Five From The Archive (no.3)

In honour of Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week - and being a bit teasing about the morose face she seems to have in every photo...

Beryl Bainbridge was famously nominated for the Booker Prize five times but never won - and so, also in my honour, this week's five from the archive are...

Five... Shortlisted Booker Titles (which didn't win)

1.) Loitering With Intent (shortlisted 1981) by Muriel Spark

In short: My favourite Spark novel, as I'm sure you all heard during Muriel Spark Reading Week, it concerns Fleur's somewhat mad involvement with arrogant Sir Quentin, his Autobiographical Association, and the world of publishing.

From the review: "This becomes the crux of the novel - where does Fleur's imagination end, and where does plagiarism begin? Similarities between the Autobiographical Association's activities and the manuscript of Warrender Chase grow ever greater - how much is coincidence, how much does Fleur absorb, and how much does she write before it happens? "

2.) The Bookshop (shortlisted 1978) by Penelope Fitzgerald

In short: A woman tries to open a bookshop in a small town, but finds that the town takes against her.

From the review:  "Between Christine and Florence a rather touching, but unsentimental, friendship develops. If that sounds remotely mawkish, trust me, it isn't. Penelope Fitzgerald doesn't do mawkish. Her writing is spare, very spare, and there isn't room for emotions - we simply see the people interact, and can quite easily understand the emotions they must be experiencing."

3.) A Month in the Country (shortlisted 1980) by J.L. Carr

In short: Tom has been hired to uncover a medieval mural in a northern village church - this gentle novel shows his relationships with the other villagers, and quiet absorption in his work.  (I'm afraid the 'review' is hardly that... one of my scatterbrain days.)

From the review: "The most interesting scene is that when Tom visits the vicar and his amiable wife, Alice, only to discover their monstrous and secluded vicarage seems to alter both their personalities. Like the rest of the novel, this is shown subtly and calmly, but is a fascinating glimpse into one facet of the village."

4.) The Little Stranger (shortlisted 2009) by Sarah Waters

In short: Creepy events start to happen in an old mansion in the post-war 1940s.  Visiting Dr. Faraday narrates them, but is uncertain whether or not the supernatural is to blame...

From the review: "It's something of a truism to say that 'the house is itself a character', but you have to take your hat off to Waters' ability to invest Hundreds Hall with this power without it becoming a caricature of Gothic literature. The house remains comfort and terror; mystery and simplicity; homely and unhomely."

5.) Black Dogs (shortlisted 1992) by Ian McEwan

In short: Something happens on a couple's honeymoon, involving two black dogs.  We see the impact of this event without, for a long time, knowing precisely what took place...

From the review:  "It certainly battles out with Atonement for being my favourite McEwan - people have recommended 'early McEwan' to me, and I can see why. The writing here is compact, tense - so often I'd finish reading paragraphs or phrases and think "wow" - quite the opposite of Saturday."

As always, I want to know - which would you suggest?  To give you a hand, here is a link to all the shortlisted titles.

Word Verification

I'm afraid I've had to reactivate word verification.  I know it's a pain, but I've been getting so many spam comments recently that I'm having to bring it back.  Sorry!  To give you a smile, I was amused by one of the spam comments I got today.  Usually they give a link to their website after a vaguely positive comment about 'your site'.  This innovative spammer went with something a bit different...  They still had their link, but before that:

The very next time I read a blog, Hopefully it won't disappoint me as much as this particular one. After all, I know it was my choice to read through, but I genuinely thought you'd have something interesting to talk about. All I hear is a bunch of moaning about something you could fix if you weren't too busy searching for attention.

UPDATE: Well, I've had two spam comments in the not-very-long since I posted this, so apparently Word Verification doesn't make any difference.  I've turned it back off for now.

Injury Time - Beryl Bainbridge

It's Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week with Annabel/Gaskella... hope you're joining in!

