Archive for the ‘Century of Books – 2018’ Category

A Trinity of Desiring: Angell, Pearl and Little God by Winston Graham

Posted in 1970s, Century of Books - 2018, Graham, Winston, Read in 2018, tagged , , , , on November 25, 2018| 6 Comments »

Angell, Pearl and Little God by Winston Graham ~ 1970. This edition: Fontana, 1972. Paperback. 414 pages.

First off: this is likely to be right up near the top of my list for “most memorable reads of 2018”.

Wilfred Angell, 47, large and undeniably fat, avoids emotional complications in his personal life by refusing to dally with women. He’s a successful solicitor, rather wealthy, in fact, who dabbles in deals shading on illegal. His hobbies are attaining art and antiques, and gormandizing.

Pearl Friedel, 20, tall and beautiful, avoids emotional complications in her personal life by refusing to go all the way with the young working-class men who squire her about to dinners and dances. She’s a perfume salesgirl in a large department store. Her hobbies are keeping herself looking nice, and looking forward to her one holiday a year, which she spends with a group of friends at a cut-rate continental holiday resort.

Godfrey Brown, 22, small in stature but perfectly proportioned, avoids emotional complications in his personal life by taking what he wants from women without committing anything at all. He’s an up and coming flyweight boxer, billed under the name “Little God”, working as a chauffeur to pay the bills. His hobbies are sparring and keeping in fighting fit form, and sex.

Wilfred meets Pearl on an airplane. Godfrey meets Pearl at a dance. Both want her, but what does Pearl want? Love? Or merely a better life than she foresees for herself in the social strata into which she was born?

Wilfred cannily courts Pearl, object: marriage.

Godfrey takes her out, and tries to rape her on their first date.

Pearl is terrified of Godfrey, and rightly so.

Wilfred ultimately looks like a safer bet, with his offering of a companionate, sexless marriage and a cash settlement to spend or invest as she wishes.

But Godfrey has developed an unhealthy obsession regarding Pearl…

“Gold, love and death.” An apt title for this French translation.

These three not particularly sympathetic characters, flawed through and through, meander along through this richly detailed novel, which builds and builds in an increasingly tense atmosphere of impending emotional drama. Violence is always there in the shadows, and from time to time it erupts, as Angell, Pearl and Little God pursue their hidden desires.

It’s hard to categorize this brilliantly black and frequently darkly humorous novel. It’s full of masterfully written set scenes: in the audience and in the ring at a boxing match; in a dying aristocrat’s bedroom; watching from fly-on-the-wall perspective shady property deals and the complex mechanics of legal-on-paper backroom bargains; a husband going through his absent wife’s bedroom, looking for something he’s not sure he’ll recognize; four laps in a racecar; a brutal seduction scene.

We don’t really like any of the titular characters and it’s doubtful that we’re meant to, though we certainly get inside their heads. Irony abounds, as their individual decisions result to a great extent in what they each deserve.

My rating: 9.5/10

The .5 reduction because Graham sometimes indulges in letting himself go on just a bit too long here and there. (And the sex scenes are cringe-inducing here and there. But hey. Sex scenes. Writers’ downfalls, pretty well universally. So I give these a conditional pass.)

But my goodness, that man was a writer.

 

 

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“They seek him here, they seek him there…” ~ The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

Posted in 1900s, Century of Books - 2018, Orczy, Baroness, Read in 2018, tagged , , , on November 23, 2018| 21 Comments »

Not my dust jacket, but the one that my tattered red hardcover would have had when it hit the book shops.

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy ~ 1905. This edition: Hodder and Stoughton, 1950. Hardcover. 256 pages.

Do I really need to give a whole lot of details here? This one of those books which (almost) everyone knows the plot of, if not by actual reading then by osmosis through publicly shared cultural literacy.

Here’s an economical précis, from Oxford University Press:

Sir Percy Blakeney lives a double life in the England of 1792: at home he is an idle fop and a leader of fashion, but abroad he is the Scarlet Pimpernel, a master of disguise who saves aristocrats from the guillotine. When the revolutionary French state seeks to unmask him, Percy’s estranged, independent wife, Marguerite, unwittingly sets their agent on her husband’s track. Percy’s escapades, and Marguerite’s daring journey to France to save him from the guillotine, keep the reader turning the pages of Baroness Orczy’s well-paced romantic adventure.

No prizes for guessing that Sir Percy survives the attempt to bring him down, with his final escape being due 100 percent to his amazing skill at disguise (of a broad variety, but most successfully as a “loathsome Hebraic”, which, though it sounds dreadful in quotes, is actually more of a shot at 1700s’ French prejudice than at the Jewish population of France), which has aided him in his escapades to pull off his daring rescues. Marguerite is merely a bit of background decoration, as it were. The menfolk (Sir P and his team of fellow sporting English noblemen) have things well in hand from start to finish.

This book is thoroughly dated in style, but it has retained its status for over a hundred years as a pretty good romp of an adventure tale. I find it rather heavy on the superlatives, myself. Sir Percy, public persona that of a “demmed idiot” – stupidest man in England – is the most fashionable as well as the richest nobleman in his coterie, while Lady Blakeney, formerly a French actress, is widely touted as the most beautiful woman in her crowd, as well as the most fashionably dressed and the “wittiest woman in Europe”.

We have The Scarlet Pimpernel to thank for all sorts of tropes in subsequent popular fiction, as he flicks the priceless Mechlin lace of his cuffs out of his way when getting down to business disguised by his bipartite persona, all hooded eyes, telling glances, and double entendres.

