Archive for October, 2016

They’ve come undone: Bath Tangle by Georgette Heyer

Posted in 1950s, Heyer, Georgette, Read in 2016, tagged , , on October 29, 2016| 14 Comments »

bath-tangle-001Bath Tangle by Georgette Heyer ~1955. This edition: Heinemann, 1955. Hardcover. 327 pages.

My rating: 7/10

This post is absolutely singing to the choir of Heyerites of whom I know there are many in my circle of fellow like-minded readers. You others, feel free to click away.

I picked up this handsome Heinemann edition of this new-to-me novel a week or so ago, and I’ve just finished reading it.

(And while we’re still at the cover point, don’t you love these Heinemann dust jacket illustrations? Far and away the best of the lot. Impeccably period correct, and so crisp and detailed, with hardly a glimpse of the determined frou frou which the cover art of the many later editions is overloaded with.)

I find my immediate response to the text behind that cover is love-hate, shades of the key troubled romance which drives this completely predictable bit of diverting froth.

I mean, I guessed every single one of the eventual matchups as soon as the characters in question stormed, crept, flounced, swanned, artlessly frolicked etc. their way onto the stage. Too, too easy – the suspense was zero. (But we’re used to that with Georgette Heyer, aren’t we? No prizes for guessing the match-ups!)

Starting things off with the funeral and will-reading of a wealthy nobleman sets the scene quite nicely. Subsequently two of the main female characters are in mourning the whole way through, which drives some of the complications soon ensuing, as our characters mustn’t cross the etiquette line which rigidly defines just what a bereaved widow/daughter can or can’t do in the months following the death.

Fanny is the very young widow; Serena is the somewhat older stepdaughter by a previous wife of the dearly departed; the two confound expectations by being very best of friends, though their personalities couldn’t be more different. Serena is proud and willful, Fanny meek and mild. Each defers to the other, though, and their affections for each other are genuine, which is a lovely touch. United they stand, covering for each other as needed, with varying degrees of talent and success.

Serena’s father has left his widow very well provided for, but he has pulled a bit of a rotten trick on his daughter, leaving her portion of the massive family fortune tied up in a trust administered by – get this! – Serena’s previously jilted ex-fiance.

As can be expected, sparks immediately fly.

Throw in a generous handful of star-crossed lovers, a comically “vulgar” grandmother figure, an overbearing and ambitious mum, and a whole peanut gallery of gossiping upper class observers.

Stir well.

Stand back.

When the mixture stops moving, everyone is where they should be, and the one superfluous suitor has quit the scene, gone off to heal his wounded heart elsewhere.

This is basically the Beatrice and Benedick storyline, with a few tweaks here and there. The chief lovers spend every meeting moment sparring, more or less equally, until manly forcefulness drives the final scene, wherein the proud lady goes all over swoonish and apologizes all round for her wilful ways, though we note that she doesn’t vow to permanently change.

Pleasant enough reading for a rainy autumn evening, of which we’ve had our fair share lately.

I haven’t even come close to tracking down Heyer’s entire Regency oeuvre, but compared to those I’ve bumped up against, I’d have to place this one smack dab in the center of the pack. I liked it quite a lot, but ultimately didn’t love it.

Luckily there are lots more to choose from, and the re-reading value is high across the board. I find myself mulling over a return to one of the top-end Heyers. Perhaps The Quiet Gentleman, one of my favourites so far, to luxuriate in a bit of harmless daydreaming about the anti-Ivo therein portrayed!

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From Battleships to the Battle of the Sexes: Blue Days at Sea by H.V. Morton

Posted in 1930s, Morton, H.V., Read in 2016, tagged , , on October 27, 2016| 6 Comments »

blue-days-at-sea-h-v-mortonBlue Days at Sea and other essays by H.V. Morton ~ 1932. This edition: Methuen, 1932. Hardcover. 207 pages.

My rating: 7.5/10

This is a slender book of very readable essays by that British one-man phenomenon of mid-20th-century journalistic travel writing, Henry Vollam Morton.

In 1910, at the age of 16, H.V. Morton left school to work for the Birmingham Express and Gazette, where his father was employed as an editor. Young Henry took to journalism as a duckling takes to water, and his rise in the newspaper world was sure and steady.

In 1923, Morton was present at the opening of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, and his scoop of the “official” Times reporter brought him much notice, resulting in a further impetus to his upward progress in his chosen career.

In 1926, after several collections of his travel columns had been published and received with approbation by the English public, Morton set off on a motor trip of the rural areas of the UK, frequenting pubs and country gatherings, and documenting in a strongly nostalgic, rose-tinted way the vision of “our England” that he found.

In Search of England was published in 1927 to immediate acclaim, and H.V. Morton rode the crest of its success for the following five decades, wandering (in a very focussed sort of way) hither and yon, throughout the British Isles, Spain, Italy, North Africa, and into the Holy Land.

With his reporter’s pass card in hand, Morton received entry into all sorts of places, and he followed up his visits with likeable articles and essays, a collection of which make up this particular book.

The leading essay in Blue Days at Sea, in length and importance, details Morton’s time spent on one of the Royal Navy’s largest battleships. He documents his awed introduction to the “floating city” of a massive naval ship housing over 1200 people, and pens generally admiring portraits of some of its various classes of officers, focussing on the lowly midshipmen (rejoicing in the nickname “snotties” among their compatriots), and touching on the others, up to the second-in-command Commander, and the lordly Captain. The regular seamen are occasionally mentioned, mostly as being “down there somewhere” in the bowels of the ship, but Morton doesn’t seem to hobnob with them to any meaningful extent.

This being in 1932, England is officially at peace, but the Royal Navy never relaxes, so ambitious war exercises – mock battles at sea – are frequently being carried out to keep everyone up to speed on operating their deadly ships. Morton’s narration of one of these exercises is fascinating, in particular when viewed with our future hindsight, knowing that only a few short years later those mock battles would be very real, and the torpedoes fully loaded instead of being benign duds.

A moving vignette regarding a funeral at sea caps off this section.

Once this patriotic sample of “Hurray, our England!” journalism is tidied away, Morton turns his hand to a series of humorous sketches regarding various stereotypical versions of the era’s women. The Wife, The Woman Nobody Knows, The Woman of Affairs, The Bad Girl, The Head Huntress…these are just a sampling of the rather stock characters Morton dissects. Modern readers will lift an eyebrow; period humour prevails, and with that excuse we must be content.

Travel pieces cap off the collection, giving glimpses of Rome and Egypt. A particularly good essay is a description of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s tomb in Rome. Well done as well are glimpses of the tourists’ experience of the Nile and the monuments of the long-dead kings, Morton standing well off to the side viewing his compatriots with a cynical eye.

Back to Victoria Station proceeds our writer, and “It’s good to be home.”

With the recent publication of several biographies of H.V. Morton (he died in 1979, still enjoying a mostly positive reputation as a true booster of All Things British, though he had been a resident of South Africa for the last three decades of his life), most notably this one, a rather critical light has been beamed into Morton’s private life, revealing the feet of clay of this one-time literary idol.

