"Love in a Cold Climate" by Nancy Mitford

If you like 'Downton Abbey' and similar work set in the world of the English aristocracy between the First and Second World Wars, you might enjoy this light comedy. Or you might be interested by the glimpses it gives into the attitudes of an unpleasant minority. I suspect some might defend it on the grounds of satire, but if it is, it has a toothless bite and the narrator - and, I suspect, the author - clearly shares some of the nastiest views. “‘I love being so dry in here,’ as Lady Montdore put it, ‘and seeing all those poor people so wet.’” (1.8) might indeed be satire but when the narrator says “The front door was opened by a slut.” (2.1) the satire slips and the sneers are seen for what they are. This is entitlement writ large: “Since I had as yet no servant, I was obliged to get up very early and cook Alfred's breakfast.” (2.1) cuts little ice with those of us who have never had servants. It was difficult to remind myself that this was written as recently as 1949. 

It is also tolerant of paedophilia. One of the most sympathetic characters feels quite sorry for a man who likes interfering with little girls when he is hoist by his own petard and virtually entrapped by one of his victims: “He can't be expected to guess that because he strokes the hair of a little girl when she's fourteen she's going to insist on marrying him when she grows up. Bad luck on a chap I call it.” (1.13) The vengeance of grooming.

And the second half of the book is dominated by a portrait of an extravagantly gay man who embodies all the stereotypes of that role.

There was one moment which seemed inconsistent. In 2.2, Lady Montdore says:“I hope he's not an artist. well, if he is we shall simply have to get him out of it - he must learn to behave suitably.” (2.2) But in 1.7, we have been told that she and her husband are always“occupied ... with what they called ‘their art’, producing enormous portraits, landscapes and still lifes by the dozen.”

There are some amusing moments, but on the whole this was a novel which left a bad taste in my mouth, when it wasn't plain boring.

Selected quotes:

• “That was where her charm lay. ... the charm of a purring puma.” (1.3)
• “Charm allied to riches and position is almost irresistible.” (1, 6)
• “‘All this’, on her lips, meant position allied to such solid assets as acres, coal mines, real estate, jewels, silver, pictures, incunabula, and other positions of this sort.” (1.6)
• “Oxford is a place where social life ... is designed exclusively for celibate men ... the whole tradition is in its essence monastic, and as far as society goes wives are quite superfluous.” (2.1)
• “It seemed to me quite plain and uninteresting except for the label in its lining, and they long to put this on the outside so that people wouldn't know where it came from.” (2.4) She’s wearing a Schiaperellii dress. Nowadays, of course, designers do put their labels on the outside so that vain people can brag about their clothes.
• “You are so fortunate not to be a beauty, Fanny, you'll never know the agony of losing your looks.” (2.5)

August 2026; 166 pages

First published by Hamish Hamilton in 1949

My edition was issued with The Pursuit of Love in 1980.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Pursuit of Love" by Nancy Mitford

 Anyone who knows the much-publicised history of the Mitford family will know that this is a fictionalised version of that. (And sanitised; there is no mention of the fact that one of the Mitford sisters married the leader of the British fascists and another was an ardent supporter of Hitler who attempted suicide in Germany when the Second World War started; presumably in 1945 when this novel was published these issues were still hot potatoes so Nancy Mitford decided to avoid them.)

It purports to follow the romantic career of Linda, best friend and cousin of the narrator, Fanny. Linda, whose father is a bigoted Earl with a large country house, loads of servants, and a lot of land, falls in love with the son of a nouveau riche banker, with predictably dreadful consequences. She then has an affair with an upper-class communist, leading to her divorce and second marriage. Finally, returning from the south of France having realised that her second husband is in love with someone else, she meets and becomes the mistress of a wealthy Frenchman, finally finding love, although they are parted by the Second World War.