Can you imagine what would happen if the casts of Abigail's Party and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were held hostage in a siege?  Well, if you can't, then read Injury Time and it'll give you a pretty good idea.  The sexual bewilderment of George and Martha is combined with the 1970s would-you-like-an-olive stylings of Beverley et al in Bainbridge's 1977 novel, somewhere in the middle of her writing career.

Edward is a somewhat hapless chap, working in dull job and in a marriage with Helen which, if not loveless, is hardly passionate.  And he has a mistress - albeit one with three unruly children at home, and no intention of staying submissively in the shadows.  His mistress rejoices in the absurd name Binny.

Binny was a wonderful mother, but she didn't seem to realise he was a very busy man and his time was limited. They could never do anything until her ten-year-old had settled down for the night.  They could usually start doing something at about five to eleven, and then they had to do it very quickly because Edward had to leave at quarter past eleven.  He was always whispering frantically into Binny's ear what he might do if only they had a whole evening together, and she grew quite pale and breathless and hugged him fearfully tightly in the hall, mostly when seeing him out.

Binny is tired of fitting in around Helen's schedule (although Helen supposedly does not know of Binny) and demands that Edward ceases to treat her as a dirty little secret.  In order to pacify Binny, Edward agrees to invite his colleague Simpson, and Simpson's wife Muriel, to a dinner party at Binny's house.  What could possibly go wrong?

Bainbridge is great at showing the awkwardness of this dinner party and all its shades of morality: Simpson has overstated his wife's approval of the night, for example, and Binny's attempts to maintain a presentable dinner party in bizarre circumstances are drawn wonderfully.  My favourite character, though, is Binny's neighbour Alma, who turns up mid-way through the party, rather the worse for wear.  I don't know what I find so amusing about characters who incongruously pepper their conversation with 'darling' and 'dear', but it always makes me chuckle.  Indeed, the whole novel is very funny - mostly a humour which comes from dialogue, clashes of characters, and surreal turns of events.

"Drunken driving is a crime," said Simpson stiffly.  "It should carry the harshest penalties."

"What are you worried about, darling?  I lost my licence, didn't I?"  All at once Alma's face crumpled.  Tears spilled out of her ludicrous eyes.

"You can talk, George," Muriel said coldly.  "You're only wearing one shoe."

The most bizarre twist, as I mentioned at the beginning and as the cover suggests, is that these characters find their evening's festivities interrupted when two men and a woman come running through the front door (complete with a pram holding a doll) and hold them all hostage.  The house is chosen more or less at random, and they are simply a bargaining tool against the police.

What makes Injury Time so hilarious is that Beryl Bainbridge chooses not to change the tone when the hostage situation takes place.  The characters - especially irrepressible Alma - don't alter the way they talk, and the dynamics between man, mistress, colleague, and wife all remain fraught, uncomfortable and very funny.  It helps that Ginger and Harry, the main two hostage-takers, are not your normal criminals.  Some fairly disturbing events occur in Injury Time, but they are described with such lightness, and focus upon social awkwardness rather than anything more traumatic, that this remains decidedly a comic novel.  As my first foray into the world of Bainbridge, I'm off to a fantastic start, and I look forward to seeing what else the week brings.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - Anita Loos

Amongst my towering pile of current (but not very active) reads, I mentioned Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos.  One or two of you encouraged me to return to it, and I am never one to turn down the call to read a short novel from the 1920s.

Lorelei is the blonde in question, going around America and Europe bewitching rich men and thinking deep thoughts.  These thoughts she has been encouraged to note down in her diary... she is admirably determined to educate herself, but rather more determined to secure diamond tiaras etc. from the gentlemen she encounters.  She is not aided by her unrefined friend Dorothy, whom I absolutely love - Lorelei attempts to refine her, but Dorothy's slang and insults ("Lady, if we hurt your dignity like you hurt our eyesight I hope for your sake, you are a Christian science") are thankfully unfettered by decorum - they're hilarious.