Apparently the man was a rather promiscuous womanizer, which comes as no surprise to me after reading the essays on women in this collection, the writer very obviously having a keen eye for the delights of the female form.

More damning are Morton’s pro-fascist views in the pre-War years, according to his private journals. In this he was in common company with certain other public figures of his time; one again must keep the context of the times in mind, for the horrors of the wartime atrocities were a thing of the future.

It is now rather the thing to sneer at H.V. Morton, for both his now-politically-incorrect attitudes and the consistent romanticization in his writings, but one can’t dismiss his wide appeal to his contemporary readers, and the fact that he was an excellent documentarian of places and people now lost in time.

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A Sometimes Tangled Tale: A Footman for the Peacock by Rachel Ferguson

Posted in 1940s, Ferguson, Rachel, Read in 2016, tagged , , on October 24, 2016| 8 Comments »

a-footman-for-the-peacock-rachel-ferguson-1940A Footman for the Peacock by Rachel Ferguson ~ 1940. This edition: Dean Street Press, 2016. Softcover. ISBN: 978-1-911413-71-4. 206 pages.

My rating: 8/10

Ever since my 2012 reading of Rachel Ferguson’s challenging but ultimately enjoyable 1931 novel, The Brontës Went to Woolworths, I’ve harboured a yen to broaden my exploration  of the further works of this highly intelligent (and highly class conscious) writer.

Imagine then my anticipatory pleasure when approached by Dean Street Press with a review copy of one of Rachel Ferguson’s long out-of-print novels, A Footman for the Peacock, a partly serious, partly fantasy, partly satirical novel set at the beginning of the Second World War.

“Yes, please!” was my response, and I must say in this case my instinct that this was going to be a pleasure to read and review was perfectly correct.

A small aside, here, regarding my book reviewing. As a book blogger in this esoteric corner of the internet, I frequently receive requests to read and review things, and I generally turn these requests down. No time or energy for possible duds, you know. (I find enough of those for myself quite voluntarily!)

Unless the book in question is one which looks to be something I’d be interested in buying for myself in any event, in which case I’m naturally as keen as can be. (Re-publishers of mid-century middlebrow fiction, and gardening and travel books of any era, please take note! 🙂 )

Back to the Peacock.

It’s 1939, and the war is looming. Even the most optimistic of “peace in our time” Munich Agreement yes-men have come to the realization that all of that was a great big political farce, and that the guns will soon be firing.

The aristocratic Roundelays are in residence at Delaye, a vast pile of a country house just barely holding its own as the 20th century brutally takes its financial toll on the English “gentleman’s class”. Sir Edmund and Lady Evelyn know that another war is well-nigh inevitable, but in concert with their rural neighbours are merely holding still, making no actual preparations other than mental, because to do so would break the fragile hope that peace might yet prevail.

The Roundelays are walking a financial tightrope, balanced as they are between the still-wealthy and the newly bankrupt; each breath of political wind sends them swaying, but they refuse to step aside and are making shift to keep things going, with ever-fewer servants and not running a car (Lady Evelyn does the household shopping herself, travelling to and fro by bus) and having a cousin in residence as a paying guest, his five guineas a week going directly into the grocery budget for cousin Maxwell, Lady Evelyn, Sir Edmund, their two daughters still at home, three perennially feuding great-aunts, an ancient and increasingly senile old family retainer (Nursie), long-time dedicated butler, cranky cook, and a gardener, his helper, and a housemaid or two, not to mention kitchenmaid Sue Privett, eighth in her family to have been in service to the Roundelays, which turns out to have great significance to our story.

And there’s the peacock.

Ill-tempered, raucous, and tolerant only towards kitchenmaid Sue and the younger Roundelay daughter, Angela, the peacock haunts the grounds of Delaye, finding his way home after being forcibly relocated to a neighbouring estate where it is hoped he will find solace with a flock of peahens.

We have clues early on that this particular peacock is much more than a semi-domestic bird. He is, instead, a sort of reincarnation of long ago Roundelay servant Thomas Picocke, a “running footman”, who perished in 1792 due to the horrific nature of his duties (running in front of the carriage horses for miles and miles, to clear the way and announce the arrival of his masters) and the callous disregard of the family he served; all but French expatriate Lady Marguerite, wherein lies a sad tale of pity and betrayal, but not that which you might think…

Of reincarnations we have an inkling of three in this complex tale; also an intriguing reference to Dunne’s Theory of Time, a concept of serialism, or parallel streams of time, much discussed by the intellectuals of Rachel Ferguson’s time, and used by such disparate writers as J.B. Priestley, Rumer Godden and Elizabeth Goudge in their novels.

A Footman for the Peacock was received with lukewarm enthusiasm upon its publication early in the war. Though Rachel Ferguson was well-known by that time as a cutting satirist, the portrayal of the Roundelays as self-devoted shirkers of wartime duties grated just a bit too much on the sensibilities of reviewers, who suspected that Rachel Ferguson’s tongue was not quite as far in cheek as it should have been.

Here’s a sample of what got on their nerves.

War has just been declared, and the Roundelays are appalled by the thought of taking in evacuees or refugees. -(Perhaps understandably so, for their domestic arrangements are delicately balanced at the extreme edge of manageability – though others less well-placed are turning their households inside out in the service of the National Emergency, so that’s not a real excuse.) Anyway, at dinner one night, eldest daughter Margaret drops a bit of a conversational bomb.

‘I say, mother, I had a letter yesterday from Ortrud Bohm, that German girl I was at school with – ‘

Lady Roundelay smote the table with her fist. ‘No! No she doesn’t! My heart bleeds for the German Jews as much as anybody’s but I cannot face a pale fugitive running tear-stained in what she stands up in down this avenue. I’ve read horrors until I’m sick and I know everything the Nazis have done and I can’t cope with being wept over and having the old home in Hamburg or wherever it is described brick by brick and hearing that Mein Vater was suddenly not there and hasn’t been seen since, and that the Liebe Mutter was raped before her eyes and my German wouldn’t stand the strain. I can only say Bitte and Danke Sehr and Sauerkraut and Mein Kampf, and I won’t, I won’t, I WON’T!’

‘God, no,’ confirmed Sir Edmund. ‘If she comes, I go.’

Margaret finished her ham. ‘I was only going to tell you what she wrote and she’s not Jewish, you know… She says that she’s joined the Youth Movement and her brother’s in the army and he’s got a commission he couldn’t have hoped for in peace time as the Bohms aren’t geboren, you know, and that they’re not half so sniffed at as they used to be when they were only in trade, and she’s really seeing some men at last and is having the time of her life. She actually used some German words, so that really looks as though she might even marry now she sees it’s no good being so frightfully British. She was the one who came into the class once in a tartan skirt.’

‘Gosh… well, sorry I spoke. I hope she hooks some oberleutnant – what happened in church today, aunt Jessie?’

Did you find this passage rather shocking?

Well, you were supposed to, because Rachel Ferguson’s point is that people are a mix of thoughts, feelings and instinctive responses.