This fairy tale of romances is backed with what purports to be social satire, although it is clear that the narrator (the author wearing a disguise only very slightly less transparent than some of the characters) is very much on the side of the upper-classes: 

• “Planes was a horrible house ... The garden which lay around it would be a lady water-colourist’s heaven, herbaceous borders, rockeries and water-gardens were carried to a perfection of vulgarity, and flaunted a riot of huge and hideous flowers, each individual bloom appearing twice as large, three times as brilliant as it ought to have been and if possible of a different colour from that which nature intended.” (Ch 12)
• “I have seen too many children brought up without nannies to think this at all desirable.” (Ch 21)

As a result, the humour is gentle and whimsical rather than cutting: a few wry smiles rather than a single belly-laugh. If you want comic fiction of the upper-classes from this period, read P. G. Woodhouse who piles on the absurdities rather than taming them. For me the funniest line, purely because it is tautologous, came as late as chapter 21: “Once a foreigner always a foreigner in my opinion.”

That the author is writing for her fellow subscribers to Tatler is evidence from the fact that she gives passages, and sometimes whole conversations, in untranslated French. When one cannot understand the punchline, the joke falls flat. But I suspect that the point is that Mitford has thereby demonstrated her superiority to those born without her advantages.

Nevertheless, she has a few memorable characters although the strongest, such as Uncle Matthew, are Dickensian caricatures. 

Many people are impressed by the vanished world of the upper-classes in their country houses. These are the fans of Upstairs Downstairs, Downton Abbey, and keen visitors of National Trust properties. This is a book for them. I'd rather read literature.

Selected quotes: 

• “Over the chimney-piece clearly visible in the photograph, hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out.” (Ch 1)
• “The behaviour of civilized man really has nothing to do with nature, ... all is artificiality and art more or less perfected.” (Ch 5)
• “His hair seemed to be slipping off backwards, like an eiderdown in the night.” (Ch 6)
• “That fella, what's ‘is name, Romeo, might have known a blasted papist would mess up the whole thing.” (Ch 6)
• “He was in his last year at Oxford, a member of Bullingdon, a splendid young man with a Rolls Royce, plenty of beautiful horses, exquisite clothes, and large luxurious rooms, where he entertained on a lavish scale.” (Ch 7) Not today’s typical undergraduate.
• “‘We must keep our ends up,’ said Linda uncertainly. ‘O,h dear,’ I said, ‘the thing about me is, I always feel much happier with my end down.’” (Ch 7)
• “A Moses basket full of wails.” (Ch 10) Description of a baby.
• “His general attitude to what he called the man in the street was that he ought constantly to be covered by machine guns: this having become impossible ... he must be doped into submission with fiction that huge reforms, to be engineered by the Conservative Party, were always just around the next corner.” (Ch 11)
• “The Alconleighs were obliged to face the fact, as parents must sooner or later, that their children had broken loose from control and had taken charge of their own lives.” (Ch 13)
• “It would never have occurred to the Alconleighs to visit the continent for any other purpose than that of fighting.” (Ch 15)

August 2026; 151 pages

First published by Hamish Hamilton in 1945

My edition, together with Love in a Cold Climate, was issued in 1980.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Biographies written by Nancy Mitford and reviewed in this blog:

• Madame de Pompadour
• The Sun King

"Heartburn" by Nora Ephron

A roman a clef in which the author turns the break-up of her marriage into light comedy.

It's narrated in the first person and the past tense. The author disguises herself as a food writer but the husband/ villain is rather more thinly disguised as a Washington reporter (in reality he was Carl Bernstein, one of the investigative reporters who exposed the Watergate scandal). The novel was adapted into a film.

It is frenetically fast-paced and full of quips, like the romantic comedy movies Ephron wrote, directed and produced. It reminded me of an American sitcom. I didn't find it particularly amusing.

It starts with a great hook: “The reason I was hardly in a position to date on first learning that my second husband had taken a lover was that I was seven months pregnant.” (Ch 1) I should immediately have sympathised with the main character. But I couldn't. She didn't seem heart-broken, in fact even that hook itself is written as part of a joke. This should be a major tragedy in her life and she is wise-cracking. Perhaps her relentless humour is a defence strategy but it worked in the sense that I never had any sense that there was a vulnerable human underneath the robotic comedy. 

