Archive for the ‘1940s’ Category

Survivors and otherwise: They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple (1943)

Posted in 1940s, Century of Books - 2022, Whipple, Dorothy, tagged , , , on February 5, 2022| 4 Comments »

They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple ~ 1943. This edition: Persephone Books, 2020. Afterword by Celia Brayfield. Softcover. 455 pages.

Three sisters, three marriages.

Dorothy Whipple’s novels of fraught family dynamics are compellingly readable, and this one ramps things up a notch over the others; there is some really dark stuff going on here, including but not limited to psychological spousal and child abuse.

Sounds depressing, doesn’t it?

It is, very much so, though it’s so fascinating in its depictions that one cannot ever quite look away.

It is also a story built around the power of love, and, yes, sometimes the powerlessness of love to “make things better” for the loved ones.

In the years before the Great War, three sisters in a middle-class English family lose their mother too soon. Responsible, highly intelligent, seventeen-year-old Lucy leaves her studies – she’s been preparing for Oxford – and takes on the role of mother-figure to her three brothers and two younger sisters, the sweet natured, trusting thirteen-year-old Charlotte, and the headstrong, volatile and exceptionally beautiful eleven-year-old Vera.

The brothers gain independence swiftly, but the young sisters remain on Lucy’s conscience and in her care; she often feels that there is a great divide between them, the too-soon sedate older sister sometimes cut out of confidences by the younger pair. But by and large things go on quite serenely, until the inevitable heart-stirrings of young love strike.

Lucy, “the plain one”, seated among the chaperones at parties and dances, is rather on the shelf, but Charlotte and Vera are very much sought after, and all three sisters ultimately marry. Charlotte to the self-satisfied, go-getter businessman Geoffrey, one of Vera’s cast-offs, Vera to the self-effacing and wealthy Brian, and Lucy to sedate, much older William, whose keen eyes have noted quiet Lucy’s sterling qualities.

As the years go by, these pairings develop in three vastly differing ways. Charlotte and Vera have children; to her quiet grief Lucy is childless; but they keep in touch as the years march on and Lucy remains watchful over her two sisters and then her nieces and nephew, becoming the perpetual aunt, hosting the children on holidays, and trying hard to not interfere when she sees her sisters making some very poor decisions, some deliberate, some thrust upon them by the situations they find themselves in.

Moral failure or spiritual failure or whatever you call it, makes such a vicious circle… It seems as if when we love people and they fall short, we retaliate by falling shorter ourselves. Children are like that. Adults have a fearful responsibility. When they fail to live up to what children expect of them, the children give up themselves. So each generation keeps failing the next.

Geoffrey, to no one’s surprise but Charlotte’s, proves to be a manipulatively cruel domestic tyrant of epic proportions. Brian, despite holding the purse strings in the marriage, is relegated to shadow-husband as Vera fervently pursues self indulgence. William watches it all with a keen eye and hands-off demeanor, giving quiet support to Lucy as she frets over the troubles she finds Charlotte and Vera enmeshed in.

This is as much plot as we are given; it’s very much a novel about relationships versus large happenings. There are dramatic events, but they are of a small, familial nature, kept as much under the rug as possible due to the need to keep up appearances.

When two of the sisters’ marriages go inevitably wrong, the third one quietly carries on, allowing a small semblance of normalcy for some of the damaged children who are ultimately the innocent victims, the collateral damage of their elders’ decisions and actions.

An intense, unputdownable read. Dorothy Whipple, accomplished documentarian of domestic drama, excels herself here.

My rating: 9/10

From the Persephone Books website:

‘They Were Sisters is a compulsively readable but often harrowing novel by one of Persephone’s best writers, who always manages to make the ordinary extraordinary,’ writes Celia Brayfield. This, the fourth Dorothy Whipple novel we have republished, is, like the others, apparently gentle but has a very strong theme, in this case domestic violence. Three sisters marry very different men and the choices they make determine whether they will flourish, be tamed or be repressed. Lucy’s husband is her beloved companion; Vera’s husband bores her and she turns elsewhere; and Charlotte’s husband is a bully who turns a high-spirited naive young girl into a deeply unhappy woman.

