"At the Jerusalem" by Paul Bailey

A compassionate portrait of old age, written almost entirely in dialogue. It won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1968. Its author went on to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize in both 1977 and 1986.

Old Mrs Gadny, still grieving the death of her daughter, goes to live with her stepson and his wife and children. Tensions multiply and she is placed, still depressed, in an old people’s home.

It's a well-paced story with some interestingly nuanced characters. It is written mostly in dialogue. Actions are also recorded but there is virtually no description. In this it reminded me of the work of Ivy Compton-Burnett. However, the dialogue in this novel is much more vernacular than the formal and grammatically correct dialogue that ICB employs. Furthermore, there is a substantial amount of interior monologue from the principal character, Mrs Gadny, interspersed with the dialogue. Here is a typical extract:

"Nurse Barrow watched her eat.
‘Have they missed me?’
‘The ladies?’
- Ladies!
‘Ladies! Have they missed me?’"

Note the extreme brevity of the paragraphs which are often a single sentence long, the preponderance of dialogue, the simplicity of the described action and the inclusion of a single line, in this case a single word, representing  Mrs Gadny's thoughts.  

This gives the novel a bare-bones, minimalist feel. It makes it distinctive. I need to read more novels by Bailey to judge whether this accurately represents his style. 

It is very much of its time. There are only ten ladies in the home and several nurses, a matron and a cook, but they all sleep together in the ward. Some of the ladies used to be ‘in service’. One of them never,  learned to read, this is also true of some of Mrs Gadny's relatives. Some of the patients object, in bluntly racist terms, to being cared for by a black nurse. The phrase ‘Jew-boy’ is used and the word ‘cripples’.

Of course it is sad, since it charts Mrs Gadny's decline. She herself feels that she has been thrown away like "trash". Nevertheless, there are a number of moments of wryly observational humour to lighten the mood.

Selected quotes:

Page numbers refer to the Head of Zeus (2020) edition

• “As crafty as a pox doctors clerk.” (1, p51)
• “This hospital’s in Lambeth, where they've done it. They have a machine there, it's the only one of its kind; just for stomachs. People come from all over the world to take advantage. All over the world ... Dulwich - everywhere.” (1, p 70)
• “This is what you come to: you live for seventy years and you find one night you're stuck in a room, in a chair, and your body’s beneath you, waiting for the chill to strike it, till your eyes see only black and no sound to remind you. You've memories of rooms and faces and all manner of things but they go as quickly as they come. How long before she was nothing? Years?” (3: p208)

November 2024; 216 pages

First published in 1967

This edition published by Head of Zeus

Other, more or less contemporary novels about old people reviewed in this blog include Memento Mori (1959) by Muriel Spark, and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) by Elizabeth Taylor. Both these books focus on people from a rather higher social bracket; in the Spark book the protagonists live independently and Mrs Palfrey lives in a 'private hotel'. 

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

"Her Winter Song" by Anna Vaught

A spooky story set in a village full of rustics under a White Horse hill.

This tiny novella, little more than a short story, 

A Cambridge academic heads to a village in chalk-hilled Wiltshire, where another don, now missing, has recently been doing archaeology. He meets 'the Man' who issues a mysterious warning and describes how he was seduced by the Woman. There are the usual cryptic comments from the yokels in the pub, there is a drink of strange spiced wine, and there is sex both on the hill and in a church whose font is strangely carved. It is the celebration of the 'old' winter solstice symbolising death and rebirth, and there are monsters.

Very Wicker Man but told in a luxuriously lyrical style, full of a Victorian ghost-story vibe but saved from melodrama by some delightful modern touches (eg the Man fits kitchen: "there was a particular fashion for cupboards with many shelves and built-in racks").

Selected quotes:

• "If you hear the strike of the farrier's hammer and remember that there are none in the village, or the blacksmith striking his anvil, when none have lived here for years, leave here quickly. And if you hear hoof taps but see no horse striding towards you ... I am sorry for your loss; it is too late, and you must stay here with me in this perpetual dusk." 
• "I found the instability alluring"
• "As the winter solstice tells us of nights shortening and days lengthening, what we pray for is darkness. Rich aphotic pools of it."

November 2024; 58 pages

Published by Renard Press

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

"Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks" (and two other stories) by Natsuko Imamura

 Strange stories from Japan which blur the boundaries between reality and illusion.