It helps that there are no financial pressures: she leaves her husband and takes her two-year-old son and heavily pregnant self to New York by air; here she squats in her father's apartment. The kid is never an inconvenience; she does what she wants and always finds a maid to take care of it. In New York she is held up at gunpoint but even this is scarcely traumatic. The book skated along on wisecracks and trivialities and never challenged my emotions at all. 

She describes a typical dinner-party conversation thus: “Then we would move on to the important matters. Should they paint their living room peach? Should they strip down their dining table? Should they buy a videotape recorder? Should they re-cover the couch?” (Ch 7) I suppose most life is fundamentally trivial and this contributed to the novel's verisimilitude. But basically I didn't care. It's not as if her trivialities are everyday trivialities, cocooned as she is in her privileged world as a best-selling cookery writer married to a heavily-syndicated journalist. There are no ordinary people in her social circle, even her therapy group has a famous actress in it. 

If you like lightweight froth (and it shouldn't be lightweight froth, it's about a marriage breaking up), this is the book for you.

Selected quotes:

• “My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone would do it for you.” (Ch 2)
• “If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters.” (Ch 4)
• “There's a real problem in dragging a group into a book: you have to introduce six new characters ... who are never going to be mentioned again in any essential way but who nonetheless have to be sketched in.” (Ch 4)
• “That's what marriage is ... after a certain point it's just patch, patch, patch.” (Ch 4)
• “It's true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.” (Ch 7)
• “You know how old you have to be before you stop wanting to fuck strangers? ... Dead, that's how old.” (Ch 8)
• “When you have a baby you set off an explosion in your marriage ... all the power struggles of the marriage have a new playing field.” (Ch 11)

February 2025; 179 pages

First published in 1983 (by Heinemann in the UK)

My Virago paperback edition was issued in 2018

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

"My Man Jeeves" by P G Wodehouse

 

A collection of some of the first short stories in which Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves make their appearance. The collection also includes some stories featuring Reggie Prepper.

I would argue that Jeeves and Wooster represent the pinnacle of Wodehouse's oeuvre and it is interesting to trace the evolution of these characters. First there was Psmith, who first appeared in the novel Mike as schoolboy cricketer Mike's new friend. Psmith, like Wooster, has an air of indolence and a wonderful way with words but unlike Wooster he is really rather wise and it is he who enables the farcical plot to reach a successful conclusion. It is as if he is Wooster and Jeeves in a single person. Reggie Prepper is more like Wooster in that he is likely to get himself into scrapes and need rescuing; he is also the first person narrator of the stories. The transcendent moment came when Wodehouse took Psmith, removed his competence and placed them all in Jeeves, and, as with Prepper and also rather like Watson and Holmes, used Wooster as the foolish first person narrator.

The Wooster stories are set in America where Wodehouse lived during the First World War and where the third Psmith novel (Psmith, Journalist) is set. 

The joy is in the farcical situations in which the upper class twits are enmeshed and in the wonderful verbal dexterity with which the stories are told, as evidenced in some of the quotes below. His principal talent is for exaggerated similes and metaphors.

Selected quotes:

• "One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He's like one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them." (Leave it to Jeeves)
• "I hadn't the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself." (Leave it to Jeeves)
• "I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare - or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad - who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping." (Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest)
• "What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them? Makes it so bally discouraging for a great city." (Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest)
• "The days down on Long Island have forty-eight hours in them; you can't get to sleep at night because of the bellowing of the crickets; and you have to walk two miles for a drink." (Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest)
• "Women with hair and chins like Mary's may be angels most of the time, but, when they take off their wings for a bit, they aren't half-hearted about it." (Absent treatment)
• "'Women are frightfully rummy,' he said gloomily. 'You should of thought of that before you married one,' I said." (Absent treatment)
• "In his official capacity, Voules talks exactly like you'd expect a statue to talk." (Rallying Round Old George)
• "I did a murder last night ... It's the sort of thing that might happen to anyone." (Rallying Round Old George)
• "'How long were you engaged?' 'About two minutes.'" (Rallying Round Old George)
• "It's just on the cards that I may have drowned my sorrows a bit."  (Rallying Round Old George)

June 2024; 135 pages

Other Wodehouse works reviewed in this blog may be found here.