In the Independent on Sunday Charlie Lee-Potter commented that They Were Sisters ‘exerts a menacing tone from start to finish. I eavesdropped on the lives of Lucy, Charlotte and Vera, compelled to go on but with a sense of simmering dread.’ Salley Vickers in the Spectator described ‘the sparkling achievements of this accomplished novelist, not the least of which is the ability – rarer today than it should be – simply to entertain.’ And Elizabeth Day has called it ‘a powerful portrayal of sisterly relationships and an emotionally coercive marriage.’

 

They Were Sisters was made into a movie in 1945, starring James Mason as the suavely malignant Geoffrey, and Phyllis Calvert as his abused wife. Movie version described in some detail here. The plot appears to have been altered somewhat, but the essentials of the novel appear to remain true to Whipple’s written version.

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Analyzing Japan: Black Fountains by Oswald Wynd

Posted in 1940s, Century of Books - 2022, Wynd, Oswald, tagged , on February 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Black Fountains by Oswald Wynd ~ 1947. This edition: Doubleday & Company, 1947. Hardcover. 374 pages.

What a mixed response I have to this novel! It’s a definite period piece, a product of a very particular time and place, written by a person with a lot of insider knowledge of his topic, and there are a lot of things going on which influence the narrative.

I had high expectations for readability, having enjoyed the two prior Oswald Wynd novels I’d serendipitously bumped into, The Eyes Around Me and The Ginger Tree. I thought that Black Fountains would meet that standard, in particular since it won a $20,000 literary prize (the Doubleday Prize) in 1947.

Perhaps the novelty of the origins and life experience of the author plus that of his fictional protagonist had something to do with that prize. Wynd was Scottish by heritage but was born in and grew up in Japan as a child of missionaries; the novel was partially written while Wynd was held under the Japanese in a Malayan prison camp in 1944-45. The protagonist of the novel is a young upper-class Japanese woman who has just returned to her homeland after five years of study in the United States. The story takes place between 1938 and 1945.

Here is some of what Kirkus had to say in 1947:

(A)n exceedingly interesting and often revealing book, introducing a new talent, immature and amateurish at times, but fresh and exciting in much of what he has to say. Here – in terms of one American-educated Japanese girl’s reactions, fears, hates, loves, is a Japan we do not know- the Japan that accepted the bonds of belonging while hating what Japan had come to stand for. Wynd was a prisoner of the Japanese; he was able to see both sides. The story opens in the Fall of 1938, as Omi, returning to Japan after five years of freedom, attempts to uproot what holds her to America and to find herself again in a Japan she dreads and fights. She finds within herself conflicts she had not dreamed existed- she resists her parents’ determination to gain submission and acceptance, both of ways of thought and ways of living. Wynd has used a sort of stream of consciousness device to take the reader into the minds of his characters, while paralleling this with narrative, dialogue, description, which forward his story. Omi resists – and then takes on her own terms the plan for marriage with Ishii; she finds unsuspected richness – and equally unplumbed doubts in that marriage . . . one gets the various points of view within Japan itself- the manipulation of propaganda instruments – one has almost a sense of seeing the machinery of their minds in action.

The character of Omi in Black Fountains never really comes to life even to the same degree that of Mary of The Ginger Tree did – and that was one of my observations when I read that book – the characters are just a shade remote. So in this earlier novel we have an attempted depiction of the innermost thoughts and feelings of a Japanese woman being written by a non-Japanese man, a challenge to pull off in any context. It’s an imaginative approach, and we can see where Wynd is going with it early on, but it doesn’t ever really fly. Dramatic and frequently horrible things happen all around and to Omi, but I found myself watching with  a lack of full engagement. It is just too contrived, the author’s “the Japanese are different from the rest of us” bias (he was writing this in prison camp, after all) is very evident from the very first page.

If you pushed me into a corner and asked me to give a two-word summation of Black Fountains, I’d have to say that the term that keeps popping up is “propaganda novel”. It’s quite openly an attempt at analyzing “the Japanese mind” in regards to the occurrences during the war, and the subsequent Allied Occupation, and how accurately Wynd pulls it off is open to question. He frequently slips into lecture mode, exposition falling from Omi’s lips in a way that doesn’t feel quite natural.