The first story concerns a girl who, growing up, discovers that no-one will ever take any food she offers them. Ever. This so upsets her that when she becomes a pair of chopsticks, the joy of delivering food straight into the mouth of her owner is transcendent. (In a nod to panpsychism, the flat is full of other girls and boys who have become blankets, doorknobs, rucksacks, reading lamps etc.)

The second story is about a girl who, no matter how hard she tries, cannot get hit. Water bombs thrown at her miss, frisbees are intercepted by dogs ... She starts self-harming and it is all downhill from then on.

In the third story the protagonist spends her youth lying in her bedroom until one night when, despite having lost the use of her legs, she goes into town. There's a sort of weird 'what if humans were domesticated pets' vibe going on here?

Fiction is all about the art of imagining things that aren't actually true. Although I personally prefer my fiction to stay within the realms of likelihood, fantastic stories have a long and honourable provenance, underlying myth and fairy tales and, in literature, classics from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Kafka's Metamorphosis. Often, the point of travelling to the edges of imagination is to critique reality, as with Swift's Gulliver's Travels or The Time Machine by H G Wells. Each of the stories in this collection could be analysed in that way (the first is about the need of people to feel useful, the second about the fact that suffering is a psychologically necessary part of the human condition?).

I was intrigued by the fact that these stories are told in a dead-pan style as if weirdness is a normal part of the everyday. I've just read Ronan Hession's Ghost Mountain and that has the same style: a stripped-down delivery without embellishment that leaves no room for doubt despite the unlikelihood of the events it recounts. This style, as encountered from the first line of Kafka's Metamorphosis ("As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.") seems to be able to blur the line between the waking world and the world of dreams. Where the protagonist themselves are transformed, the narration is always in the third person. The only first person narrative in which the narrator-protagonist are themselves transformed that I can recall offhand is The Golden Ass by Apuleius. So it is possible but are there any other examples?

I imagine that there are a number of stories nowadays written from the perspective of a ghost (eg Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost), a zombie, a werewolf, or a vampire but this is a genre I don't really know. I believe Black Beauty by Anna Sewell is narrated by the horse. Other examples? Perhaps I need to dedicate a page on my blog to these sort of stories.

November 2024; 178 pages

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

"Ghost Mountain" by Ronan Hession

 “A meditation on grief and loss with some sex in it.” 

One day, on the outskirts of a small town, a mountain suddenly appears. This novel, written like a myth, chronicles the effect the mountain has on the lives of those living near it.

The most distinctive feature of this novel is its prose style. It is written in a deliberately simplistic manner, baldly stating facts, with a lot of repetition. It reminded me of the way that a myth is written: this hero did this, this happened, then he did this. It reminded me of the first paragraph of Kafka's Metamorphosis: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes." This is telling a fantastic story but it does it in such a pedestrian style that it allows no speculation as to how it can possibly be true. Compare it with four paragraphs taken from Book 3 (Elaine is not cold) of Ghost Mountain:

“As she was explaining everything she thought, ‘Am I cold? Is this a cold thing to think?’

But it was not a cold thing to think.

Elaine asked him what he would do afterwards.

Dominic said he would join a monastery. or he would go back to being the town drunk.” 

Perhaps the only way to tell a fantastic myth is to do it simplistically.

The other feature of the story is the repetition of leitmotifs, something else that crops up in myths and religious texts. For example, it seems that no-one can lie down on Ghost Mountain without feeling the discomfort of a stone pressing against their tailbone. Two characters in separate incidents lose their front teeth. A mother and daughter both vomit into a patch of nettles, although one does it because she is dying and the other because she is pregnant. One character enjoys watching European films, each one being described in the same was, as “a meditation on grief and loss with some sex in it.” (Book 1: Ocho wasn't always like this)

It is these features that make the book haunting (like the mountain, brooding over the landscape) and, despite the echoes of Kafka (and, perhaps, of Ivy Compton-Burnett), utterly original. Other reviewers have detected a Japanese influence and it has also been described as 'post-modern'. 

