Archive for January, 2022

Where did she come from, where did she go? The Finger of Saturn by Victor Canning (1973)

Posted in 1970s, Canning, Victor, Century of Books - 2022, tagged , , , on January 30, 2022| Leave a Comment »

The Finger of Saturn by Victor Canning ~ 1973. This edition: Heinemann, 1973. Hardcover. 271 pages.

Victor Canning has proven to be a reliable source of engaging if generally improbable adventure novels and thrillers. I am slowly working my way through his sixty-one books, written from 1934 till 1987 (his last novel was finished posthumously by his widow and daughter), and, according to my list on Library Thing, I am now at number thirteen. All so far are keepers, so I have much to look forward to, both in the pleasant quest for more of his titles, and the reading of them when found.

I bumped into this latest one when I was hunting down Charles Portis, and added it on to my Thrift Books order as a bonus book. How pleasing to find upon its arrival that it was a pristine first edition hardcover. I have no objection to previously read books; indeed, one of the great pleasures of second hand book reading is mulling over inscriptions and marginal notes and the bus tickets left between the pages and such, but cracking a crisp never-read copy is highly enjoyable, too, especially when one discovers that the book in question (this one) as been shuffled from shelf to shelf for some 49 years, without anyone being inspired to read it.

Ah, well. Some things are mysterious. It’s been read now, and will be again – I’ve just snuck it from my husband’s reading stack in order to write this little review – so its bookish destiny has finally been fulfilled.

What is The Finger of Saturn about?

Well, I’m not really sure. Aliens, maybe? (That’s a hint.)

How many spoilers should I divulge? Maybe I’d do best to keep it vague, but the gloriously loopy plot points really make this one, so I also rather want to skewer them (nicely, of course) and bring them wriggling out into the light. But, in the interests of my usual writing time crunch, I’ll resist.

Robert and Sarah Rolt have been been happily married and living in quite a lot of comfort at Robert’s old family estate of Rolthead in Dorset (in the Rolt family since the 13th Century, we are proudly told by Robert, who narrates this first-person tale) since their impetuous (and strongly opposed by Sarah’s mother) courtship some nine years earlier.

Sarah and Robert came into their marriage as independently wealthy individuals – how nice for them! – and though they share a united personal and emotional life (or do they?) they each retain an independent and private financial life, which is very convenient for Canning’s plot purposes.

So, happily married for seven years, everything is lovely in the Rolthead garden. The only thing missing is an heir to Rolthead up in the manor house nursery. But that’s all right. too, Sarah and Robert have decided to adopt a child to fill that niche. Then right out of the blue, everything comes to a shuddering stop.

Sarah goes out shopping one morning, and completely vanishes.

Two years go by.

Robert has never lost confidence that one day his beloved Sarah will return to him, so he professes to be not-too-surprised when an official from the Foreign Office gets in touch to ask Robert to identify a woman shown in several snippets of surveillance camera footage, collected by the Foreign Office and subsequently shared (cue forboding background music) with the Ministry of Defence.

“She is your wife, you say. She disappeared over two years ago. She could have lost her memory and could have started a new life. From that premise she could well have found herself cultivating an innocent friendship with this man . . . nothing more than that.  The only oddness, coincidence . . . is that it was him. He was a listed man. Not to be touched. Allowed to run because he was small beer. Could turn out to be more valuable to us free than inside. . . That’s why I’m here – under instructions.”

The woman looks, moves and speaks like Sarah, and Robert is convinced that his lost wife has been found. The hunt for the truth behind her disappearance and reappearance (albeit as someone else named Angela Starr) is on.

Robert, with the blessing of the Foreign Office (not that he cares for any bureaucratic permission) travels to see her, and is greeted with polite reserve and a fantastically detailed account of “Angela Starr’s” past two years. It is no secret that Mrs Starr (she’s apparently a widow) has no memory of her past prior to the awakening one day (two years ago) in an amnesiac state, all of her past apparently erased from her mind.

She’s definitely Sarah, though, and Robert eventually convinces her of this, enough so that she agrees to return to Rolthead with him in the hopes that her memory will return, but so many questions are there to be answered, and the sorting out of these and the real truth of Sarah’s origins before her marriage and the explanation of her strange disappearance make up the body of this convoluted thriller.