Parts of this novel are very well done, in particular the descriptions of the various settings; these truly come to life. It’s obvious that the author has a deep love of what is essentially his native country – he was born in Japan and spent his first eighteen years there – and a deep appreciation of many aspects of the people of the country.

Unfortunately, viewed strictly as a novel without considering the backstory of its writing, this one stumbles.

Worth reading? Yes, I think so, if read with the author’s background kept firmly in mind. Just don’t expect a masterpiece; it’s more of a curiosity piece. A competent enough first novel, but the author has not yet developed his full talents. In my opinion.

My rating: 5/10. A keeper, with the stated reservations.

Click to enlarge these dust jacket images, provided for more context.

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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.

 

 

 

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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.

 

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A slightly unfinished business: Table Two by Marjorie Wilenski (1942)

Posted in 1940s, Read in 2019, Wilenski, Marjorie, tagged , , , , , on December 30, 2019| 13 Comments »

Table Two by Marjorie Wilenski ~ 1942. This edition: Dean Street Press, 2019. (Furrowed Middlebrow – FM35). Softcover. 224 pages.

Those of us with a penchant for reading middlebrow fiction of the second to sixth decades of the 20th Century have been quietly delighted by the recent collaboration (since 2016) between Dean Street Press and book blogger extraordinaire Scott of the deliciously, dangerously eclectic Furrowed Middlebrow.

A steadily growing list of unfairly forgotten out-of-print “women’s literature” has been assembled from hither and yon, dusted off,  re-read and assessed for republication. I’ve been acquiring quite a few of these, and have found every single one of them to be interesting in some form or another, though occasionally I strike one which is not completely enthralling.

Such as this one.

Table Two starts out with considerable promise, as we are introduced to a range of characters working in a (fictional) branch of the Ministry of Foreign Intelligence in the early years of World War II.

Elsie Pearne is chief among the group of female translators transcribing various documents from a wide variety of foreign languages into English. Elsie is perhaps the most intelligent and efficient of the eclectic group working away at Table Two in the Ministry Office. (We never get to know the ladies of Table One, as they exist merely to provide a vaguely antagonistic counterpoint to the Table Two-ers.)

Elsie is clever enough, but she’s also bitter and prickly, having been wronged in childhood by bullying peers and in adolescence by her family – she was made to give up a scholarship position and go out to work at the age of thirteen – and she has an extraordinarily tenacious chip on her shoulder as a result of the setbacks she has undoubtedly experienced.

Elsie’s practical talents and drive to succeed are considerable, but her equally strong tone deafness to the nuances of common social relationships means that she will never quite figure out why no one appreciates her true worth. When a junior translator joins the group, Elsie is determined to strike a blow at her co-workers (she knows full well how unpopular she is) and annex pretty, popular young Anne as her very own belle amie, triggering a cascading series of hurt feelings and convoluted misunderstandings which coincide with the onset of the London Blitz.

Unfortunately, the darkly humorous character portraits of Elsie, Anne and the rest of the Table Two staffers aren’t quite enough to carry the weaknesses of the office-drama plot, and the second half of the novel fades in interest as the author gradually loses control of her story.

Drawn from the writer’s personal experiences as detailed in the interesting Introduction by Elizabeth Crawford, Table Two is readable enough, but ultimately more for period colour than for polished literary quality.

This was Marjorie Wilenski’s one and only novel. It certainly shows initial strength of narrative and character development; it is regrettable that the author appears not to have had the opportunity to further develop her technique.

Recommended for readers looking to round out their World War II “first-hand fiction” collections, with the stated reservations.

My rating: 6.5/10

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Primroses and trout fishing, war and bombs: Pastoral by Nevil Shute

Posted in 1940s, Century of Books - 2018, Read in 2018, Shute, Nevil, tagged , , , on October 18, 2018| 14 Comments »

Pastoral by Nevil Shute ~ 1944. This edition: Ballantine, 1971. Paperback. ISBN: 345-02275-0-095. 222 pages.

This understated yet powerful novel follows two young officers stationed at an Oxfordshire Royal Air Force base mid way through World War II.

Peter Marshall is a twenty-two-year-old bomber pilot, with more than fifty missions under his belt. He keeps himself sane and centered by going on country walks and fishing on his off time; he’s thoroughly pleased to be stationed in a rural area where he and his like-minded aircrew can pursue their bucolic relaxations. None of them think too hard about the chances of their not coming back next time out; time enough for that when it happens.