Quite “nice” people like the Roundelays – who are loving parents (the relationship between Lady Evelyn and emotionally fragile daughter Angela is one of the most likeable aspects of this all-over-the-place book), relatively decent to their servants (that episode with the running footman being in the bad old past), kindly dutiful to their tiresome relations and dependents (the great-aunts and Nursie are high maintenance to the nth degree) – I repeat, quite nice people in comparison to the society they exist in, harbouring selfish and bigoted thoughts, and having the temerity to voice them out loud.

In the last lies the rub.

For though we all harbour certain best-not-spoken thoughts, the Roundelays let fly. Mostly in the family circle, but we are privy to their words, and we recoil in politically correct horror to what is expressed in passages such as the one above, while guiltily holding in laughter, because a lot of what is said is (full disclosure – I laughed when I read this) very funny.

There is a strand of plot running through this very full story, but much of the pleasure of the thing lies in the many side excursions – show Rachel Ferguson a glimpse of a rabbit trail and she’s off like a shot, returning to the main path not at all winded and blithely assuming her reader to be loping along still in stride.

It takes a bit to get it figured out, but once one is hooked – it took me about 20 pages or so; I went back and checked – the rest of this quirky novel is both thought-provoking and entertaining. It’s occasionally rather like untangling a mess of yarn complete with helpful kitten, but it works.

And, thanks to Dean Street Press and the republishing of not just this one Rachel Ferguson novel, plus two more and a tempting selection of other mid-century reprints, my Christmas book wish-list for myself is well-nigh complete. Check out their recent releases – oh, bliss! Available as paper books (print on demand, and very nicely done; I’m impressed) from the publisher or via Amazon and Book Depository; also as ebooks in various formats.

For the original book blog review which triggered this reprint, I’m going to send you over to Scott of Furrowed Middlebrow, whose impeccable taste in obsolete fiction has pointed the way to many, many hours of excellent reading.

Here’s his take on A Footman for the Peacock, with loads of quotes and a most thoughtful analysis, which I find myself nodding away to in complete agreement.

 

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This is how it’s done: the short story in its highest form – The Yellow Meads of Asphodel by H.E. Bates

Posted in 1970s, Bates, H.E., Read in 2016, Short Stories, tagged , , on October 22, 2016| 4 Comments »

Please pay no mind to this rather dire 1980s' cover; the content is much better than this would lead one to believe.

Please pay no mind to this rather dire 1980s’ cover; the content is much better than this would lead one to believe.

The Yellow Meads of Asphodel by H.E. Bates ~ 1976. This edition: Penguin, 1986. Paperback. ISBN: 0-14-004620-8. 95 pages.

My rating: 9/10

This slender collection of short stories, published two years after H.E. Bates’ death in 1972, is something of a hodge-podge, no uniting theme present except that they were all written by a master observer of both nature and the human race.

A review snippet from the back cover sums up this writer’s style quite nicely: “All the clotted cream of a sensuous rusticity…” (Scotsman)

Yes, indeed.

Just the briefest of comments on the seven stories in this collection, because you need to encounter H.E. Bates at first hand for purest pleasure.

The Proposal

Professor Plumley is unmasked as the mysterious person leaving lavish offers of fruit on Miss Shuttleworth’s doorstep. Is this merely a way of ridding himself of excess garden produce, or is love about to bloom in two elderly hearts?

The Yellow Meads of Asphodel

Middle-aged siblings living together in the house willed to them by their parents find their staid life turned on end when one of them falls in love.

A Taste of Blood

Dhillon falls unaccountably afoul of a gang of violent bikers.

The Love Letters of Miss Maitland

Repressed Miss Maitland allows her imagination to supply her with a lover, whose reality is too readily accepted by her friends.

The Lap of Luxury

Roger Stiles, on a journey of post-war reminiscence in France, finds himself cut adrift in the summer countryside. The offer of a ride from a presumably widowed Frenchwoman leads to a long dream-time of love in a luxurious country château. How long could it last?

Loss of Pride

Rustic philosopher Uncle Silas relates the downfall of a bully.

The House by the River

Beware the real estate deal too good to be true; it may have some strange strings attached…

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An Aspidistra in Babylon by H.E. Bates – Four Novellas

Posted in 1960s, Bates, H.E., Read in 2016, tagged , , on October 21, 2016| 12 Comments »

2-an-aspidistra-in-babylon-h-e-bates-1960An Aspidistra in Babylon by H.E. Bates ~ 1960. This edition: Penguin, 1964. Paperback. 191 pages.

My rating: 9/10.

This man could write. His stories read absolutely effortlessly.

So, what have we here, behind that curious title?

Four brief novellas, all about – universal theme! – the human desire to be loved. And, very much to the point in these four tales, the human tendency to allow that desire to cloud one’s better judgement.

The cover drawing by Robin Jacques rewards closer examination; the background detail utterly accurate of its time and place, an English seaside garrison/resort of the 1920s. Note the white chalk cliffs, upper right. It both intrigues and misleads with its depiction of the singing woman, blowsily out on the town.  She’s actually a side character of the title novella, a casually promiscuous hotel chambermaid who serves to rescue the “real” heroine from her youthful folly.

Occasionally this collection is touted as “comic” by booksellers who haven’t actually read the works within, for though not without a delicate balance of ironic humour, these are not funny stories in the accepted sense.

Prosaically tragic might be a better description, as long as it doesn’t put you off reading them. (Well, they’re not all tragic; some do come out on the optimistic side.)

Paradoxically, I myself find Bates’ sometimes-dark scenarios rather comforting, pointing out as they do that all of us are emotionally fallible in certain circumstances, and that most of us survive our lapses, coming out the other side older in spirit but wiser in mind, to alter an appropriate cliché.

The first two novellas are the best, in my opinion, but all four are worth reading for the sheer pleasure of how H.E. Bates puts together his words. He is very strong on description, something which I thoroughly enjoy, but which may be a bit of a deterrent to those of you with no patience for detailed scene setting. Give these a go anyway, I say.

An Aspidistra in Babylon

An eighteen-year-old girl lives with her widowed mother in the boarding house they keep in a small coastal city. The nearby cliffs house a large army garrison; the constant ebb and flow and of soldiers, sailors on shore leave, and their hangers-on and followers leads Christine’s mother to shudderingly label the place as “Babylon”, and she warns her as-yet naïve daughter against it.

Christine herself finds the warning unnecessary, for she hasn’t yet had any meaningful encounters with the roistering Babylonians.

As to the men, the soldiers and all the rest, I simply didn’t exist for them. This is not entirely surprising, however, since I was clearly infinitely and terribly dull myself. The best description of myself that I can think of is to say that I was as dull as one of the many aspidistras that cluttered up the rooms, the hallway and even the dining-tables of our little boarding-house. I was just that – a female aspidistra and nothing more.