For thriller it turns out to be, including stock features from the genre such as a conflicted and soul-tortured government agent, an incredibly wealthy business entity serving as a facade for a secret society, close brushes with death for both Robert and Sarah, and various complexities culminating in a car bomb plot and, ultimately, the revelation of the real truth (or is it?) regarding Sarah and her backstory.

I quite enjoy Victor Canning’s thrillers. Great escape reading they are, just contrived enough to keep one fully aware that they are absolutely fictional. Much of Canning’s appeal to me lies in the characters he creates, who are often satisfyingly interesting, even as they carry out their cliched roles and responses. I’m also a sucker for detailed scene setting, and Victor Canning could hammer out descriptive passages with the best.

My rating: 8/10. Better than I had expected it to be, though occasionally worse, too. This rating lost a couple of points for the dramatically groan-inspiring ending – I have to admit I didn’t really see it coming, though I feel like I should have. I think our Victor could have been a bit more creative with the wrap-up, though it is well within the tradition for these sorts of tales.

Oh – what is “the finger of Saturn”? Well, I shan’t divulge, as it’s one of the clues to Sarah’s identity, but if you are really curious, pop over to this great review at Existential Ennui for a teasing explanation and another reader’s assessment of the book.

Read Full Post »

Settling down and pairing up: Susan Settles Down(1936) and Touch Not the Nettle(1939) by Molly Clavering

Posted in 1930s, Century of Books - 2022, Clavering, Molly, tagged , , , , , on January 27, 2022| 6 Comments »

Susan Settles Down by Molly Clavering ~ 1936. This edition: Dean Street Press, 2021. Softcover. 236 pages.

Touch Not the Nettle by Molly Clavering ~ 1939. This edition: Dean Street Press, 2021. Softcover. 229 pages.

Molly Clavering is a new-to-me author, brought to my attention by Scott of the always vastly and expensively informative Furrowed Middlebrow blog. (Expensive because a visit to the Furrowed Middlebrow always results in quest-and-purchase episodes!)

Scott, as many of you will already know, has been working with Dean Street Press for the last six years (can it be that long already?!) to bring back into print an ever-growing list of long out-of-print titles by various “middlebrow” female writers of the first six decades of the 20th Century, and one of the authors he has championed is the long out-of-print Molly Clavering, who produced a very respectable number of novels and novellas from the 1920s into the early 1970s.

Clavering is often mentioned in the same breath as D.E. Stevenson, and the comparisons are always positive, and there was, “in real life”, a genuine relationship between the two writers. They met and shared a social circle while living in the same small Lowland Scotland town of Moffat.

Molly Clavering and D.E. Stevenson were by all reports good friends, and one might assume that their shared writing occupations provided a strong bond, for by the time they met post-World War II, each had been successfully writing “light romantic novels” for years, and each had developed their own style, and in D.E. Stevenson’s case, an inter-related web of fictional characters who show up throughout numerous novels.

It does not appear the Molly Clavering used the same characters repeatedly as a general practice, though these two tales are sequential in nature and share the same cast and setting, hence this doubling up by me.

Susan Settles Down ~ 1936

Youngish (late twenties? early thirties?), English brother and sister Oliver and Susan Parsons have unexpectedly inherited a property in Scotland, and have moved from London to the much more rural environs of Muirfoot, to try their hand at being country people. Finances are an issue; the Parsons are far from being well-off, and things are complicated somewhat by Oliver’s physical and emotional challenges, as he is in decidedly unhappy state after an accident which has left him permanently injured. Oliver is a little bit angry at the whole wide world, and he shows it.

Susan copes well with Oliver’s black moods, and by and large keeps him from alienating absolutely everyone he comes into contact with, but it is a challenge, particularly when one is trying to fit in with a brand new lifestyle in a small rural community where everyone knows everyone.

Along with the newcomers, we are introduced to the locals. We’ve met all of these folks before – or others quite like them – the abstracted vicar and his sensible wife, their irrepressibly lively daughter, the successful “young squire” farmer-next-door, an array of just slightly caricatured servants and farm workers and village shopkeepers and members-of-the-parish. 