Selected quotes:

• “The new overseas landowner of Ghost Mountain sat at his desk, eating a sandwich he had bought from his savings. What he thought of as his savings was actually the limited spare capacity on his credit card.” (1: Overseas landowner)
• “He opened the cupboard to look for food but all he saw were ingredients.” (1: Ruth not with you?)
• “Ruth distrusted organised people. Organised people liked to take over, while pretending they were not taking over. Organised people liked to shape things their way and call it helping.” (1: Night on Ghost Mountain.)
• “They had organised a celebration or commemoration or festival. The organised people always seem to be carried away with something or other. They had a whole story about why the date was significant. It all sounded simplistic to Ruth. They were building a bonfire and playing crude, repetitive music. Drugs were involved.” (1: Bitter soup)
• “He and Ruth were like two sides of the same ladder. Her death was a sundering of the ladder down the middle. Holding one half of a ladder is in no way comparable to holding one side of a complete ladder.” (2: Ocho)
• “She thought about how even though young women were so pretty and older men were not so generally pretty, an older man with two missing teeth could still be a cause of jealousy.” (2: Is he dead?)
• “For the first time, Elaine began to understand likeness in her painting. It was not about recording what somebody looked like so that they could always look that way. It was about capturing a moment of change. A simultaneous moment of change in the subject and in the artist.” (2: Likeness)
• “She thought about the artist thinking about his meat pictures. How was he so sure they were terrible? That they weren't terrible art.” (3: Meat Gallery)
• “Ursula did not like landscapes. ... Most of all she disliked the mental projection that landscapes involved. The fly tipping of the mind onto the landscape. The turning of the landscape into things. Into metaphors.” (3: Ghost Mountain)
• “He had learned that credit disguised failure as success. That a person who owned and owed a lot was viewed as rich whereas a person who owned and owed a little was considered poor. That a rich person was someone who had access to credit and that a poor person was someone who had no access to credit.” (3: Christopher)
• “Dominic was no longer Elaine's husband. He was what was called a widower. That word felt new and also very old. It felt like a word that had been worn by many people and which was now offered to him to wear, even though it did not fit him. It felt too big and baggy and heavy. It was not tailored and had no lines. It was generic and it generically erased his past except for one event. My wife has died, it says. And that is who I am now.” (3: Diesel)

Trivia:

I was slightly thrown of kilter in Book 2 when a character seems to become another character momentarily while in a lift. I thought this was a moment of surreal magic. It was a misprint which has now been corrected in the new edition.

Delightfully enigmatic. November 2024; 281 pages

Published by Bluemoose books

I've also read Leonard and Hungry Paul, a delightful novel about new men from the same author.

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

"Rare Singles" by Benjamin Myers

Fifty years ago Bucky cut two records before living the rest of his life in obscurity. Now, newly bereaved, crippled with arthritis and addicted to opioids, he has been invited to leave the US for the first time and travel to Scarborough in England where his four songs have achieved cult status. But he leaves his pills on the plane. Will he be able to battle cold turkey, his pain and his grief to get on stage and sing?

The plot may be stereotypical (aimed straight at Hollywood?) and its inspiration seems to be a blend of Demon Copperhead and Searching for Sugar Man (see below) but the question is whether Ben Myers, a superb author responsible for Cuddy, Pig Iron and The Perfect Golden Circle, can breathe life into it? 

I was disappointed. The key characters all seemed to be exactly as you would expect them. Bucky with his "sweetpea" and his "honey" was a stage American. Dinah's husband and son were predictably awful. The Moslem hotel cleaner had a heart of gold, of course she had. Even the malevolent seagull came straight from central casting. 

Worse, there were several paragraphs of dialogue, mostly involving Dinah, that seemed artificial, designed to provide information rather than to build character. They broke the verisimilitude; I was no longer absorbed in the story but alienated, realising I was a reader and this was a book.

There were some stunning pieces of prose:

• “The whisky tasted of burnt oranges and wet ash, lonely nights and bitter mornings.” (p 106)
• “Voices of doubt grew like stalactites in the dark, dripping caves of his mind.” (p 106)
• “The day had drifted, the morning yawning into afternoon, the afternoon tightening into a cool autumnal evening. Evening glancing towards night.” (p 127)

From most authors, this would have been a decent book but I have come to expect more, much more, from the author who can create the young labourer with the mother dying of cancer in  the final part of Cuddy, John-John in Pig Iron, and the wonderful pair of mavericks in The Perfect Golden Circle. 