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

"The Diary of a Nobody" by George & Weedon Grossmith

First published as a serial in  the satirical magazine 'Punch' and then turned into a short novel, this Victorian classic pokes gentle fun at Mr Pooter, a middle clerk Victorian working as a clerk in a London office. It records the trials of working with unreliable tradespeople - the laundress loses socks and bleaches coloured handkerchiefs, the eggs from the grocer aren't fresh etc - and the antics of a wayward son who loses his job almost as often as he falls in love. Despite what Michael Irwin says (in the Introduction to my edition, a Wordsworth Classics paperback) the humour is essentially fuelled by snobbery: we are invited to laugh at Mr Pooter's pretensions and pomposity as he is regularly brought down to earth ("I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat."; Ch 12) or discovering a tradesman at the Lord Mayor's Ball or being snubbed at a dinner party. He is fundamentally a social climber and we are invited to mock him. He is like a diluted version of Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet) in the BBC TB sitcom 'Keeping Up Appearances'. Perhaps it was funnier back in the days but I have laughed far more at The Diary of Adrian Mole or Nobody's more or less exact contemporary Three Men in a Boat.

The funniest things are the dreadful jokes, mostly based on word-play, such as: "I hoped it would not be long before I knew Mr Short. He evidently did not see my little joke, although I repeated it twice with a little laugh." (Ch 19)

I was disappointed at the ending which seemed to arrive like a bolt out of the blue brought about by a deus ex machina.

George Grossmith was the leading man in the first productions of many of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas playing, among other roles, The First Lord of the Admiralty in HMS Pinafore, the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance, and the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado. 

May 2024; 169 pages

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

"Seagulls and Seances" by Robin Drown

One of the joys of reading independently-published books is that from time to time you stumble across nuggets of untamed creativity which might have been stifled by the traditional publishing model. This is such a book. It has a bizarre cast of characters, including a seagull called Mum, but the key characters felt real. It has a plot which was conventional enough to keep me reading while making occasional forays into the surreal, such as when the chronological sequence of the narrative was disrupted shortly before an appearance of some otherwise unexplained time-travellers. It has some great descriptions (such as "Claire cleared her throat and put on her ‘telephone’ voice. 'Who is it?' She had got the pitch wrong and ended up sounding like the Queen after a puff of helium" (Week One Day Three). It has a delightful way of taking figures of speech literally (such as "Claire had been smoking since she was fifteen, with occasional breaks for sleep and Christmas dinner."; Week One Day Four). And there is a lot of humour. But above all, holding the madness together, it is well written.

Unclassifiable. The author references Douglas Adams, which I can see, and Kazuo Ishiguro, which I can't. I was reminded of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien, and less well known offerings such as Road Kill - The Duchess of Frisian Tun by Pete Adams and The Last Simple by Ray Sullivan.

The plot? Talented management executive Claire travels to the seaside town of Reymouth to care for a dog and a seagull after her father is hospitalised. She reconnects with friends (Daisy and love interest Damien) she met on long summer holidays when she was a child. But strange things happen. Is the house haunted? Or is someone trying to kill her?