More than slightly caricatured are a trio of desperately gossipy spinster sisters, and the author is not very kind to these-her-creations and the antics of the Pringle sisters stray into parody zone, but for the most part this is a realistically portrayed, ultimately cheerful sort of tale, easy to read and satisfactorily engrossing. There is tragedy, there is romance, and by the end, well, Susan has settled down. (And Oliver has, too.)

Touch Not the Nettle ~1939

Several years have gone by and we meet again our old friends Susan and Oliver, now fully absorbed into their new lives in Scotland. Things are deeply peaceful, and of course this state of affairs is too good to be true, as nature (and the novelist) abhor a vacuum, and plot lines must be kept moving.

Introduced to Susan’s quietly happy home is a rather reluctant guest. Amanda, a cousin of Susan’s husband, has been sent to the country by her overbearing mother as a sort of “rest cure” while awaiting news of Amanda’s daredevil pilot husband’s fate. He’s gone off on an attempted round-the-world flight and has apparently come to grief as he’s disappeared off the flight charts, but as there’s no sign of his wrecked plane and he could possibly have come down somewhere in the South American jungle so Amanda is stuck in limbo, life on hold, as she wonders if she’ll ever know if she is wife or widow.

As Susan and Oliver were, newcomer Amanda is immediately absorbed into the community of Muirfoot and environs, and soon finds herself without much time to brood upon her current unsettled state and unknown future.

We are presented with some new characters alongside all the familiar cast from Susan Settles Down, most notably the not-so-quietly-bitter Larry Heriot, with a dark secret in his past and a serious drinking habit quite obviously triggered by his attempts to “forget” whatever that secret is, and his angry, mentally ill sister Ruth.

The Pringle sisters reappear, and we get to know them all a bit better and perhaps even develop a tiny bit of sympathy for them, though they retain their parodic roles as domestic and community harpies, poking and prying and making malicious comment on absolutely everything and everybody.

There are perfect understandings and desperate misunderstandings and friendships made and comedy and tragedy and ultimately a bit of romance – all in a village-bound nutshell. The formula as expected, in fact, and very nice it is, too.

Molly Clavering hits the comfort read shelves, next to D.E. Stevenson, neighbours in literature as they were in their real lives.

My rating for both of these charming-with-some depth-and-bite vintage tales: 7.5/10

I have six more of these previously some-eight decades-out-of-print Molly Clavering novels awaiting. (Well, really only five more which are new-to-me, as I did already have, and read some years ago, the American version of Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer, published over here as Mrs Lorimer’s Family.)

Heaven bless the re-publishers; you make my reading life a little bit richer.

 

 

Read Full Post »

Double lives, below and aloft: The Four Winds by David Beaty (1954)

Posted in 1950s, Beaty, David, Century of Books - 2022 on January 21, 2022| Leave a Comment »

The Four Winds by David Beaty ~ 1954. Originally published as The Heart of the Storm. This edition: William Morrow & Company, 1955. Hardcover. 288 pages.

If you know Nevil Shute, this is essentially more of the same. Flawed heroes, occasional heroines, moral dilemmas, gripping action scenes, and a consistent willingness to kill off key characters.

Ex R.A.F. and commercial airline pilot David Beaty retired and turned writer, and this was his second of what would eventually be twenty or so fiction and non-fiction books, mostly concerned with aviation.

The Four Winds follows several commercial airline pilots as they criss cross vast bodies of water in the early 1950s, moving people and things around, all the while juggling the always complex demands of work and home and colleague relationships.

The first sign that an aircraft is overtaking the south-east quadrant of a storm is often a swell on an otherwise calm sea, which may extend over a thousand miles from the seat of the disturbance. Tufts of cirrus form the windswept ends of a thin haze hanging high over the sky, producing haloes or rings around the sun and the moon…

We start with a hurricane and white knuckle our way through a heroic rescue mission, and though that episode quickly fades into “just another flying incident” its repercussions affect the lives of a widening circle of people – the proverbial “butterfly effect”.