A female aspidistra, perhaps, but one with a luscious body under those shapeless frocks and black woolen stockings. A body which catches the eye of the dissolute Captain Blaine, who shows up on the doorstep in quest of a room for his wealthy aunt, and gazes upon Christine’s hidden charms with an experienced and lascivious eye. Not only her virginity but her very moral sense is soon to be in danger of worldly corruption…

A Month by the Lake

Holiday makers staying at an Italian lake resort mingle peacefully, middle-aged but still active and attractive Miss Bentley finding herself mildly drawn to slightly older, determinedly suave, and rather handsome Major Wilshaw.

To Miss Bentley the most remarkable feature about Major Wilshaw were his small flat pink ears. They were not only exceptionally small for a man who was thickish, upright, and rather tall. They were very delicately, very intricately fashioned. Nothing in the entire human body, Miss Bentley would tell herself, had quite the same fascinating quality as ears. All the attraction of mood and response and character and emotion lay, of course, in the mouth and eyes: everybody knew that. But ears were, Miss Bentley thought, far more wonderful. Ears were unchanging and undying. They remained, in some strange way, uncoarsened, undepraved, unwrinkled and unaged by time. In the ears of the aged you could see the flesh of youth; in a sense they were immortal and never grew old.

Major Wilshaw isn’t particularly taken with Miss Bentley in a sexual sort of way. Though he enjoys her company and her tart turn of phrase, he considers her past her prime, decidedly on the shelf, whereas he is still very much in the romantic running.

When a young English governess enters the picture, very cool and collected and confident in her sexual powers, an unexpected and silent rivalry erupts between the two women. Major Wilshaw, suddenly very aware of the very different qualities of each, turns first this way and then that.

Which will prove the strongest draw? Warmly ripe age? Cooly beautiful youth?

And do either of the woman actually want Major Wilshaw, or is he merely symbolic in his maleness of the prize which society insists all women are incomplete without?

A Prospect of Orchards

Many years ago I belonged to a young men’s club where I used to play chess, read magazines and also box quite frequently, though not very seriously, with a man named Arthur Templeton. We must have been, I think, eighteen or nineteen at the time.

Templeton was a shortish leaden-footed man with weak brown eyes whose responses were those of a duck with its legs tied. His jaw was babyish, smooth and hairless, like a pale pink egg. I had taken up boxing because once, at school, in a playful scuffle, a young ox of a farmer’s son had struck me on the chest with a blow of such short-armed ferocity that I was convinced my heart had stopped beating. Soon afterwards I found a friendly ex-policeman who gave me lessons, taught me that the essential art of the game lay in footwork and in a maxim of six short words: hit, stop, jab, and get away. Presently I was practising these principles on Arthur Templeton, to whose pink hairless jaw I sent so many unresisted straight lefts that it became intolerably embarrassing – so embarrassing indeed that I presently became profoundly sorry for him and gave up boxing altogether.

Losing track of Templeton as life goes on, the narrator is surprised to run into him on a train many years later.

Templeton is still of a pale pink unresisting type. He now gentleman-farms in a haphazard sort of way, raising pigs and attempting to create a new kind of pear-like apple, while his bossy wife Valerie is the loud leader of the local arts community, going in for amateur orchestras and the like.

As the narrator observes the Templeton ménage through a number of visits, his sympathy for his long-ago boxing partner grows as he realizes the man’s deep loneliness. He watches as a second woman now enters Arthur Templeton’s life. For a while it looks as though the feeble striver will at last take a step forward in confidence, and, presumably, happiness.

But can anyone ever change how one’s fundamental psychology, and what type of lover one attracts?

The Grapes of Paradise

On leave from his Vancouver banking firm, Harry Rockley travels the South Pacific, fetching up at Tahiti, which immediately repels him with its unexpectedly grim and sordid industrial decay, and its hostile natural features.

(H)e went back to the hotel, stripped off, put on his swimming trunks and went down to the sea. The beach of
black sand, such as there was of it, looked like a foundry yard. The lagoon of black water illuminated by the flares of mysterious midnight fishing-boats had become a stretch of tidal junk-yard, one foot deep, filled with countless black clusters of sea-birds and lengths of what looked like yellow intestine.

At the end of fifty yards of jetty  sprouted a lump of coral rock. On the rock a French girl with a figure as flat as a boy’s and legs like white peeled sticks sat staring down into forty feet of dark blue water from which rose shadowy mountains of rust-brown coral, murderous as steel.

‘I’m glad you came,’ she said. ‘If there’s someone watching, the sharks don’t follow me.’

Harry decides against swimming, and returns to the hotel bar, where he starts drinking, and doesn’t stop for weeks, until on a whim he tags along on a schooner travelling to a nearby island. There he finds something more closely approximating the South Seas paradise of his former expectations, including a single-minded native girl who throws herself at him in wanton desire.

But love isn’t always reciprocated, and shunned would-be lovers may prove dangerous to trifle with, especially when the elemental sea and its creatures become part of the set of Harry’s idyll-turned-nightmare…

*******

Oh, yes. Here's a little bonus for those of you who, like me, were a bit hazy on what the heck an aspidistra actually looks like. I suspect they are still very much around, but I couldn't pull up a mental picture to go with the name. Now I can.

Oh, yes. Here’s a little bonus for those of you who, like me, were a bit hazy on what the heck an aspidistra actually looks like. I suspect they are still very much around, but I couldn’t pull up a mental picture to go with the name. So there we are!

 

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Keeping It Up No Matter What: The Swordsman by William C. Heine

Posted in 1980s, Canadian Book Challenge #10, Heine, William C., Read in 2016, tagged , , , , , on October 18, 2016| 7 Comments »

the-swordsman-william-c-heine-2The Swordsman by William C. Heine ~ 1980. Alternate title: Sea Lord. This edition: McClelland and Stewart, 1980. Paperback. ISBN: 0-7704-1570-9. 246 pages.

My rating: 2/10

Boo, hiss.

Yes, my dears, this is a deeply baaaaad novel.

So why (I am sure you are asking yourselves) did I read it?

Good question.

And to answer it I must refer you back to this little episode from 2015: .

So, if you followed that link, you will notice mention way down in the comments of William C. Heine’s second (and, small mercy, last) novel, The Swordsman/Sea Lord, which fellow Canadian reader-of-eclectica Brian Busby and I have been discussing tackling for the past year or so. He pulled it off first, and has just posted his own bang-on review, so I’ve had to follow through with my own promise to read the thing as well.

I did, and I conquered it, and I’m now feeling a little bit dirty all over, because it was a nastyish piece of work from one end to the other. And just as stupid as The Last Canadian. Unexpectedly boring, too, because one became hardened to the unlikely sex and gruesome violence early on, and soon came to view the continual bedding and blood-letting with an increasingly jaded eye.

I’m going to pass you over to Brian for a bit: The Sea Lord Unsheathes His Sword.

Got that? Good. I can therefore be brief in my own précis, without having to include any excerpts. (Thank you, Brian.)

We meet our hero Merand as he nearly succumbs to an assassin’s knife in a back alley in old Tyre. Oh, what the heck, here’s an excerpt. It gives a telling sample of Heine’s deeply pedestrian writing style.

Merand soon gained consciousness, but couldn’t shout for help; he was choking on a warm salty liquid he recognized vaguely as his own blood. He crawled, coughing blood, to the nearest door and hit it with his fist before collapsing. The slave who answered took one frightened look and called for his master. The two men dragged Merand to an inner room and lit a candle.