Selected Quotes:

• "When Claire returned to Reymouth, she always felt herself crash into her childhood, like it was a spectre at the end of the rollercoaster. Her modern-day form - 28 years old and nearly tall enough for it - was dragged back into the past, back outside ramshackle doughnut stalls, wandering lost through clattering and blaring amusement arcades, and in the back of the hot, stuffy family car, racing raindrops." (Week One Day One)
• "Daisy gasped again, inhaling all of the oxygen in the high street and setting off a nearby car alarm.” (Week One Day Two)
• "Money was peacock feathers. If Claire wanted a pretty display, she knew bigger peacocks that Damien." (Week One Day Three)
• “He doesn’t date a seagull. He’s married to one.” (Week One Day Three)
• "She was enjoying her time with Damien too much to be bothered by Daisy and her rabbiting. Interrupting her date to talk to her would have been like turning off the Moon landing to watch a Malcolm in the Middle repeat on the other side." (Week One Day Three)
• "Claire was struggling to stay awake. Each word sounded like it had run a marathon through dream town just to get out of her head." (Week One Day Four)
• "Claire rolled her eyes. She wished she had not, because she spotted a damp patch on the ceiling and now that was the most intriguing thing in the room." (Week One Day Four)
• "Actually, smoking was Claire’s one weakness, and that was if she was limited to one. At last count, which had taken place at 2 o’clock in the morning of her last birthday, she had at least fifteen weaknesses, and smoking was three of them." (Week One Day Four)
• "The seagull, which was sitting on the armchair, gave her a glance so quick it could only have been measured by NASA’s hi-tech bird head recording instruments." (Week One Day Four)
• "Daisy was singing some pop hit that Claire only vaguely recognised. She had heard it in a McDonald’s or, if someone asked, a Costa." (Week One Day Four)
• "The labradoodle was sniffing things he must have fully sniffed hundreds of times before. Sometimes, an immediate threat to his pack – like a car door closing somewhere down the street or a leaf moving awkwardly – would cause him to freeze. Once he had ascertained that he had eliminated the threat by doing nothing at all, he would continue with his strange game of running and stopping." (Week One Day Five)
• "The church was empty. Aside from God, of course, who somehow managed to announce His presence to one and all, but also hide in the corner and spy." (Week One Day Seven)
• "Wine, gin, whisky, absinthe. All the food groups." (Week One Day Seven)
• "She thought back to what Daisy had said. Something, something listening to people. Pay attention or whatever. She shrugged off the rest of her words and sipped from her wine glass." (Week Two Day Two)
• "Daisy! You look nice. You’ve d…” Dyed your roots. No, done your roots. No… “…one your hair different. Are you meeting someone?” (Week Two Day Two)
• "Sounds like… too much pressure. I’ll stick to being a sidekick. Better hours.” (Week Two The Last Day Part Four)
• "They might be serving an evil, underground god, but we still have an NHS budget.” (Week Two The Last Day Part Four)

Not just weird, not just delightful, but well-written too. Enormous fun. There is a sequel which I hope to read soon: Pigeons and Pagans.

May 2023

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

"The Last Simple" by Ray Sullivan

 This remarkable book lampoons novels, especially of the Da Vinci Code type. The characters are all aware that they are in a work of fiction and that what happens to them will have to conform to the requirements of the genre (including only being able to perform normal bodily functions if they happen not to be in the next chapter); being written out is tantamount to murder and they all hope to be in the sequel. 

There is a plot of sorts and it is suitably ridiculous. Lord Bartholomew has been kidnapped by the evil Cardinal Ringaringaroses (whose henchman is Al Bino) in order to fulfil the Cardinal's plans for world domination which will inevitably involve a sixty second countdown towards the end. Bradford, a Professor of Simpology, is recruited to save the world.

But the joy of this book lies in the almost non-stop jokes. Every possible metaphor is taken literally. Every possible bit of word-play is wrung from the text. There must be at least one joke on every page. To give just a few examples:

• "‘A mystery?’ repeated Bradford, thrown momentarily by the starting of a new chapter.  Deep down, he hadn’t finished with the last one." (Ch 3)
• "‘I think the chapter’s going to end soo" (Ch 10)
• "Then another idea struck him, cutting him just above the eye" (Ch 13)
• "Kylie felt her heart sink, a rare hereditary condition caused by inbreeding in popular fiction." (Ch 14)
• "Lady Bartholomew poured scorn over the drawing, making the ink run a little." (Ch 20)
• "The assembled group nodded sagely, except for Belsen who chose a different herb to nod." (Ch 32)
• "‘Lucas Brightwater?’ asked Bradford, his eyebrows knitting together.  One was working on the sleeves, the other on the body." (Ch 32)

It's quite exhausting for the reader to keep up. It is also fantastic. It's like Tristram Shandy has been crossed with Monty Python with help from Milton Jones, the result being hilarious, surreal and extraordinary.