“British Empire Airways” pilot Mark Kelston, stoically enduring an indifferent marriage to the socially-climbing and financially-demanding Veronica back home in England, is perhaps over-ready for the romance that develops during the mid-hurricane stopover in the Azores with the beautiful Czechoslovakian exile Karena, woman-without-a-country.

Kelston’s fellow pilots also have their own complicated personal and romantic lives, and what happens over here affects things over there and vice versa. If this novel has a theme – other than the obvious “men and women of the air” storyline – it would be “everything is connected”.

This novel was a book sale acquisition quite a few years ago, and it’s been shuffled from pile to pile quite a few times, never really reaching out to me, but just intriguing enough on repeated fly-leaf browsings to keep it hanging around. I had lowish expectations, never having heard of David Beaty, but once I started I was happily drawn in and inexorably swept along. It was a good read, in a mid-century, sometimes-a-bit-cringe-worthy, Nevil Shute-ian sort of way. Allowing for the expectedly dated language and attitudes, some passages were very good indeed.

Curious about the author, I had recourse to our old friend Wikipedia, and here is the lowdown on David Beaty.

Another writer to look out for in a casual way when I return to in-person old-book browsing in bricks-and-mortar bookstores. This online questing is all well and good, but hands-on is way better.

My rating: 7/10

 

 

 

 

 

Read Full Post »

Plots and posings and quite a lot of piffle: The Reluctant Widow by Georgette Heyer (1946)

Posted in 1940s, Century of Books - 2022, Heyer, Georgette, Read in 2022 on January 16, 2022| 11 Comments »

The Reluctant Widow by Georgette Heyer ~ 1946. This edition: Arrow Books, 2004. Softcover. 278 pages.

It’s probably not a good sign that as I stare at this blank screen, trying to communicate my thoughts on this Georgette Heyer novel, all I can think of is the “next novel” I’ve just left still-to-be-finished on the night table, David Beaty’s The Four Winds. Giving myself a mental shake, back to Heyer it is.

The Georgette Heyers on my bookshelves have been something of go-to, reliable, comfort reads during these past few years, when our escape literature has taken on new importance what with the generally stressful situation related to the current pandemic and its far-reaching effects on pretty well everything we thought we could take for granted.

My Heyer collection is far from complete. but a recent stint of re-readings of those on hand nudged me to seek out a few more, so off to Thriftbooks I went, and as the wonderful book-shaped parcels trickled in, I figuratively (and yes, perhaps literally) rubbed my hands with glee. New-to-me old-book reads! Such fun!

But I am sad to report that this one has fallen with a (figuratively) damp thump onto the B-list Heyer stack, joining a few others, rarities from an otherwise reliably entertaining writer.

Now, you either know Georgette Heyer or you don’t, and if you don’t I’m not going to try to woo you over to the Regency side, but if you do, I’m guessing you’ll get it when I say this one is pure GH formula, with a few initially intriguing twists.

Condensed as much as I appear to be able to condense things, which is pretty darn long-winded most of the time, here we go.

We’re in the Regency era in England, right in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s. One Elinor Rochdale, a young woman of good family, sadly fallen in her personal circumstances due to her father’s highly unwise financial endeavors and subsequent demise, is now pursuing a career as a governess.

Hopping off her stagecoach at a rural stopping place, appointed rendezvous with a new employer, Miss Rochdale inadvertently hops into the wrong coach, and finds herself embroiled in a complicated and never very lucidly explained scheme which finds her married to a young ne’er-do-well on his deathbed that very night. She’s a widow by morning, sole inheritor of a deeply encumbered estate.

There is a trio of handsome and charming brothers, a large and bumptious dog (something of a Heyer staple), a collection of dedicated family retainers, a dreadfully rundown manor house with a secret staircase, hidden papers, a spy plot, several sudden deaths which we are not terribly perturbed by because obviously the victims “had it coming”, and lots of prattling on about Wellington and the Prince Regent and “Boney” and traitors and collaborators and such. The romantic fates of Miss Rochdale – oops, now Mrs Cheviot – and her masterful second-husband-to-be are telegraphed loud and clear early on and there are ZERO surprises, even when the traitorous “secret” spies are revealed.