Selected quotes:

page references refer to the Bloomsbury hardback edition 2024

• “Down into the rough, cloying quicksand of a second strange sleep.” (p 13)
• “It bombed like Dresden.” (p 22)
• “Dinah knew her love for her son was diminishing ... but she refused to succumb to guilt over this recent realisation, and in fact wondered if love and the capacity to give it had a limit. ... Was there a discernible moment when all the love for someone is gone?” (p 63)
• “Sometimes it seems like the working  life is out to break a man rather than make a man.” (p 85)
• “He had known that this day was coming for years ... What he hadn't expected was that it would be here, wedged between a dreary sea and a low -ceiling sky in a foreign land.” (p 92)
• “The weight of history was pressing him deeper down into the pit of withdrawal. All those memories that he had put into holes and buried. They hadn't disappeared though, merely corroded.” (p 97)
• “Everything that stands against the sea is scrubbed away eventually.” (p 105)
• “Maybell was just better equipped to deal with the day-to-day act of living than he was - and it was an act, because pretending was part of it, always had been. Pretending you were thriving rather than just surviving; pretending you were strong when you felt weak; pretending you didn't give a damn when really you were scared of every shadow; pretending you were happy, you were cool, you were chilling.” (p 132)
• “Rain was indifferent. Rain ruled the world. It amplified his insignificance; it reminded him that just when you think you're at the bottom, there's always further to plummet.” (p 163)
• “Were we simply stagnating like the lonely pond that is no longer being refreshed by rain, and is simply sitting in the sun, losing all its oxygen; all of the life forms that it harbours slowly suffocating, the foetid stench of decay hanging over the unmoving body of browning water.” (p 184)

November 2024; 207 pages

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

Searching for Sugar Man is a documentary film about Sixto Rodriguez, a musician from Detroit who cut two albums in the early 1970s which bombed in the US but achieved cult status in apartheid South Africa. The film rather gives the impression that, following his rediscovery, his comeback tour of South Africa was the first time he had played his music for nearly thirty years; in fact he was also well-known in Australia, where he had concert tours in 1979 and 1981, and New Zealand, Botswana and Zimbabwe. Just as in 'Rare Singles', his work has been sampled by rappers and featured in a movie. In my humble opinion, the intro to 'I Wonder' is one of the great bass guitar riffs.

"Fire Exit" by Morgan Talty

Does our identity depend upon our heritage? And is our heritage passed down to us through 'blood' or 'stories'?

The narrator, Charles, is the stepson of Frederick, a member of the Penobscot nation, an indigenous people living in Maine. Because Charles doesn't qualify as Penobscot he is not allowed to live on the reservation. Instead he lives across the river and spends his days watching his daughter growing up with her mother and another man. Meanwhile his mother, Louise, who has battled episodes of depression throughout her life, is now drifting into dementia.

He wants to tell his now adult daughter that he is her father. “She needed to know that her blood was her blood. nothing could take that away, and nothing could even come close to capturing it.” (Ch 12) He hasn't really grasped the implications: not only does that cast doubt on her identity as Penobscot but also she will discover that her parents have been lying to her all these years. 

It's a nice conundrum. The narrator is obsessed by bloodline and yet many of the deepest and most meaningful relationships in this book are between people with no genetic connections, such as Charles with his beloved stepfather and Bobby with Louise. 

The subplot of his mother's voyage into dementia is a counterpoint that reinforces and strengthens the theme.

I found the first chapter very confusing (even after I discovered I had skipped two pages and returned to reread them). But the structure of the plot is nicely balanced between keeping the reader guessing, letting curiosity drive the page-turning, and providing sufficient information. It ends in a dramatic climax with is both surprising and a necessary consequence of what went before; Aristotle would have approved.

Selected quotes:

• “I knew her only by the conversations we had on the phone, her body the shape of a voice on the other end of the line.” (Ch 3)
• “The only true thing I could be certain about ... was that blood is messy, and it stains in ways that are hard to clean, especially if that stain can't be seen but we know it is there, a trail of red or dark red leading back to a time we cannot go to remove it.” (Ch 6)
• “I wasn't sure Louise knew who I was anymore, but I was quite certain I was nobody. And as I sat there I felt myself slipping away to damp depths of sadness as I had done the night before, and I was thinking and thinking and thinking about how, in just the past year, I had just started to know her, but then I began to unknow her, getting farther and farther away like watching a boat drift from the shore and head out not to some other land but to an open water that never, ever ends. And she did not even know this, that she was on the boat.” (Ch 21)
• “We are made of stories, and if we don't know them - the ones that make us - how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?” (Ch 26)

November 2024; 292 pages

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

"Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates

Chosen by Time magazine as one of the Hundred best novels since Time began, this debut novel first published in 1961 was a finalist for the National Book Award. It became a three-times Oscar nominated film directed by Sam Mendes and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet; I've never seen the film.

It's about how the need to grow up and earn a living destroys our dreams.