Then something else happens.

Peter catches sight of a new face in the radio communication unit, one Section Officer Gervase Robertson of the W.A.A.F. She notices him in turn, and the traditional courtship ritual is on: advances, retreats, pauses, moments of passionate emotion – following its normal course though sudden and violent death stands ever in the wings.

Both young people are serious-minded in their personal attitudes towards their emotional investments in each other and, also, their predictably urgent sexual desires. It becomes apparent almost immediately that a casual romantic fling isn’t even on the table, which leads to certain complications as things between them advance.

Gervase hadn’t thought of marrying quite yet; she’s a mere twenty-one and takes her role in the war effort very seriously indeed. Peter now thinks of nothing else, to the detriment of his hitherto-untroubled sleep and his crucial concentration, leading to the endangerment of himself, his devoted flight crew, and his plane.

1st American edition, 1944

How the two come to an eventual compromise is the strand that runs through this delicately sombre yet optimistically hope-filled tale.

It’s quietly stunning to realize how very young all of these people are. Hardly entered into their full adult lives, they deal with being caught up in a brutal war as matter-of-factly as they wrote their school essays just a few years before. And though it is never stated outright, the thought is ever-present that everyone here, on the side of “right”, is engaged not just in dodging but in dealing out death to others such as themselves, who also merely want to live.

Pastoral is tenderly handled, but never trespasses into over-sentimental. Occasionally it is heart-breaking. The descriptions of base life, bombing missions, rural relaxations and occasional Oxford and London leaves are very well portrayed. In my opinion, one of Nevil Shute’s memorable best.

My rating: 10/10

 

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The Bravery of the Aged: Fear for Miss Betony by Dorothy Bowers

Posted in 1940s, Bowers, Dorothy, Century of Books - 2018, Read in 2018, tagged , , , on October 17, 2018| 1 Comment »

Fear for Miss Betony by Dorothy Bowers ~ 1941. This edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1947. Hardcover. 310 pages.

The grand books just keep coming. What joy to discover yet another new-to-me writer, and to have another book-search rabbit trail beckoning!

This title was found at Neil Stad’s wonderful Nuggets Used Books in Chilliwack this past weekend, source of a respectable number of  vintage treasures now gracing my crowded shelves.

This time round the writer is Dorothy Bowers, who wrote a meager five mystery novels between 1938 and 1947, of which this one, Fear for Miss Betony, is the fourth. Sadly this writer died of tuberculosis at a tragically young age, leaving who knows what books unwritten.

Retired governess Emma Betony, aged sixty-one, has come to the point of reluctantly seeking refuge in a Home for Decayed Gentlewomen, but instead accepts a surprise offer from an old pupil to take on a position as a part-time tutor at an evacuated girls’ school, as cover for a nebulous investigation into strange goings-on concerning a possible poisoning of one of two elderly ladies living amongst the school girls.

Something deadly is indeed happening, but the target might not be the obvious one…

Delightful character portrait of the extremely sharp and very likeable Miss Betony – shades of Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver and D.L. Sayers’ Miss Climpson. The mystery, on the other hand, seemed needlessly convoluted, incorporating as it does multiple packets of arsenic floating about, an unconcerned (!) doctor, a case of extremely coincidental hidden identity, an evil necromancer type, a rather strange pet shop, and a truly wicked conspiracy targetting our elderly virgin.

As a “fair play” mystery writer the author played just a tiny bit unfair, withholding a key detail of evidence, but all in all this was a very diverting example of Golden Age detection fiction. Two “real” detectives appear in the last few chapters, but Miss Betony does all the heavy lifting, or, rather, takes all the heavy hits.

Well written in general. I enjoyed this book.

My rating: 7.5/10

A short biography of Miss Bowers, courtesy of LibraryThing:

Dorothy Bowers was born in Herefordshire, England, the daughter of a bakery owner, and raised and educated just over the border in Monmouth, Wales. She attended the Monmouth School for Girls and went on to Oxford University, where she read modern history. She later said these years were among the happiest of her life, and she greatly missed the friends she made there.