This ultimately slight tale had a lot of initial promise, and there are numerous passages of deeply pleasurable Heyerian “piffling” (in the Lord Peter Wimsey sense of the term), but overall, this novel is a bit of a yawn-inducing mess.

One person’s opinion, of course, and I’d be absolutely pleased to hear what others think. “Your mileage may differ!”

My rating: 5.5/10

I almost abandoned The Reluctant Widow to her foretold fate, but I kept plugging along because I hoped so hard she might at some point surprise me.

No such luck.

I’m keeping the book, and it will be shelved with the rest of the Heyers, because no doubt it will get re-read at some future time-of-reading-desperation, and who knows! – maybe my response will be more favorable second time around.

 

 

 

Read Full Post »

Colonial miss turns pirate: Jade by Sally Watson (1969)

Posted in 1960s, Century of Books - 2022, Watson, Sally on January 13, 2022| 2 Comments »

Jade by Sally Watson ~ 1969. This edition: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969. Hardcover. 270 pages.

I had the good fortune to be in elementary and high school during the 1970s, when Canadian public school library budgets were generous and the collections vast and varied.

During these formative reading years, I toted home large stacks of books, many of them fated to be read by illicit flashlight after mandatory lights-out time.

Sometimes my flashlight batteries gave out, and I also remember crouching in the hallway outside my bedroom surreptitiously reading by the faint gleam of a plug-in night light. I tried my best to be silent and unnoticeable, but my timing was sometimes off and I occasionally was busted by my dad, who was not particularly impressed by my initiative. My bookwormish ways were inherited directly from him, but he was the adult and I a mere child, with school and chores the next day, and he chose to view my nocturnal reading activitity as an act of rebellion against his preferred status quo, and his rebukes were memorably stern.

Which perhaps might be one of the reasons I felt such a strong kinship with the heroines of Sally Watson. She specialized in well-researched historical fictions with strong, teenage female leads, and perhaps the most memorable of all of these was the unquenchable Melanie Lennox, a.k.a. “Jade”: green-eyed, opinionated and outspoken sixteen-year-old resident of colonial Williamsburg, circa 1721.

Jade gets up to all sorts of unladylike adventures, and anyone familiar with this genre will nod in recognition when I mention that young Jade gloried in the forbidden-for-females actions of rising astride, dressing up in boy’s clothing,  learning fencing on the sly, and, most audaciously in the society and era that she lived in, railing against the evils of slavery.

Jade finally goes too far and is shipped off to Jamaica to reside with her fluttery aunt and stern Prussian uncle. Uncle Augustus is well known for his mastery of horses, slaves and women; he will surely be able to tame one small teenage girl.

Ha!

Jumping over all sorts of detail, I will merely divulge that after some adventuring our Jade finds herself a member of a pirate ship’s crew, eventually plying her skill with a rapier alongside none other than Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

As far as juvenile fiction of the 1960s and 70s went, Sally Watson’s work was pretty darned decent, enough so that I remember in quite vivid detail, some forty years later, episodes from all of her novels.

Sally Watson’s bent was historical fiction, with characters linked in quite creative ways as she passed through the centuries from the 1500s onward. Though Sally Watson was American, born in Seattle in 1924, she had a special fondness for all things Scottish, and at least two of her novels were set in Scotland, with the ancestors of those heroines popping up in other places in her tales.

I started my current reading of Jade with some trepidation, hoping that it would reward me with the thrill that my long-ago twelve-year-old self experienced during those stolen midnight reading hours. Alas! the magic was not quite recaptured, though every word was as familiar as yesterday.

This said, I would be most open to reacquainting myself with the rest of Sally Watson’s long-lost tales. They were snapped up quickly as library shelves were purged during the great school library downsizings of the 1990s and beyond, and hardcover ex-library copies are ridiculously scarce, but a republishing of some titles by Image Cascade has put Sally Watson back into circulation.

I’ve just ordered a copy of Sally Watson’s autobiography, Dance to a Different Piper, published in 2015, and I must say I am looking forward to learning more about this opinionated and multi-talented writer, as the biographical snippets gleaned from the endpapers of her books are most intriguing: a membership in Mensa, extensive traveling, Highland dancing, judo, cats, fencing and gardening are all noted as strong interests of this well-rounded individual.