Selected quotes:

• "it wasn’t her fault that people didn’t read his stories in the right order, but it irked him that he had to explain his background every bloody time he had an adventure." (Ch 6)
• "In a fair world he wouldn’t be the lead in a third-rate parody but would instead be the lead in a Dan Brown story – the only problem was that he didn’t know if he’d have to dumb up or down for that role if and when it happened." (Ch 6)
• "This place must be costing a fortune,’ he said, looking around at the magnificent architecture, marred by the steel pipes. ‘Only if you describe it fully,’" (Ch 7)
• "What you have is a pretty strong jaw, not a pretty, strong jaw." (Ch 7) 
• "‘You’re going to speak to your daughter in a few moments,’ he declared, his eyes spilling evil.  Pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket, he wiped the evil up" (Ch 10)
• "Deep down, Bradford wanted to be an original character, not some amalgam stereotype." (Ch 15)
• "studying the hand with a puzzled look on her face while hoping nobody would ask her to suggest where else a puzzled look could reside." (Ch 31)
• "Bradford realised he was approaching novel fatigue, the syndrome where characters realise they’ve been active for days and nights without sleep.  It happened in practically every story and was never accounted for adequately." (Ch 34)

It's like Wodehouse on speed. Bizarre but brilliant. February 2023.

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

"The Bullet that Missed" by Richard Osman

Shortlisted for the crime/thriller prize in the 2023 British Book Awards.

This is the third novel in the Thursday Murder Club series and follows The Thursday Murder Club and The Man Who Died Twice. The usual gang is here (with the addition of Joyce's dog, Alan) but now the dangers need to be ramped up. So Elizabeth has to be abducted and threatened with death while both Bogdan, Ron and Joyce are also in danger. The police officers Donna and Chris are relegated to an even more minor role than before. But why should our amateur sleuths need them? Ron can elucidate details simply by chatting to a man he has never met before. This is lazy sleuthing. But we don't need plot. We have (superficial) characters and we have a lot of short sentences and some wit. Maybe the whiff of unreality has become a smog. Maybe disbelief is now too heavy to be suspended. This is the third in a record-breaking series and it will sell at least as well as the others simply on the author's name. But I don't think I'll be reading any more.

Selected quotes:

• "What was he thinking? That was the one question she knew not to ask a man. They were almost always thinking nothing at all, so were thrown by the question, and felt compelled to make something up." (Ch 4)
• "Everyone wants to feel special but nobody wants to feel different." (Ch 4)
• "He eats so much broccoli he can spell it without looking it up." (Ch 7)
• "Very few things are so important you would risk your life for them, but all sorts of things are important enough to risk somebody else's life." (Ch 12)
• "How often do you walk down a new road with an old lover?" (Ch 14)
• "Spies are like dogs. They cannot stand a closed door." (Ch 31)
• "Ron prays for his torture to end. Are the gentle sounds of the rainforest ever going to stop?" (Ch 40)
• "He doesn't say much, but sometimes that can be a relief, can't it? With some men you spend most of your time just nodding in agreement." (Ch 88)

Light comedy, little suspense. January 2023; 408 pages

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

"A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain

An engineer from 1890s Connecticut is transported back to Camelot in the mid-6th century. Appalled by the feudalism and the monarchism (as an American he is a staunch republican), he sets about to defeat superstitious magic with the aid of science (mostly by dynamiting Merlin's tower) and to develop the economy using engineering, newspapers and advertising. It is a paean to the virtues of the nineteenth century.

