans who are from the Boston merchant class and who are quietly, modestly, unspectacularly very wealthy and the happy-go-lucky carefree Felix, used to living on his wits and few talents, and the Baroness, cultured in the rather heavy handed styles of the courts of Europe. The young unmarried men of the Bostonian families are drawn to the Baroness as moths to a flame and the question becomes which one of them will propose and be entrapped in what will probably be an unsuitable marriage. And which of the girls will fall for Felix?

The characters are drawn subtly and well. Right from the outset, James uses dialogue and action to raise intriguing questions about each character.

It starts beautifully. The Baroness is looking out of her Boston hotel window at a graveyard, the stones covered in snow. She watches people, mainly women, scrambling onto a bus, she likens it to a life boat. The brother assumes that there is a very handsome man inside.

She is out of sorts whilst her brother Felix is, as always excessively optimistic, full of gaiety. She says he is too good-natured and he replies; "Good natured - yes. Too good natured - no." She thinks they have made a mistake but he says: "There are no such things as mistakes."

This is a storming start. The characters are beautifully contrasted: the carefree but happy brother, the depressed but elegant sister. Very little is told to us but we can work it out from the conversation. It becomes clear that they have travelled from Europe to America to discover the cousins that they have never seen before and that they hope the cousins are rich because they are on their uppers (though not enough to descend into working for a living).

In the next chapter, we meet Gertrude. Gertrude is 'odd' though wee are never quite told what is wrong with her; probably she has too much rebellious joy in her to fit in with the rest of the family, all of whom have gone to church. Mr Brand, the utterly wholesome minister,talks with her in the garden, trying to persuade her to go to church, but she declines and he goes off. One feels that he is probably in love with Gertrude. And when he has gone, Felix arrives to meet the long lost family.

And we are off. The decadent Europeans meet the upright, puritanical Bostonians. As well as Gertrude there is her sister Charlotte, much more of a decent young woman, her solid and stolid father, the picture of righteousness, and her brother Clifford who has shocked the family by being suspended from Harvard for sixth months for getting drunk. He is characterised as a delightfully innocent young man who desperately wishes to have amorous complications but is far too shy to achieve them, so he becomes gauche instead. Clifford is a brilliant character and, again, it is all there is the dialogue. Show, don't tell!

The Actons are around as well. Robert traded in China and his sister Lizzie (a pert little miss in the single scene she is allowed to play) is supposed to be on the verge of becoming engaged to Clifford.

So the scene is set for a classic romantic comedy:

• Will Felix try to seduce Charlotte or Gertrude?
• Will Gertrude end up with Felix or Mr Brand (does he have a first name?)
• Will Clifford or Robert Acton  end up with the Baroness?

Throughout, the dialogue is beautifully constructed and the conversation scintillating and brilliant. But unlike Oscar Wilde, there are no epigrams for the sake of epigrams. These people say the things they say because of who they are. There are no epigrams but there are some absolutely delightful quotes:

• "She seems to me like a singer singing an air. You can't tell till the song is done." (Chapter 3)
• "Forming an opinion - say on a person's conduct - was with Mr Wentworth a good deal like fumbling in a lock with a key chosen at hazard." (Chapter 7)
• "We may sometimes point out a road we are unable to follow." (Chapter 7)
• "If we have ever had any virtue among us, we had better keep hold of it now." (Chapter 9)

The only thing that I didn't like in this book (and I have said this repeatedly in this blog) is when the author uses a foreign language without any translation. I hate this! It is Henry James saying: I have lived in Paris; I can speak French. If you're going to write for an English (or American) audience WRITE IN ENGLISH!!

Apart from that I adored this little book.

Other James books I have read and reviewed:
Washington Square which has a similar theme: will the Doctor prevent his daughter from contracting a marriage with the unsuitable man with whom she has fallen in love?
What Maisie Knew: Maisie grows up unwanted by either of her parents who are too involved with having affairs and getting married again. The only people who seem to want her are her step-parents. Can there be a happy ending?

March 2016; 173 pages

"Washington Square" by Henry James

James is sometimes considered as one of the originators of the modern novel but this is a rather old fashioned book; written in 1880, the year before the Portrait of a Lady, it comes close to the end of the early James. The story is straightforward and narrated in a linear fashion by a third person omniscient narrator who from time to time speaks directly to the narrator. The sentences are simple and straightforward without the convoluted sentences of his later prose.