After graduation, she returned to Monmouth to work as a history teacher, but finding full-time employment was difficult. She tutored private students and held a temporary position teaching history, English, and elocution at a school in Malvern.

She supplemented her income by compiling crossword puzzles for John O’London Weekly from 1936 to 1943 and for Country Life from 1940 to 1946. However, she had hopes of a literary career, and published her first detective novel, Postscript to Poison, in 1938. It received enthusiastic reviews and established her as among the best writers in the genre of literary thrillers.

Fear for Miss Betony (1941), now considered her masterpiece, was hailed by the Times of London as the best mystery of the year. After the outbreak of World War II, she moved to London and worked for the European News Service of the BBC. Her fifth and final book, The Bells at Old Bailey, was published in 1947.

Dorothy Bowers died at age 46 of tuberculosis the following year. She had just been inducted into the prestigious Detection Club, the society of Golden Age mystery writers that included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and G.K. Chesterton.

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A long, long way from Skookum Falls: Turvey by Earle Birney

Posted in 1940s, Birney, Earle, Canadian Book Challenge #12, Century of Books - 2018, Read in 2018, tagged , , , , on October 6, 2018| 9 Comments »

Turvey by Earle Birney ~ 1949. This edition: McClelland and Stewart, New Canadian Library N34, 1963. Introduction by George Woodcock. Paperback. 286 pages.

Earle Birney, Canadian master-poet of power, grace and poignant reflection, occasionally wrote off-genre.

Perhaps most notably so in 1949, just a few years after Birney’s service in the Canadian Army during World War II, when he produced this bawdy and satirical novel – “a military picaresque”, as it is sometimes subtitled – combining a farcical account of a common soldier’s adventures during his quest to get to the front lines in Europe with a critique of the absurdities of military bureaucracy (Birney served as a personnel officer so had an insider’s knowledge) and a scathing if understated depiction of the horrors and human toll of war.

We follow one Thomas Leadbeater Turvey, originally native to (fictional?) Skookum Falls, British Columbia, as he enlists in the Canadian Army and goes through an interminable saga of slow advancements and sudden setbacks on his mission to join his best friend Mac Macgillicuddy in the (fictional?) Kootenay Highlanders as they head to Europe to take on the Nazis.

First edition dust jacket.

Private Turvey is of the species amiable innocent, and though he goes through an astounding series of mild-to-dire accidents and ailments, he always manages to crawl out from under with a sheepish grin. We are ever on his side, fingers tightly crossed, especially after he does eventually achieve Europe and a reunion with the ultimately ill-fated Mac.

Hedy Lamarr snuggled tighter into Turvey’s arms. The other dancers cleared the floor to watch, entranced with their grace. Her fingers slid down and caressed his wrist. Lifting her luminous eyes she murmured:

“Come on, lug. Open up your trap ‘n lift that tongue.”

Turvey awoke in time to gag before the little icicle of a thermometer could slide down his throat. The orderly, who had been holding Turvey’s wrist with a thumb and forefinger as if it were a piece of bad meat, dropped it. The time was 0600 hrs.  Turvey began his thirteenth day in Ward Two of Number Umpteen Basic Training Centre Hospital…

Turvey takes hit after hit and comes out each time a little bit wiser; on his post-VE Day return to Canada he finally develops a righteous sense of indignance (anger is too strong a term for this sweet-natured man) at the powers that control the fates of lowly privates and hies himself off in pursuit of his left-behind English sweetheart and a well-deserved happily ever after.

I thoroughly enjoyed this engaging and deeply funny novel; its serious moments hit hard in contrast to the lightheartedness; the combination works perfectly; Earle Birney’s touch is sure and precise.

Turvey won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1950. Reviews of the book are easy to find online, and a short but interesting post on the novel appears here, at the Canus Humorous blog.

My rating: 9/10

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Evil lurks in the sulphurous night: Colour Scheme by Ngaio Marsh

Posted in 1940s, Century of Books - 2018, Marsh, Ngaio, Read in 2018, tagged , , , on October 1, 2018| 9 Comments »

Colour Scheme by Ngaoi Marsh ~ 1943. This edition: Collins, 1943. Hardcover. 314 pages.

I have found myself dipping into Ngaio Marsh’s mysteries a bit this year, with mixed results. 1962’s Hand in Glove, read for the first time this summer, left me cold. At least on this my first reading.