As the blood coagulated in Merand’s lungs, the worst of his coughing and choking stopped. He managed to tell the two men he was a slave of Tehemil, Tyre’s builder of ships. They exchanged glances over the wounded man’s body…

I always thought that once the blood coagulated in your lungs you pretty well stopped breathing, but hey! – Heine’s reality isn’t ours, so there you go.

So Merand is soon up and about, working for his rescuer, a Jewish ironworker with a gorgeous daughter. Merand instantly forms lustful designs upon her as she leans over his bed-of-pain, and, once recovered, he seduces and then marries her, either before or after he receives his freedom from the local ruler. (Some details are a merciful blur.)

There is a long flashback, describing how Merand learned to read, write, murder those who annoy him, stash himself some stolen gold, and become a master ship designer, in between sleeping with a fellow slave girl, and sacrificing his first-born child to Baal in a much-too-detailed episode describing how the wee infant is tipped into the fire to be burned alive. Apparently (in Heine’s version of history), it was mandated that every family’s firstborn be so sacrificed in Olde Tyre. Huh. Who knew?

Moving on.

Merand falls in love with a sword his new master has forged for a disgraced prince. He acquires it, learns to become a stellar swordsman, travels about gaining stunning riches, takes on a beautiful red-headed mistress (because his wife is always pregnant and a man has needs, you know), and eventually sails off into the really wild blue yonder, right across the Atlantic, it appears, fetching up on the shores of South America, where he is welcomed as a god by the local ruler and subsequently given the chief princess as a reward for being big and blonde.

Small digression into vivid descriptions of Heine’s version of Mayan (Aztec? Toltec?) human sacrifice.

Back to the old country goes Merand, lots of gold and doomed-to-die-in-childbirth new babe in tow, where he finds he is persona non grata with the king for various reasons, so he packs up his household, faithful wife Naomi still in the picture, plus Jewish father-in-law, and various offspring by assorted partners (Merand’s), and sets sail back to South America.

The end. With an epilogue describing the imaginary discovery of Merand’s tomb, complete with detailed carvings depicting his adventures, which is how we know the whole story.

Sure.

I truly believe that regrettable books like this only exist to provide a contrast to well written things.

Kind of like never truly appreciating the sun until you’ve had rain for weeks on end. Or how good a simple green salad tastes after having had to subsist on corner store deep-fried thingamajigs for a week or two. (That last bit being strictly imaginary, based on occasional exposure to the scary 7-11 food display when fuelling up late at night when it’s the only gas station open.)

Where am I going with this?

Nowhere, really, so I’ll quit.

William C. Heine: avoid like the plague. (Or a large, blood-dabbled swordsman wearing a skimpy loincloth over a suspicious bulge. Run away!)

 

 

 

 

 

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Desperately Dramatic in Long-Ago Indonesia: Norah Lofts’ Silver Nutmeg

Posted in 1940s, Lofts, Norah, Read in 2016, tagged , , , on October 16, 2016| 4 Comments »

Here’s another entry for The 1947 Club. This one doesn’t give any sort of portrait of the year, being strictly inventive historical fiction, but it does have a telling author’s note which serves to highlight the difficulties of the researching writer during wartime.

silver-nutmeg-norah-lofts-1947From Norah Lofts:

Apology and Acknowledgement

The irresistible desire to write a book about the nutmeg island of Banda came upon me when I was reading H.W. Ponder’s book, In Javanese Waters. There, in one short chapter, was outlined a romantic, bloodstained history that called for exploration. But, like all exploration, it presented great difficulties. The Dutch East Indies were in Japanese hands, all contact broken; Banda itself is no more than a speck, the size of a fly dirt on the map; no book that came my way gave any idea of the island’s layout. So my geography is the geography of the imagination.

Silver Nutmeg by Norah Lofts ~ 1947. This edition: Doubleday, 1947. Hardcover. 368 pages.

My rating: 4/10

Some centuries ago, in the 1600s, shrewdly businesslike and sensibly adventurous Dutch merchants sailed the southern seas, creating trading empires for themselves in direct competition with their British counterparts. One area both factions set their sights on was the group of tiny island just off Indonesia, on one of which, Banda, grew the world’s only known population of nutmeg trees.

The Dutch having attained possession of the nutmeg isle, they jealously guarded their monopoly.  Spice trading being a big deal way back then, the export of fertile nuts or tree seedlings was strictly prohibited, transgression being punishable by imprisonment or worse. Needless to say, some of the Dutch spice plantation owners became fabulously wealthy, and herein lies the nucleus of this absolutely over written story.

(There will now be spoilers galore.)

Look, a pretty little Dutch girl!

A nice Dutch girl of good family. (Don’t do it, Annabet!)

Two Dutch half brothers, one a wealthy nutmeg plantation owner (Evert), the other a moderately successful sea-captain (Piet), meet on Banda after many years apart.

Says Evert to Piet, “Oh, dear half-brother, good to see you and everything, though we were never very close as children, my mom hating yours and all. Never mind all that, for I am now fantastically wealthy and have progressed  so far from our shared childhood as middle class nobodies in Holland. All I need now is a lovely wife to grace my fabulous house. A nice Dutch girl of good family, preferably aristocratic, so I can rub it in to those back home how far I’ve come.”

Says Piet to Evert, “Hey, what about one of the daughters of the Van Goen family? They used to be so high and mighty, scorning our family as not worthy of notice, but they’ve now gone bankrupt. I’ll bet they’d be willing to marry off one of their daughters if one flashed a few guilders their way. Annabet’s a good looker, just seventeen and blond and lovely…”

“Oh, ho!” says Evert. “Just what I’m looking for. Dear half-brother, how about you take this casket of jewels and gold and head back to Holland to convince Mama van Goens to part with her daughter in return for the fixings? You can go ahead and arrange a marriage by proxy for me, and then arrange to ship me my luscious bride.”

Done.

Small problem, however. Lovely Annabet has suffered an illness and is now no longer the beauty she once was, being emaciated and scraggly. Ah, well, the long sea voyage should put her right.

Nope.

Shal Ahmi, keeping an eye on things. (Cue foreboding music.)

Shal Ahmi, lurking about keeping an eye on things. (Cue foreboding music.)

Though Annabet proves to have a winning way about her, enslaving other men’s hearts after just a few moments of conversation despite her hideous appearance, proud Evert is instantly appalled. Calling up his pet native fixer, the shady Shal Ahmi, Evert hints that he’d be thrilled if his new wife could be eliminated from the picture.

“No worries”, says Shal Ami. “I’ll get rid of your problem.”

Which he does, by using his many connections to have Annabet massaged and herbal-cured back to her original beauty.

Evert comes home, expecting to find his marriage bed empty, all ready to start anew, and instead finding a tempting beauty in residence. “Oh, wow! My luck is in”, he gloats.

Not so fast, Evert-me-lad. For Annabet has given her heart away to another, and not just any another, but the rogue Englishman who is Evert and Shal Ahmi’s partner in a highly secret nutmeg smuggling scheme.