The joy of the novel is the voice Loos creates for her blonde.  Almost every sentence begins 'So' or 'I mean', and her deep thoughts are about as perceptive as her spelling is correct.  Typos today are, for once, not my own work.

I am going to stay in bed this morning as I am quite upset as I saw a gentleman who quite upset me.  I am not really sure it was the gentleman, as I saw him a quite a distants in the bar, but if it really is the gentleman it shows that when a girl has a lot of fate in her life it is sure to keep on happening.

I haven't seen the film musical, with Marilyn Monroe, but I think I'm going to now.  At the time of publication, it was hugely successful - the second best selling title of 1926 (although published in 1925), and Edith Wharton called it 'The great American novel.'  I wonder how tongue-in-cheek she was being?

As the beauty of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is in the style, I'll give you another excerpt - one which gets across quite how beguiling the young woman is:

So Mr. Jennings helped me quite a lot and I stayed in his office about a year when I stayed in his office about a year when I found out he was not the kind of gentleman that a young girl is safe with.  I mean one evening when I went to pay a call on him at his apartment, I found a girl there who really was famous all over Little Rock for not being nice.  So when I found out that girls like that paid calls on Mr. Jennings I had quite a bad case of hysterics and my mind was really a blank and when I came out of it, it seems that I had a revolver in my hand and it seems that the revolver had shot Mr. Jennings.

[...]

Because everyone at the trial except the District Attorney was really lovely to me and all the gentlemen in the jury all cried when my lawyer pointed at me and told them that they practically all had had either a mother or a sister.  So the jury was only out three minutes and then they came back and acquitted me and they were all so lovely that I really had to kiss all of them and when I kissed the judge he had tears in his eyes and he took me right home to his sister.

So, I mean, I liked the novel a lot - I didn't find it quite as uproariously funny as some people evidently do, and I think the joke would wear a little thin if it were stretched beyond the 150pp of this novel - but it was great fun while it lasted.  And I do have the even shorter sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, in the other half of this edition, starting from the other side and meeting in the middle... I'll report back in due course.

Song for a Sunday

Like everyone else in the world, it seems, I have Adele's albums.  I bought 19 after hearing her beautiful cover of 'Make You Feel My Love' at my cousin's wedding.  Well, little did I know that, buried deep in my iTunes, I had a duet called 'Water and a Flame' which Adele sang with Daniel Merriweather on his album Love & War.  And it's rather nice.

Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend (Minimalist) Miscellany

It's been a long day, so I'm going to leave you with a very minimalist miscellany.  Follow the links to find out more...

1.) 60 Years in 60 Poems - can you help?

2.) Remember how much I loved Life in a Day?  Now there is Britain in a Day.  Not as good, but still definitely worth watching.

3.) Have you seen Karyn's new bookshelves yet?

4.) Tove Jansson AND Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?  Yes please!  (click the picture for more info.)

5.) Claire shares How To Write A Novel by Georgette Heyer - very funny!  And...

6.) Michelle shares On Reviewing Fiction by Rose Macaulay - also very funny!

Have a lovely weekend :)

On Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf

Bea Howe (c.1925) by Duncan Grant

"What inspired and intrigued most about Sylvia was her way of talking.  I had never heard anybody speak like her before.  Some chance remark or an artfully-posed question by Tommy – who loved to argue with her – and Sylvia was off in a fantastic flight of her own.  Poetic words, colourful phrases, an apt quotation, extraordinary similes poured forth from her in a way I did not meet again till I came to know, and dine with, Virginia Woolf.  But where Sylvia kept her conversational flights of fancy more or less under control while the slightly malicious gleam in her eyes dared one to give her verbal battle, Virginia’s flights of pure fantasy, soaring sky-high, as the light in her beautiful deep-set luminous eyes kindled and grew almost wild, silenced one to listen to her, entranced." 

Bea Howe

PN Review 8:3 (1981)