The story revolves around Catherine Sloper, the plain, dull-witted but determined daughter of a rich New York doctor. Catherine, who has an excellent income left to her by her late mother and prospects of considerably more when her father dies, is courted by Morris Townsend, an idler who has already run through one fortune and is clearly intending to marry Catherine for her money. Dr Sloper is determined to put a stop to this, taking Catherine for a year abroad to Europe to forget him and threatening to cut her out of his will if she does marry Townsend. However, the Doctor's widowed sister Mrs Penniman, who is a foolish woman obsessed with the ideals of romantic fiction, schemes and plots to bring the young lovers together (this allows a certain amount of comedy: all the other characters are exasperated by Mrs Penniman's foolish contrivances). Most importantly, Catherine has fallen in love with Morris. But Morris wants the Doctor's money as well.

It is a tight little book and the four characters are well drawn. One feels very sorry for Catherine, crushed between the determination of her father and her own love of a man she gradually comes to realise doesn't love her back. One suspects the worst but I won't spoil it by telling you what happens.

In many ways it reminded me of The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope in which the stubborn woman marries the waster despite her father and then lives to regret it.

Selected quotes:

• Mrs Penniman, at this, looked thoughtful a moment. 'My dear Austin,' she then inquired, 'do you think it is better to be clever than good?'
• 'Good for what?' asked the Doctor. 'You are good for nothing unless you are clever.' (Ch 2)
• Catherine was always agitated by an introduction; it seemed a difficult moment, and she wondered that some people ... should mind it so little. (Ch 4) I came across this characteristic again in the protagonist of Dostoevsky's short novel The Double
• 'Well, I never knew a foreigner!' said young Townsend, in a tone which seemed to indicate that his ignorance had been optional. (Ch 5)

A nice little book and soooooooo much easier to read than the later James.

March 2016; 151 pages

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

"What Maisie Knew" by Henry James

Henry James is so challenging to read: his sentences are so long, with so many commas, that, given the proliferation of clauses, not to mention sub-clauses, makes it difficult, sometimes nigh impossible, to read while ensuring that the sense of the sentiment, given the difficulty of remembering the start of the sentence as one approaches the end, is understood.

Delightfully, What Maisie Knew starts before chapter one as James describes the circumstances of the bitter divorce between Maisie's father and her mother which leads to Maisie, like Persephone (is this whole book a metaphor for the seasons?), spending six months with one followed by six months with the other. When Chapter One begins, it is told from Maisie's point of view.

Of course Maisie is a child so her understanding is imperfect and James is able to use this device for developing an increasing understanding in the reader of the characters. Thus we are early introduced to Maisie's nurse Moddle, who protests to her father: "You ought to blush, sir, for the way you go on!" We realise, though Maisie does not, that her father is a bit of a philanderer and this is confirmed when her mother's companion, Miss Overmore, meets Maisie's father in the park, subsequently defects to his household (protesting that she is doing this because she cannot bear to be parted from Maisie) and later marries Maisie's father. At which discovery we also discover that her mother, while abroad, has married a Sir Claude.

All of this is told with very little dialogue and long paragraphs of description. But then the first act of the story (25% of the way through) is complete.

At which point things become more exciting. As Maisie gets older she learns more about the actions (though not the motives) of the actors. She is very scared of having no one to look after her so she attaches herself to Sir Claude, her new step-father. At the same time her governess, Miss Wix, realises that without Maisie she will have no position and so begins to manoeuvre herself to end up with Maisie no matter what; Miss Wix also seems to fancy Sir Claude. But Sir Claude has met Mrs Beale (who was Miss Overmore) and possibly begins an affair with her. At the same time Maisie's father and mother, swiftly growing bored of their new spouses, spend more and more time away. This leaves Maisie more and more with Mrs Wix and Sir Claude; whilst with Sir Claude she meets one of her mother's transient lovers in Regent's Park; whilst at Earl's Court she meets the Countess, her father's latest squeeze (and funder).