So that’s the set-up.

xx

“She learned the meaning of love in a night of murder, lust and terror.” Not quite sure if the possessively groping guy is husband Evert or lover what’s-his-name. That’s quite the foreground image, isn’t it?! Reminds me that I never mentioned the native mistress thing.

It goes on for 368 long, long pages, of heart-wringings and bodice heavings, and sullen scenes, and bitter revenge scenarios, culminating in a bloody native rebellion led by Shal Ahmi, which results in the nasty demises of every single one of the key players, except Piet (remember him?) who sails into the Banda harbour just as Annabet is breathing her last after being knifed by one of Shal Ahmi’s disciples, just after she herself has done in Shal Ahmi with a handily wielded wine bottle.

Husband Evert is also messily dead, as is, presumably, the true love Englishman. (“True love”, though Annabet only actually saw him for a few hours total, with a single stolen kiss their only amorous memory) Can’t remember his name. Maybe it was John? Something like that. He’s offstage for 99.9 percent of the saga, living mostly in Annabet’s head, so we never really get to know him in person.

Norah Lofts could be and frequently was a very good writer, and I find her stuff generally quite entertaining – she had a lovely dark sense of humour and indulged in it on numerous occasions – but this book isn’t one of her winners. On the contrary, it’s truly crappy, because the love stuff is so darned unrealistic that I just couldn’t get my head around it – first sight this, first sight that, unlikely ailments miraculously cured – bah, humbug! – and the historical part is just barely sketched in.

(For those really wish to know, a bit about the real world Banda and the nutmeg trade. It’s truly interesting; I can see why Norah Lofts was intrigued.)

Let’s blame it on the war, and move along, shall we?

Silver Nutmeg had okay sales, most likely (I’m assuming) due to Lofts’ prior bestsellers, in particular Jassy (1944), a very dark, gorgeously crafted gothic-ish novel which does make the cut as far as this reader is concerned. From Kirkus, 1945, with the spoilers removed:

Once again, an experienced period romance as the story of Jassy who lived and loved too much, and was xxxxxx for it in the 19th century, is related by four who knew her. Half gypsy, with an ugly-beautiful fascination, an ungovernable temper, and the gift of second sight, Jassy is first recorded by Barney Heaton, the boy next door; next by a Mrs. Twysdale whose young ladies’ school was to be disrupted by Jassy; next by Dilys Helmar, her friend at that school, who took Jassy home with her to the ruined estate – Mortiboys – and to her amorous, wine-sodden father, Nick… (Lots of plot details removed here.) …Intricately contrived imbroglio, elemental passions for a story that keeps one reading. In the Lady Eleanor Smith tradition.

I’ve also just found a rather lovely post by author Katharine Edgar on  Norah Lofts and Why You Should Read Her which I really liked because it pinned down Lofts’ peculiarly unique style most cleverly: The Queen of Gritty, Dark, Agricultural Histfic With Lots And Lots Of Murders.

Yup.

I concur.

I’m pro-Lofts in general, despite the times I want to pitch her books across the room, but I must say you can safely give Silver Nutmeg a miss.

But please do find yourself a copy of Jassy. It’s very available. A candidate for fireside reading these gloomy autumn evenings, with the dead leaves rustling in the cold wind outside…

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One for the 1947 Club – Confronting the Bigot Within: Gentleman’s Agreement by Laura Z. Hobson

Posted in 1940s, Hobson, Laura Z., Read in 2016, tagged , , , on October 14, 2016| 10 Comments »

the-1947-clubI’m notoriously not much of a joiner, here in blog-world as much as in my introverted real life, but I do make exceptions from time to time, especially when the thing-to-be-joined is so interesting as this.

The 1947 Club is the third year-specific “read-in” which Simon and Karen have hosted; previous years featured were 1924 and 1938. The idea is to read and post about writing published during the year, and by doing so sharing a glimpse at what was being read and talked about at the time.

The resulting assortment of books read and reviewed is wonderfully varied, and does indeed paint a literary portrait of a year. It is rather fascinating to see which books are still very much in circulation and in public awareness. Others are rather more obscure; some were never particularly successful; some are bestsellers which have fallen into obscurity.

Deciding at last minute to jump into the project, I looked over my shelves and happily found a number of likely prospects. Here is the first.

gentlemans-agreement-1947-laura-z-hobson-001Gentleman’s Agreement by Laura Z. Hobson ~ 1947. This edition: Simon and Shuster, 1947. (First edition, third printing.) Hardcover. 275 pages.

My rating: 6/10

Serialized in Cosmopolitan in 1946, Laura Z. Hobson’s second novel, Gentleman’s Agreement, was published in book format in 1947. It had an enthusiastic reception, spending five months on the New York Times bestseller list.

Later that year, Gregory Peck – against his agent’s advice due to the sensitive subject matter – was asked to fill the leading role in a Hollywood movie adaptation of the novel. (Cary Grant had already turned it down.) The movie was a decided success, and it went on to receive five Academy Award nominations. It won three of those, including Best Picture, Best Director for Elia Kazan, and Best Supporting Actress for Celeste Holm.

Despite – or perhaps because of – its success, the film attracted the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, with charges of subversive and quite possibly “communist” points of view being promoted. The director, Elia Kazan,  producer Daryl Zanuck, and two of the film’s actors, Anne Revere and John Garfield,  were called upon to testify before the committee. Revere refused to participate, and Garfield refused to name names; both were subsequently blacklisted and barred from employment with Hollywood movie studios. John Garfield died of a heart attack a year later, rumoured to be caused by his stress over the blacklisting and his call to a second hearing. Anne Revere, a quietly renowned character actress, did not appear in another mainstream film for twenty years.

By now you may be wondering what Gentleman’s Agreement was about to cause all this brouhaha.

The answer: antisemitism in American society.

No question that this was a genuine issue of the time, and that the subject stirred up strong feelings. Hobson’s book no doubt had much of its success because of the righteous audacity of her hero, new-in-New York investigative journalist Phil Green, a gentile who decides to outspokenly claim to be a Jew in various situations, and then cannily identifies each embarrassed shift of gaze or cover-up of language slip in those who assumed that Phil was “one of us”, because his name isn’t a tip-off, and his appearance is basic-white-caucasian.

It works the other way, too, once Phil’s feigned “ethnicity” becomes common knowledge. His Jewish contacts react in various ways, most often – how ironic! – warning Phil off from acting too outwardly Jewish, because he is endangering the chances of other Jews who share Phil’s ambiguous appearance to “pass” as gentile, or, worse yet, if all Jews were accepted as completely equal to gentiles, that the “wrong element” would climb in society. You know, the beak-nosed Yids fresh from Old Europe, and the crass social climbers dead keen to sign up at the country clubs and buy into the housing projects where there is no written policy excluding those with the Hebrew taint, but which operate on the “gentleman’s agreement” that everyone will be really careful whom they introduce into the secretly closed society.