Read Full Post »

Crawling out of madness: The Snake Pit by Mary Jane Ward (1946)

Posted in 1940s, Century of Books - 2022, Ward, Mary Jane on January 11, 2022| 3 Comments »

The Snake Pit by Mary Jane Ward ~ 1946. This edition: Random House, 1946. Hardcover. 278 pages.

“Do you hear voices?” he asked.

You think I am deaf? “Of course,” she said. “I hear yours.” It was hard to keep on being civil. She was tired and he had been asking questions for such a long time, days and days of incredibly naive questions.

Now he was explaining that she misunderstood; he did not mean real voices. Fantastic. He was speaking, he said, of voices that were not real and yet they were voices he expected her to hear. He seemed determined that she should hear them. He was something of a pest, this man, but she could think of no decent way to get rid of him. You could tell he meant well and so you tried to play the game with him, as if with a fanciful child.

Virginia Cunningham, young writer, cherished wife of a loving husband, has had a terrible breakdown. Overwhelmed with what she feels are unfulfilled family and societal expectations, desperately worried about money and her husband’s apparently casual attitude to a dwindling bank account, Virginia is getting so very tired – she cannot sleep – and she crashes hard: “Robert,” I said, “I think there is something the matter with my head.”

Now Virginia is in a mental hospital – not an insane asylum, as she and the more lucid of her fellow patients assure themselves – they will be getting better, they will be going home – but as the days-weeks-months-years slip by, home seems an ever more elusive concept, and the institution (prison? are we really in a prison? are the nurses wardresses?) becomes the whole world.

As Virginia slips in and out of the fluctuating stages of her mental breakdown, she experiences all of the attempted treatments which mid-20th century medicine has to offer: psychoanalysis, work therapy, regular doses of the hypnotic sedative paraldehyde, electric shock therapy and eventually a course of the dreaded “baths” – a medievalesque program of lukewarm and ice cold baths, with the patient completely immobilized by mummy-like canvas wrappings and subjected to hours and hours of immersion in baths supplied with continuously running water.

Virginia has times of recovery and progresses through the different wards of the institution she is being treated at; she gains ground but slips back frequently into states of deep confusion and memory loss, but then she has something of an epiphany.

She should have, she knew, been frightened and depressed by the newest transfer. She was in a much worse building now and none of the patients she had seen so far struck her as being good risks. And yet the hopelessness that had been hounding her had lessened and for the first time she dared to believe that she might get well…when you realize you aren’t the sickest in your ward, it does something for you…I know where I am and I know I am sick…Shock treatments. Why bother with insulin, metrazol or electricity? Long ago they lowered insane persons into snake pits; they thought than an experience that might drive a sane person out of his wits might send an insane person back into sanity. By design or by accident…a more modern “they” had given V. Cunningham a far more dramatic shock treatment now than Dr.Kik had been able to manage with his clamps and wedges and assistants. They had thrown her into a snake pit and she had been shocked into knowing that she should get well.

We leave Virginia on the verge of stepping back into the world of the sane; she has had a long and terrible journey, and she might not be able to carry things off as a “normal” person without any hitches, but she has achieved a psychological mastery of her own fate, and she is going to try.

The real life version of Virginia, Mary Jane Ward, who wrote this heart-rending yet sometimes funny and optimistic semi-autobiographical novel, did make a successful transition back into “normalcy”, though she did have future episodes of psychiatric illness in later years.

The Snake Pit was an immediate bestseller upon its release in 1946, and it sparked a wider conversation about the institutionalization and treatment of the mentally ill. It was made into an Oscar-awarded film starring Olivia de Havilland. The book remains in print today.

My rating: 9.5/10

A rather disturbing and frequently uncomfortable read in a “They did what?! And why?!” sort of way, but engrossing and engaging.

It struck home in a personal way as well. A beloved elderly aunt of my husband suffered psychiatric episodes from the 1950s into the 1970s and she did undergo an array of the  same treatments as Mary Jane Ward reports, including sessions of shock therapy. By the 1980s, advances in pharmaceutical treatments allowed her a much higher quality of life, and she “functioned” with apparently absolute normalcy, though she was always free and open in referring to “my medications” and also in referencing some of her previous experiences as a “mental” patient.