Colour Scheme, on the other hand, pleased me quite a lot.

Being a classic mystery novel by a deservedly popular author, and sure to be on numerous reading lists, I won’t give much away. Here’s the general gist, as set out in the first edition endpaper blurb.

(M)ore a novel of character and character and atmosphere than it is a detective story. The scene is New Zealand, during World War II, the characters an ill-assorted, bizarre group of New Zealanders, Britishers and Maoris assembled in and around Wai-ata-tapu Hot Springs, a second-class thermal bath establishment belonging to Colonel Edward Claire. The Claires are a hardworking couple who have lost most of their modest inheritance in unsound investments. They have two children, Barbara, aged twenty-five, and Simon, twenty-one.

The family has a genius for collecting impossible people, and at the opening of the novel are burdened with two: a seedy individual named Herbert Smith, who is seldom completely sober; and Mr. Maurice Questing, an unscrupulous business man to whom the Colonel is under heavy financial obligations. The final member of the household is Mrs. Claire’s brother, Dr. James Ackrington, an irascible physician living with the Claires as a paying guest and therefore completely free to criticize and complain. Before long there are two more additions to the establishment, Geoffrey Gaunt, the famous Shakespearean actor, and his secretary, Dikon Bell.

Almost immediately Barbara is fascinated by Gaunt but at the same time Dikon Bell finds himself falling in love with her and Mr. Questing continues forcing his unwelcome attentions on her. The household are united in their dislike of Questing but at odds in practically everything else.

With the first chapter one senses something queer and something very wrong, and the tension mounts as irritations and hatreds grow and as strange signals go out from the cliff above the sea.

Throw in possible German agents, definite Nazi submarines prowling New Zealand shores, seething pools of fatally boiling volcanic mud, priceless Maori artifacts, an Eliza Doolittle scenario, an idealistic young Marxist immersed in the study of Morse Code, and oodles of artistic temperament. Result: a pleasantly nasty sort of Golden Age murder mystery.

My rating: 8/10

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Strange consequences of an overactive imagination: Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker

Posted in 1940s, Baker, Frank, Century of Books - 2018, Read in 2018, tagged , , , on April 22, 2018| 6 Comments »

Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker ~ 1940. This edition: Bloomsbury, 2010. Paperback. ISBN: 978-1-60819-051-5. 317 pages.

This one has been on the want-to-read list for many years. I’ve seen so many enthusiastic recommendations by like-minded readers, and I am pleased to report that my own experience is the same. This is a grand – and more than slightly unusual – novel.

I’m parachuting in here in the briefest of ways this desperately busy Sunday morning, because this one is just too good not to mention, and luckily a lot of others have said a lot of things about it; it’s no longer quite the hidden gem it was before Bloomsbury dusted it off and sent it back into the world.

Here’s the set-up, courtesy the publisher’s blurb:

When, on the spur of a moment, Norman Huntley and his friend Henry invent an eighty-three year-old woman called Miss Hargreaves, they are inspired to post a letter to their new fictional friend. It is only meant to be a silly, harmless game – until Miss Hargreaves arrives on their doorstep, complete with her cockatoo, her harp and – last but not least – her bath. She is, to Norman’s utter disbelief, exactly as he had imagined her: enchanting, eccentric and endlessly astounding. He hadn’t imagined, however, how much havoc an imaginary octogenarian could wreak in his sleepy Buckinghamshire home town, Cornford.

Norman has some explaining to do, but how will he begin to explain to his friends, family and girlfriend where Miss Hargreaves came from when he hasn’t the faintest clue himself? Will his once-ordinary, once-peaceful life ever be the same again? And, what’s more, does he want it to?

And here, because anything I say would be merely a repeat – he even includes one of the quotes I marked in my own book! – is Simon at Stuck in a Book. Thank you, Simon. For this, and for so much more. You keep pointing me in the direction of intriguing things!

“I abominate fuss…” Miss Hargreaves and Me

This is a delicious creation indeed, a close to perfect novel, with its combination of intelligent ridiculousness and things much deeper and darker. It stands alone; I can think of nothing to compare it to.

Very highly recommended. 10/10.

 

 

 

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