It's 1955 in the USA. Frank wants life to be meaningful. April, his wife, married him because he was always talking of things that seemed important and worthwhile. But now he is saddled with “the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs.” (1.2) She is a housewife and mother bringing up two children. They devise a plan to drop out of the rate race and move to Europe where she will work and he will find himself. But events and human weakness conspire to undermine their dreams.

We've all been there. We've all had to compromise on our hopes. This is a universal theme.

Despite being written in the third-person 'omniscient' and past tense, it was almost entirely from the PoV of Frank.

My problem was that I didn't like the characters. Now that should be a sign of excellence in writing: to inspire such a reaction in your reader. But I wasn't sure that I wholly believed in them:

• April was a neurotic doormat. She seemed to live entirely for her man. She seems entirely contented with her role as a domestic servant; her plans for the future revolve around making her man more fulfilled. She says things like: “You always do have the right instinct about things like this. You’re really a very generous, understanding person, Frank.” She belatedly realises this when, finally and of course disastrously, she makes up her mind to rebel. “The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was effort to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear.” (3.7) But in terms of the book this epiphany came too late. I suppose you can argue that their row-strewn marriage was fuelled by her unrealised anger. I suppose you can argue that women in America in 1955 were complacently subservient. But it didn't ring true to me.
• Frank almost completely lacks self-awareness. He's a self-pitying bully and tyrant. He wants to feel that he's a man. In conversation he's a bore. Somehow he has done less than the minimum at work for seven years and kept his job. He can embark upon an affair without any feelings of guilt. Of course you don't need your main character through whose eyes the others are seen to be a hero  but Frank was so unpleasant that, even though he had dreams (although he never really visualised them) and now his life is dull dull dull, I couldn't sympathise. Stop whingeing and get over it was how I felt. 

I am aware that I am judging these characters (a) as if they were real (which suggests that the book was well-written) and (b) in the light of contemporary standards, after we have had nearly seventy years of feminism.

The other characters were very much in the background. Mrs Givings (I kept reading that as 'misgivings') was a nice little cameo role.

The plot was mostly predictable and paced very much as you would expect. 

There are some wonderful descriptions:

• "as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell.” (1.2)
• “His temple ached in zeal and triumph as he heaved a rock up from the suck of its white-wormed socket and let it roll end over end down into the shuddering leafmold, because he was a man.” (1.3)
• “His thin gray body, which seemed to have been made for no other purpose than to fill the minimum requirements of a hard-finish, double-breasted business suit.” (2.4)

But if you want trapped suburban American angst, I'd prioritise Rabbit, Run by John Updike and its sequel Rabbit Redux.

There's an interesting homage to The Great Gatsby. Compare these two passages:

• “‘I just remembered that today’s my birthday.’ I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.” (The Great Gatsby, Ch 7)
• “I just thought of something ... Tomorrow’s my birthday. ... I'll be thirty years old.” (Revolutionary Road 1.4)

Is it a coincidence that the protagonist's name is Frank and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's first name was Francis?

Selected quotes:

• “His face did have an unusual mobility: it was able to suggest wholly different personalities with each flickering change of expression.” (1.2)
• “Nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn't seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ... and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach." (1.2)
• “You want to know why everybody thinks you're a jerk? Because you're a jerk, that's why.” (1.2)
• “It was turning into mindless, unrewarding work, the kind of work that makes you clumsy with fatigue and petulant with lack of progress.” (1.3)
• “Wasn't it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn't really wanted to do?” (1.3)
• “He had never seen such a stare of pitying boredom in her eyes.” (1.4)
• “Her hair was as unattractively wild now as it must have been in childhood; it seemed to have exploded upward from her skull into hundreds of little kinks. She touched it delicately with her fingertips in several places, not in any effort to smooth it but rather in the furtive, half-conscious way that he had sometimes touched his pimples at sixteen, just to make sure the horrible things were still there.” (1.6)
• “Don't ‘moral’ and ‘conventional’ really mean the same thing?” (3.1)
• “She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known ... that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.” (3.7)
• “The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something.” (3.9)

October 2024; 337 pages

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

"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)

Links to other literary works:

This is speculative. In The Knight of the Burning Pestle by John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, the hero Rafe, in the style of Don Quixote, mistakes an innkeeper for the squire of a castle, precisely the opposite mistake made by Mr Marlow. I wonder if Goldsmith knew of the play? There is no record of it being performed between 1636 and 1904, so Goldsmith couldn't have seen it, but it was published in the 2nd edition of the Collected Works of Fletcher and Beaumont so he might have read it. 

October 2024;

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