But it is a small conceit for such a long novel and I found the joke wearing very thin at times. In addition, it left a rather bad taste in my mouth. Twain seems utterly blind to the possible evils of his own society. In the middle of the book, the narrator (known as The Boss) takes King Arthur in disguise to learn about the condition of the common people (shades of Twain's The Prince and the Pauper here). The poverty and sickness and cruelty of the master to the serf and the wickedness of slavery are highlighted, but in the end one gets the feeling that the narrator doesn't actually care whether poor people are lynched or starve to death or are burned alive ... providing it's not him. For example, when The Boss and The King have been enslaved and are on a scaffold waiting to be hanged for slave rebellion, he watches the first two slaves hanged with equanimity and only starts worrying when the noose is around the King's neck. 

And towards the end, when The Boss is battling the knights, he kills at first one, then dozens and later tens of thousands using guns, electrocution and explosives. If anything, he is proud of the body count. It reminded me of the jingoistic exultation of Victorian Britons when their soldiers, armed with guns, slaughtered soldiers armed with spears and swords and called their opponents 'savages'.

If course it is possible that Twain intended the book as a satire against colonialist capitalism. I think the Introduction of the Penguin edition is trying to make this point.  ... but I certainly didn't get that sense.

Selected quotes:

• "By his look he was good-natured; by his gait , he was self-satisfied." (Ch 2)
• "As is the way with humourists of his breed, he was still laughing ... after everybody else had got through." (Ch 4) I think this remark could apply to this book, if Twain had any sense of how he himself appeared.
• "It is no use to throw a good thing away merely because the market isn't ripe yet." (Ch 4)
• “It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their King and Church and nobility: as if they had any more occasion to love and honour King and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honour the stranger who kicks him!” (Ch 8)
• “It is enough to make a body ashamed ... to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always been figured as its aristocracies - a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.” (Ch 8)
• “The nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before King and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation, that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world.” (Ch 8)
• “Human daws who can consent to masquerade in the peacock-shams of inherited dignities and unearned titles, are of no good but to be laughed at.” (Ch 8)
• "Spiritual wants and instincts are as various in the human family as are physical appetites, complexions, and features, and a man is only at his best, morally, when he is equipped with the religious garment whose colour and shape and size most rightly accommodate themselves to the spiritual complexion, angularities, and stature of the individual who wears it." (Ch 10)
• "She was as welcome as a corpse is to a coroner." (Ch 11)
• "King, nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world." (Ch 13)
• "There were two 'Reigns of Terror' if we would but remember it ... the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons' the other upon a hundred millions." (Ch 13)
• "He believed that if you were to strip the nation naked and send a stranger through the crowd, he couldn't tell the King from a quack doctor, nor a duke from a hotel clerk." (Ch 18)
• "When red-headed people are above a certain social grade, their hair is auburn." (Ch 18)
• "The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name." (Ch 25)
• "His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once." (Ch 28)
• "A royal family of cats would answer every other purpose, They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up to shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive; finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house." (Ch 40)

September 2022; 410 pages

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

"A Pelican at Blandings" by P G Wodehouse

Another Blandings novel. Once more Galahad, the younger brother of Lord Emsworth, must reunite  sundered lovers. Once more the antagonists are Lady Constance and the truly awful Alaric, Duke of Dunstable. Once more there are imposters. And if no-one has any plans to kidnap the Empress of Blandings, there are plans afoot to steal a painting of a nude lady that looks a bit like the fat pig herself.

So the plot and the characters are the same as all the other Blandings novels. Never mind! What makes Wodehouse adorable is the way he twists our common language into absurdity:

• "A man, to use an old-fashioned phrase, of some twenty-eight summers, he gave the impression at the moment of experiencing at least that number of very hard winters." (6.1)
• "Something had told Lord Emsworth that this interview might prove to be a difficult one, and it was plain to him that something had known what it was talking about." (7.3)
• "'I wouldn't marry him if he were the last man on earth.' 'Well, he isn't, so the question does not arise.'" (9.2)

One of the other joys of this book is the way he teases his fellow authors:

• "A stylist like Gustave Flaubert, with his flair for the mot juste, would have described her as being as mad as a wet hen." (8.1)
• "Thomas Hardy would have seen in the whole affair one more of life's little ironies and on having it drawn to his attention would have got twenty thousand words of a novel out of it." (10.2)
• "Like all authors, she knew that her output was above criticism." (13.1)

And one of the characters is called Abercrombie Fitch!