There are parts of this novel when you really get a sense of Maisie as a poor little girl shunted from pillar to post between fickle adults, becoming a little precocious as a result. But then James spoils it all with another chapter of page-long paragraphs. And in the end, given that Maisie doesn't understand fully what is going on, and given that nobody states their position fully but only hints at improprieties, I found the intricacies too complex to appreciate. On page 166, Mrs Wix admits: "I hope then, he understood you. It's more than I do!" and I have added 'Me too.'

There are delightful moments. Maisie realised that Mrs Wix "had sidled and ducked her way through life" (p 51)(although she doesn't seem to appreciate what that means so that she can use that knowledge later; lower class is still lower class). She also realises "Mamma doesn't care for me" (p 57) and can usually use this knowledge to discern humbug in an adult. Mamma's neckline indicates urgency: "the lower the bosom was cut the more ... she was wanted elsewhere" (ie not with Maisie) (p 59) And Mamma has a delightful male friend whose eyebrows are so bushy that Maisie thinks they are moustaches! (p 61) The fact is that all the adults Maisie knows, even the adored Sir Claude, are weak and lie.

James understood the psychology of the unwanted child: she is desperate for love, is easily taken in by the protestations of love from adults, and is ready to accept that it is she who is at fault for being unloveable. The psychology of the adults who profess to adore Maisie is rather more difficult to understand, except for the real parents who view Maisie simply as a weapon to hurt their ex.

There were times when I really enjoyed the book but there were times when the complicated sentences swamped me. There were times when I saw it all from Maisie's point of view and there were times when I thought that no child could possibly say things and do things with this level of awareness.
Jury's out.

January 2016; 216 pages

Spurgin, 2006 (lecture published by The Great Courses; The Teaching Company) suggests that James is influenced by George Eliot (especially Middlemarch), Ivan Turgenev (Smoke; Fathers and Sons; James
"admired the sharpness of Turgenev's character studies, praising the author's minutely psychological attitude"; they both started with a character rather than a plot) and Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary). He thought that novelists should be (high brow) artists rather than entertainers or moralists. His final phase  "helped to pave the way for modernist novels" by Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner.

"Death comes to Pemberley" by P D James

Baroness James combines her love of the murder mystery story with her love of Jane Austen to pen this sequel to Pride and Prejudice.

On the night before Lady Anne's Ball, Mr and Mrs Darcy (nee Elizabeth Bennett) are entertaining the Bingleys, Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mr Alveston when a spectral coach hurtles through the windy night to disgorge Lydia, Lizzie's sister, screaming that her husband, Wickham, has been murdered in the night. But who has been killed, who is the mysterious ghost woman, and why are Darcy's initials carved into the trees?

There are some nice touches such as the discussion about the need for an appeal court :"That would be the ultimate idiocy, and if carried on ad infinitum could presumably result in a foreign court trying English cases. And that would be the end of more than our legal system." Other elements of the oeuvre are mentioned such as the Elliots from Persuasion and the Knightleys from Mansfield Park. James enjoys pastiching the Pride and Prejudice characters such as Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr Collins, and Mr Bennett but the characterisations are too modern and the dialogue never quite right; she succeeds only in confirming that Jane Austen is inimitable. And the pace of the plot seems flawed. We have a lot of family trivia to get through before the first body is found, there are too few clues, there is a sudden break with the words 'some months later' written all over it, and the denouement is disappointing.

A cute and clever book but not a great read either as an Austen sequel or as a detective story.

January 2012; 310 pages

"Death in Holy Orders" by P.D.James

A theological college for just 20 students on an isolated and wind-swept headland on the East Anglian Coast where Adam Dalgliesh, poetry writing Commander of Police at New Scotland Yard and son of a Norfolk vicar, stayed when he was a teenager. An industrialist called Sir Alred, a detective who studied theology, a padeophile priest, another priest who is aristocratic descendant of Prince Bishops, a barmy old maid, an unnaturally beautiful bastard and a vitriolic Archdeacon. An exquisite work of art and a papyrus purporting to be the command from Pontius Pilate to release Christ's body. High Anglicanism and low crime. The classic ingredients of a PDJames murder mystery.

Pure hokum. I don't know that you could ever begin to believe in some of the bizarre characters but the plot is almost worthy of Agatha Christie, the descriptive writing is lyrically brilliant and there are some moments of wonderful comedy. An entertaining read.

September 2011; 548 pages