 

Read Full Post »

The long reveal: Transcription by Kate Atkinson (2018)

Posted in 2010s, Atkinson, Kate, Century of Books - 2022, tagged , , on January 9, 2022| 3 Comments »

Transcription by Kate Atkinson ~ 2018. This edition: Back Bay Books, 2019. Paperback. 339 pages.

I missed out on this novel when it was published a few years ago, being instead focused on the pending release of the fifth Jackson Brodie installment, Big Sky, which I happily received as one of my Christmas 2019 books. (Remember December of 2019, with just the faintest hints of a world-changing event? “A new virus has appeared in China…”)

Anyway, Big Sky had my full attention, and Transcription slipped past unnoticed until this Christmas season, when my daughter and I were on a rare “non-essential” visit to the bookshop and she noticed it on a remainder stack and said, “Hey, I don’t think you have this one, do you?” So it came home with us and I have saved it until now, and isn’t it grand to start the new year off with a new book by a favourite writer?

What can one say about a Kate Atkinson novel which many others haven’t already said, and frequently much more eloquently? The answer is “not much”, so I will keep this relatively brief.

London, 1940. Recently orphaned nineteen-year-old Juliet Armstrong is scouted by MI5 and soon finds herself “plucked” (“…More pigeon perhaps than rose…”) from the ranks of minor clerical workers to act as a transcriptionist on a special project, typing out the secretly recorded conversations of a group of British fascist sympathizers. Things go a bit sideways, as they are wont to do in Atkinson inventions, and Juliet – well – Juliet has adventures.

Flash forward to the 1950s, with Juliet now working at the BBC, and a face from the past shows up with complicating consequences. (Is anybody ever really what they seem?)

Trust Kate Atkinson to spin a complex and frequently perplexing tale. This one comes complete with an impressive research bibliography and author’s note.

Frequently funny, in a laconically wry way, and I had one laugh out loud moment early on, when BBC announcer Juliet is thinking of awkward moments when on air.

The cat, a ginger one – they were the worst type of cat, in Juliet’s opinion – had jumped up on the desk and bitten her – quite sharply, so that she couldn’t help but give a little yelp of pain. It then proceeded to roll around on the desk before rubbing its face on the microphone and purring so loudly that anyone listening must have thought there was a panther loose in the studio, one that was very pleased with itself for having killed a woman.

Digression. Could one not create as a quietly diverting side project a felinophile-bibliophile’s trivia file, a collection of brief yet memorable cat references in literature? For example, Grumpy in Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry from Kensington.

No more cats appear in Transcription, though there are two dogs, one with a bit part, one with much more than that. (Spoiler alert for the animal lovers going “Aw, so sweet…”: the dogs do not get happy endings.) Also memorable plot-wise are a small Mauser revolver, a string of pearls, a unique handbag and a Sèvres teacup.

My rating: 8/10

The Sources afterword has some tempting titles, perhaps most intriguing Human Voices (1980) by Penelope Fitzgerald, One Girl’s War (1945) by Joan Miller, and Mollie Panter-Downes’ London War Notes, 1939-1945 (1971).

 

 

Read Full Post »

Beyond the pale in a fast-changing Japan: The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd (1977)

Posted in 1970s, Century of Books - 2022, Uncategorized, Wynd, Oswald on January 6, 2022| 6 Comments »

The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd ~ 1977. This edition: Harper Collins Perennial Classics, 2002. Paperback. 324 pages.

January 1903. Twenty-year-old Mary Mackenzie, a decidedly sheltered Edinburgh Presbyterian brought up in financially challenged upper-middle-class circumstances by a sternly religious widowed mother, is sailing to China to marry her betrothed, an English military attaché she has only met a few times. Mary will be “marrying up”; accepting Richard’s offer is seen as something of a marital coup in her social circle.

As the ship sails through troubled winter seas, Mary writes in her very private journal regarding the sea change occurring in her own attitudes and opinions, as she sheds first her uncomfortable corsets and then some of her previously unquestioned viewpoints on class distinctions and the quiet yet fervent jockeying for position among those seeking to move higher in the ranks.