Selected quotes:

• "She belonged to the school of thought that holds that a nice glass of hot milk, while not baffling the death angel altogether, can at least postpone the inevitable." (6.1)
• "He switched on the torch. When he did so, he instantly became the centre of attraction to a rowdy mob of those gnats, moths and beetles which collect in gangs and stay up late in the rural districts." (7.2)
• "A stare that would have aroused the respectful envy of a basilisk." (8.1)

Other P G Wodehouse novels reviewed in this blog may be found here.

August 2022; 249 pages

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

"Pigs Have Wings" by P G Wodehouse

 Another Blandings book and once again there is an imposter at the castle, as well the two sets of young lovers who have managed to get themselves engaged to the wrong people, as well as a pig that needs protecting from kidnap, or another that needs kidnapping. 

As well as reusing characters and plot devices (all Blandings books include imposters and young lovers, most include the pig) PGW is not beyond reusing phrases. For example: "It was plain that she was in agreement with the poet that of all sad words of tongue or pen the saddest are these 'It might have been'." (8.1). A very similar sentiment was first used by Psmith in Mike (“Of all sad words of tongue or pen,” said he, “the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’"; C 33) and in Leave it to Psmith ("Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these. 'it might have been'."; 3.1). The quote is originally from a nineteenth-century American Abolitionist Quaker poet called John Greenleaf Whittier. Perhaps reusing your material is the only possible strategy if you are a prolific author.

But you don't read PGW for the predictable plot or the insight into character; you read him for the joy of the way he takes the language all the way to the fair.

Selected quotes:

PGW enjoyed taking the mickey out of authors in this book. One of the young lovers writes short stories: 

• "For an author Jerry Vail was rather nice-looking, most authors, as is widely known, resembling in appearance the more degraded types of fish, unless they look like birds, when they could pass as vultures and no questions asked." (4.3)
• "Jerry Vail is an author and you know as well as I do what authors are. Unbalanced. Unreliable. Fatheads, to a man." (9.1)

Other quotes:

• "A man with a fondness for the fleshpots and a weakness for wines and spirits who, after many lean years, suddenly inherits a great deal of money and an extensive cellar finds himself faced with temptations which it is hard to resist. Arrived in the land of milk and honey, his disposition is to square his elbows and let himself go till his eyes bubble." (2.1)
• "Silence fell, one of those deep, uneasy silences which occur when all good men realize that now is the time for them to come to the aid of the party but are unable to figure out just how to set about doing so." (2.5)
• "'Why is it?' inquired Penny - she seemed to be addressing a passing butterfly, 'that men always say that?'" (4.3)
• "He looked like the things you find in dust-bins, which are passed over with a disdainful jerk of the head by the discriminating alley cat." (6.2)
• "I've been thinking about that cold of yours, and I'll tell you the stuff to give it. You want to take a deep breath and hold it as long as you possibly can. This traps the germs in your interior, and not being able to get fresh air, they suffocate." (8.1)
• "It is a very intrepid young man who can see an English butler steadily and see him whole without feeling a worm-like humility and all Jerry's previous encounters with Beach ... had left him with the impression that his feet were too large, his ears too red and his social status something in between that of a Dead End kid and a badly dressed leper." (10.3) It is the addition of 'badly-dressed' to 'leper' that makes PGW so wonderful: he takes a metaphor and keeps adding.
• "He was experiencing the quiet satisfaction of the raconteur who sees that his story is going well. ... Just the right hushed silence, and the eyes protruding just the correct distance from their sockets." (11.2)

June 2022; 253 pages

Other P G Wodehouse books reviewed in this blog can be found here.

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