This just after the end of the war, with the country full of returned servicemen who saw firsthand the results of Hitler’s Final Solution, smoke just barely dispersed from the death camps. American is full of bleeding heart liberals who insist that there is no racial prejudice in their brave new world, but who flinch when the Jacob Finkelsteins move into the apartment next door.

Liberal, broad-minded Americans like Phil Green’s fiance Kathy, who truly thinks she is prejudice-free, but who freezes for a moment when Phil states that he is Jewish. She’s stated loudly that she deplores any sort of bigotry, but her first response to Phil is a cry of, “But you’re not Jewish, really, are you?!” Phil, who was about to explain his charade to her, decides in a flash to let the misunderstanding go on. Kathy becomes an unwitting subject in Phil’s social experiment, and she doesn’t present very well.

Gentleman’s Agreement is a novel with a Great Big Message, and the author pounds that message home with a sledgehammer, somewhat to the detriment of her novel as a novel. Her characters are relentlessly one-dimensional; the good guys are too good; Phil’s mother and son (Phil is a widowed single father whose mother cares for his eight-year-old child) are well nigh unbelievable in their moral perfection and their unerring ability to say the right thing in every situation, always on the side of the angels.

Kathy, on the other hand, isn’t nearly good enough to merit heroic Phil’s ardent infatuation. She’s a smugly self-regarding bit of goods, who divorced her first husband basically out of boredom, because the man would keep insisting on coming home and going on and on and on about his work. The nerve of the guy, couldn’t he see how tiresome Kathy found it?!

I kept hoping that Phil would get it together with much more interesting and worthy-of-devoted-love Anne, who is an independent and successful fellow writer, smart as a whip, who unhesitatingly says what she thinks. There’s enough chemistry between Phil and Anne to set a good size New York walk-up on fire, and Phil is seriously attracted, because who the heck wouldn’t be, but in the end, after several break-ups and reconciliations with Kathy, each one seeing her get a bit more of a clue as to where she is falling short in the moral worthiness department, he returns to her arms, leaving Anne all stiff-upper-lip over at stage left.

The love story in this novel was deeply annoying, but there was enough other stuff going on to keep me interested, and on the author’s side. Discussions of religion, mostly, and its un-relation to race, a self-evident truism which to this day is a hard thing for most people to grasp. Phil and his mother are also agnostic, and the passages where they think about and discuss death, and “what happens after”, are likely the finest bits of the book.

Is Gentleman’s Agreement a portrait of its time?

You bet it is.

Is it worth reading now in 2016?

Yes, I think so.

Not so much for its merits as a novel, because it falls short in many ways – most obviously in its many over-simplifications to prove the author’s thesis – but for its well-thought-out and timeless discussion points concerning race, religion, and the often unintentional hypocrisy of the civilized human being.

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Heading South: Mexico Unknown by Lorna Whishaw

Posted in 1960s, Canadian Book Challenge #6, Read in 2012, Whishaw, Lorna, tagged , , , , on October 12, 2016| 7 Comments »

Here’s another excellent travel memoir from Lorna Whishaw, re-posted from October 2012 specially for my long-distance friend Susan. One to search out once you’ve gone with Lorna to Alaska!

Mexico Unknown by Lorna Whishaw ~ 1962. This edition: Hammond and Hammond, 1962. Hardcover. 256 pages.

My rating: 9.5/10 for sheer admiration of the cheek of this mid-20th-century intrepid traveller, plus for the extreme readability of her prose. If even half of this is true – and apparently, it all is, with some allowances for dramatic presentation – Lorna Whishaw gets my nod for the “Forge Ahead Regardless and Don’t Make a Fuss” award. Shaking my head and smiling, thinking of her adventures – in this case not an exaggeration of term. She loses .5 for not telling more. Infuriating book, because it’s such a teaser.

Lorna Whishaw only wrote two books – this one plus the earlier (published in 1958)  As Far as You’ll Take Me . She barely lifted the veil on her fascinating life and many travels. Probably too busy living to sit down and write about most of it!

I did find record of a third piece of Lorna’s writing, her Master’s Thesis for the University of British Columbia Department of Creative Writing, a 1212 page (really? possibly a pagination misprint) work titled Blue Kootenay, published 1985. Most intriguing. I wonder what the possibilities of somehow accessing that one are? I’m thinking fairly slim.

*****

Of my own free will I would not choose to live in Mexico, any more than I would take up residence at the bottom of a tropical sea, because I do not belong there, because I am not wanted there, and because Mexico can get along very well without me. But because through the Will of God I live in Mexico, I shall write of it, of day-by-day living in a land of vast beauty, of violence, and savage extremes, where the struggle of maintaining life is more terrible than death; a land which is trampled by the tourist with sightless eyes.

I have heard Lorna Whishaw’s two memoirs referred to, in her B.C. BookWorld biographical entry*, as creative non-fiction, and I suspect that she distanced herself somewhat from her narratives by tweaking names and certain personal details, and in her portrayal of order of events. There is no question that she was a real person, that she did travel widely and adventureously and that she based her books solidly in fact.

Lorna Whishaw’s perspective is at once soberly analytical and deeply personal. I am finding her writing intelligent and vivid; Mexico Unknown in particular is a unique work which rewards the reader in multiple ways. Sincerely passionate, continually smile-provoking, and unusually thought-provoking. Plus she was just a damned good writer, and not one mite afraid to voice her opinions in print, though it appears she was capable of maintaining a tactful silence when required in her real life.

On October 4, the day of the sputnik, we left the sanitary tranquility of the American way of life, and in total ignorance of things Mexican we plunged into the uneasy atmosphere where anything goes, where yes and no are as high as the sky and as deep as hell, and where nothing you can conceive of is impossible.

The Mexican experience starts with the culture shock of the border towns, and then the physical shock of the amenity-less workers’ community of a struggling Sierra Madre mine. The first half of the book is a dramatic tale of love and death, corruption and betrayal, nobility of character and inner joy found in the most unlikely people.

The portraits of the Mexicans and the American and European mine foremen, technicians and investors are generously but ruthlessly drawn with an artist’s flair for capturing personality and mood in a few well chosen words. The physical descriptions of the land and people are as good as photographs; I find myself perfectly able to picture each face and scene; an unusually difficult authorial feat to pull off as well as Whishaw consistently does.

Disaster strikes La Fortuna Mine, and the scene abruptly changes to Mazatlan, where the suddenly unemployed and quite broke family reassess their situation. The geologist husband goes off with the last of the ready money to attend job interviews, while the wife and daughter camp on the deserted beaches, invisible to the lavish tourist enclaves just down the coast.

A new job is found in a silver mine in Zacatecas in central Mexico,

…a rolling land, arid and beautiful, a vast panorama of golden grass rimmed by oil blue mountains; of joshua trees, lovely in scant clumps, but frightening assembled as they are sometimes to cover the land…as they march to the horizon black with their myriads…

and a life of relative luxury is settled into; school for the daughter, and endless days of lounging by the swimming pool, gossiping with fellow expatriate wives, and riding out in the surrounding countryside.