Marry arrives at her destination, marries her passionless fiancé, bears a baby daughter and tries her best to fit into the rigidly structured community of British and European pseudo-exiles who have drawn ever closer together both physically and emotionally since the bloody Boxer Rebellion just a few years before.

With husband Richard off on a military mission, Mary uncomplainingly carries on with a life much more joyless and circumscribed than she had thought to find herself in. It is perhaps not particularly surprising that she falls into a brief yet passionate affair with a high ranking Japanese nobleman convalescing from injuries received while serving as a military officer in the Russo-Japanese War.

One short week of forbidden love has long-reaching consequences. Mary finds herself pregnant. Scandal ensues. The betrayed Richard casts her off – “puts her out”. The baby daughter will be sent to Richard’s mother back in England, while Mary will be returned to Edinburgh and whatever life she can make for herself under the care of her devastatingly appalled mother.

Then Mary skips out.

Slipping out of the hotel room where Richard has parked her while she awaits her passage “home”, Mary instead travels to Tokyo and sets herself up in a modest little house, all paid for by a previous money-gift from ex-lover Count Kentaro, who apparently feels a certain responsibility towards his Scottish fling, though he demonstrates no intention of otherwise recognizing or continuing their relationship.

A son is born and Mary revels in an unexpectedly joyful experience of second-chance motherhood, until the Count reappears, casually reignites the love affair, inspects the child, likes what he sees and arranges a parental kidnapping, leaving Mary distraught and socially isolated in her adopted homeland, as the British community is now completely closed to her as a result of her wayward ways.

How Mary remakes her life as a stranger in a strange land makes up the remainder of this rather tall tale, which is not quite as melodramatic as this description might make it sound. There is a deep sensitivity and substantial verisimilitude here, very likely formed by the author’s own experience as a son of Scottish missionaries, living in Japan from his birth in 1913 until 1932, when the family returned to Scotland. Wynd returned to Asia in WW II as a member of the British Army Intelligence Corps, and subsequently spent three years as a Japanese prisoner of war in Hokkaido.

Wynd’s timeline does not exactly match that of his heroine in this novel, but the depiction he gives of expatriates living amongst the Chinese and Japanese communities of the early 20th century up until the start of World War II is convincingly depicted and serves as a historically plausible backdrop to fictional Mary’s tale.

As for Mary Mackenzie, we leave her on board another ship in August, 1942, outbound from Japan, returning to the land of her birth and a possible reunion with her long-lost daughter.

This epistolary novel was a very good read, and it has reminded me of my other encounter with Oswald Wynd a few years ago, reading one of his thrillers written under the non-de-plume of Gavin Black. As The Ginger Tree most pleasurably did, The Eyes Around Me kept me absolutely engaged.

I do believe this will be a writer I will quest after in 2022. Most of his books are out of print, but his popularity was such that there are some copies still floating about, and I intend to search out as many as I can reasonably afford. I expect that I will find them very diverting.

My rating: 8.5/10

A point and a half docked because the detail fell off in the later years of Mary’s story, though understandably so. An awful lot of historical and dramatic ground was covered here.

Kudos to the writer for keeping this saga at a modest 324 pages. Some rather clever technique was shown here, hopping us through the story in ever-greater leaps towards the end, but still keeping it (fictionally) very believable.

Read Full Post »

Happy New Year!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on January 4, 2022| 7 Comments »

Happy turn-of-the-year, my bookish friends!

The last few years have been so…strange…challenging…difficult…add your own adjective here. But despite all of our woes, books continue to provide diversion, solace, amusement and inspiration, and the conversations continue.

I must admit that I have not been an active participant for some time in these conversations, though I’ve dipped in to read what others have to say and have enjoyed my lurker status. However, realizing how much I miss recording my impressions as a reader, I think it’s time to be a bit more active again.

No promises! Life is supremely full of “stuff” at present, with no likelihood of its settling down anytime soon, but let’s see what happens.

I will start with this warm wish to all of you for good things to come in 2022. No matter what this new year brings us, may we all find comfort and companionship in and through books.

Read Full Post »