On to Guadalajara and then Mexico City, where the family experiences the major July 28, 1958 earthquake, then the geologist goes on to Nicaragua, while the other two return briefly to Canada, where a new car, a British-built Ford Zephyr convertible, is purchased and driven from British Columbia through the U.S.A., through Mexico and, over a technically “non-existent” road through the jungle,  into central America. That trip is a saga all of its own, tacked on to this crowded tale as almost an afterthought.

The family is reunited yet again, only to discover that the Nicaragua job is being curtailed, and though by this time Canada is looking wonderfully attractive, Mexico is again the next destination…

And here I should end this story, but something happened on our drive to the mine on that black and silver night, that should be told. On the trail, lying insolent and beautiful under the headlights we saw two jaguars. Tony stopped the truck a few feet from them, and we watched in ecstasy as they rose and moved slowly away into the bush, throwing flaming glares towards us as they went.

‘Fancy’, Mary said. ‘Jaguars in driving distance from Canada.’

The End

*****

Fancy.

Indeed!

Did I saw “highly recommended” yet? I’m sure I did, but I’ll say it again. This is why I love used book stores, and glorious vintage books.

*****

* B.C. BookWorld, 1992:

Born in Riga, Latvia to British parents in the diplomatic corps, Lorna Whishaw grew up in England and came to B.C. in 1947. She has lived in many countries, including South Africa where she worked on behalf of the civil rights movement. She speaks six languages and has published two books of creative non-fiction, As Far as You’ll Take Me (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958) and Mexico Unknown (London, 1962). With degrees in French, English and Philosophy, she has taught for East Kootenay Community College in Golden and Cranbrook. She lives in Windermere.

Lorna Whishaw died in 1999.

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Just Thumbing Some Rides: As Far As You’ll Take Me by Lorna Whishaw

Posted in 1950s, Canadian Book Challenge #6, Read in 2012, Whishaw, Lorna, tagged , , , , on October 12, 2016| 7 Comments »

A commentor has just referred to this grand travel memoir which I first read and wrote about in 2012. Re-posting, because it is an enthralling account, as unique as the woman who lived it and wrote about it.

As Far As You’ll Take Me by Lorna Whishaw ~ 1958. This edition: Hammond, Hammond & Co., 1959. Hardcover. 222 pages.

My rating: 8.5/10

One summer in the 1950s, while her geologist husband was off an a 3-month, “no wives allowed” prospecting trip, Lorna Whishaw left her Kootenay Lake farm and her 10-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son in the care of a neighbour’s retired ex-nanny mother and hitch-hiked to Alaska and back. This is the account of that journey, and of some of the people Lorna met.

Her husband, apologetic that Lorna could not accompany him on this trip as she had on many others, suggested that she go on an adventure of her own, until the time of his return when they could go off on a family trip together. She mulled over his suggestion, and went so far as to engage the efficient Mrs. Clements (to whom the book is dedicated), but then dreams the weeks away until…

One morning, as I lay watching the dawn on the mountains, I knew that the time had come. And that it had to be a hiking trip. Naturally, I was unprepared. I had expected to take weeks making plans and packing, but suddenly it was time to go and I had not even been into town to the bank.

I scoured the house for money until I had collected thirty-six dollars, mostly from winter pockets. I filled a packboard and a huge sack with all sorts of unsuitable effects. Anything, in fact, I could lay hands on without waking Mrs. Clements. In the end I had collected: two pairs of jeans, one pair of faded blues and some shorts, two cotton shirts, two short-sleeved sweaters, one fisherman’s sweater, three pairs of woollen socks, some crimson skijamas, three changes of underwear, a short fisherman’s slicker and four coloured kerchiefs to tie around the neck.

From the kitchen I stole a small Revere saucepan and frying pan, a silver spoon and fork, an aluminum pie plate, a plastic mug, two pounds of coffee, two pounds of rice, some bacon, salt, pepper and a huge chunk of cheese.

On top of this I stuffed in my sleeping bag, which weighed as much as the cheese, and a ground sheet…

After bidding goodbye to Mrs. Clements, and peeking in on her still-sleeping children, Lorna heads down the road, picking up a ride almost immediately with a well-wisher who warns Lorna about the dangers of the road, but ends with a “Wish I was going with you!” good luck parting. Into the line-up for the Kootenay Lake ferry, and Lorna picks up her first real ride, with a trucker headed to Vancouver. He gets her as far as the MacLeod junction, giving her tips on truck driver-passenger etiquette which will stand her in good stead her whole trip. Past the point of no return, Lorna mulls over her next move.

I turned northward, up the long straight road which seemed to touch the horizon and climb into the pink evening sky. Till that moment I had not really given much thought to the direction I would take. For many years I had dreamed of the far north. It was a dream which I had never allowed to take hold, but it was always with me. Standing in the golden sunset at the start of the flat grey road, I felt an overwhelming desire to go north. I had the time and I had thirty-six dollars. With luck I might actually realize my dream – Alaska and the Yukon!

And, by golly, she does indeed realize her dream. Cadging a series of rides with truckers and tourists and farmers and other good-hearted souls, she makes it all the way to Alaska, where she finds further adventure in trips into the wilderness through the kindness of strangers who quickly become friends. It is not all fun and laughter; many of her drivers and hosts have tragic pasts and difficult presents; Lorna herself has several brushes with disaster and makes some very poor decisions, which she pays for in real danger and frequent discomfort. She always pushes through, though, with a combination of luck and bull-headed resolve.

This was an understated but nicely written road trip saga. I found myself fully engaged and reluctant to put the book down, reading far into the night until my eyes closed on their own. Lorna’s voice is cool, calm and collected, and her dry sense of humour is apparent throughout. I am so glad I stumbled upon this memoir; this is my second reading of it and it is even better the second time around, as I found I slowed down in my reading and really savoured her descriptions and impressions of the country she was travelling through.

Lorna herself must have been as much of a unique character as any of the long-distance truck drivers, game wardens, and Yukon and Alaskan prospectors, lodge owners and fellow adventurers she met. According to scant but intriguing biographical information I tracked down, Lorna Hall was born in 1912 in Riga, Latvia, to British diplomatic corps parents. She grew up in England, but travelled widely, marrying pilot and mining engineer Quentin Whishaw and living in many countries, including South Africa, where she apparently worked on behalf of the civil rights movement, and also as a linguist for the “secret service”, according to her son Ian’s biographical notes. Lorna spoke six languages, and had degrees in French, English and Philosophy.

She moved to the Kootenay Lake region of British Columbia with her family in 1947, and lived in Windermere until her death in 1999. Apparently she only wrote two books, both travel memoirs: As Far As You’ll Take Me in 1958, and Mexico Unknown, in 1962. A real shame; I wish she had published more of her memoirs; from the glimpses of her life she shares in As Far As You’ll Take Me she is definitely a person whom I’d like to hear more from.

There were a few copies of both books on ABE, most quite reasonably priced the last time I checked. If you see a copy of either travel memoir in a second-hand bookshop, I would recommend you grab it, if you think you might enjoy reading of the solo travels of a strong, independent woman with a deep appreciation of other people and the natural world.

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