I quite happily read The Scarlet Pimpernel a number of times in my school years, always experiencing a frisson of vicarious passion when the noble Sir Percy Blakeney kisses the ground whereupon his desperately misguided wife has just trodden, shortly before he heads off to risk his life to rescue another batch of French aristocrats from the guillotine, with a cold-hearted agent of the French government hot on his heels, primed with damning information provided (all unbeknownst to Sir P) by Lady Blakeney herself.

Reading this some decades later as a much more judgemental adult, I found the love scenes to be more humorous than romantic; a certain cynicism has obviously developed with my years.

This is worth reading as a period piece, and for a glimpse at how an early 20th Century popular fiction writer pulled off an 18th Century historical fiction. The Baroness Orczy certainly had an enthusiastic pen, and a keen sense of what would appeal to her readers, not to mention her audience of theatre lovers. The Scarlet Pimpernel started life as a play staged in 1903; the stunningly popular novelization followed.

A number of not-quite-so-well-known sequels followed. The Scarlet Pimpernel itself has never been out-of-print since its publication. Ridiculously easy to find secondhand, and available online through Gutenberg, along with oodles of other Orczys.

My rating: 7/10

 

 

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Truffle-studded fluff: Acquired Tastes by Peter Mayle

Posted in 1990s, Century of Books - 2018, Peter Mayle, Read in 2018, tagged , , , on November 22, 2018| 2 Comments »

Acquired Tastes by Peter Mayle ~ 1992. This edition: Bantam, 1992. Paperback. ISBN: 0-553-09027-5. 229 pages.

No doubt spurred on by the phenomenal success of Peter Mayle’s 1990 and 1991 expatriate-life-in-Provence memoirs – A Year in Provence was the first; perhaps you’ve heard of it? – Mayle’s publisher hastened to keep this cash cow at the milking station by producing this small volume of essays written for GQ magazine, all about the finer things in life.

Peter Mayle manfully goes about delving into all sorts of indulgences of the well-off people of this world. The really well off people, just to clarify, not the merely moderately wealthy. People who think nothing of dropping a casual thousand plus dollars (in 1992 dollars, mind you) for a pair of handmade shoes, or a tailored silk shirt. Private jets and stretch limousines are common as dirt to these folks; Peter Mayle stretches out in his borrowed rides and waxes eloquent on how lovely it all is.

Most of the essays are both funny and fascinating; the odd one misses the mark as Mayle tries exceedingly hard to pad out his list of topics.

Let’s see, what does this collection include?

Handmade shoes, the very long black car, the mistress (yes, this is a manly sort of list of indulgences for the most part), personal lawyers and the art of suing, bespoke suits, truffles (the fungal kind), antiques, servants, the social obligations of Christmas time, cashmere, caviar, second homes in nice places, cigars, hosting house guests, handmade shirts, champagne, a very lame piece about New Year’s Resolutions, boutique hotels (the upper end type), single malt whiskey, another rather lame piece on being a writer, tipping, private jets, Panama hats, the concept of Manhattan (I told you Mayle is reaching for some of these), and a very special Parisian café.

All in all, an easily readable, ultimately forgettable concoction of a book, probably more suitable for placing on the guest room night table versus amongst your treasured “keeper” books. If it finds its way into an overnight bag, so be it. Lots more where that came from! At a recent used book sale in my nearest small city I saw no less than five pristine copies larded throughout the M section. Seeing that Acquired Tastes was published in 1992, its relative abundance at this book sale some 26 years later is rather telling.

My rating: Just squeaks in at a generous 5/10. “Light reading” status only.

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Vintage American feminist angst: Heat Lightning by Helen Hull

Posted in 1930s, Century of Books - 2018, Hull, Helen (Rose), Read in 2018, tagged , , , on November 22, 2018| 2 Comments »

Heat Lightning by Helen Hull ~ 1932. This edition: Coward-McCann, 1932. Hardcover. 328 pages.

Apologies first to anyone receiving these posts via email. I accidentally hit “publish” last night while saving the first bit of this post, so you might have read the intro and not much else!

The books-to-be-written-about are piling up again. This is a mixed good-bad thing. Good because it means I’ve had a fair bit of reading time (these long dark evenings) and bad because, well, the books are piling up!

I’m also feeling a bit disgruntled right now because of the Canada Post labour dispute. The Postal Carriers’ Union is carrying out rotating one-day strikes right now in order to put pressure on the CP corporation to get an expired contract improved and renewed, and apparently the mail backlog is suddenly so severe that Canada Post has closed the borders to out-of-Canada mail. Which means that the list of things-from-ABE I had planned for topping off my Century of Books project (and my Christmas season reading indulgence) is in limbo, as are all of the very time sensitive seed orders for our plant nursery, which are already somewhere in the international mail system.

The book lack is merely annoying, but the seed delay is potentially financially brutal, so I’m rather tense at the moment. Totally in sympathy with the strikers, and hoping they get a decent settlement, but argh – my stuff!

I think October was my “breathing space” month, as things are getting exceedingly busy once again, with no sign of a let-up. So book posts might  well be slimmer than I’d like them to be, though I hope to keep them coming. I have a lot of “business” writing in my life at present; the “fun” book blog is back seat priority!

Okay, that personal update out of the way, let’s take a quick look at Helen Hull’s Heat Lightning.

Midwest American writer Helen Hull was on her way up as a popular fiction writer when she wrote this introspective domestic novel during the first early years of the Great Depression.

Amy Norton stands on the baking hot street in her old home town in Michigan. She’s just arrived from New York, running away – her own words – from something as yet undefined. She’s just had a minor operation; she’s supposed to be convalescing; her children are safely off to summer camp; her husband is apparently “off fishing”, but she’s not really sure if that is the case. Amy is looking forward to spending a week or two sheltered in the refuge of her childhood roof, back in a place where she once had a clearly defined identity as one of the wealthy and respectable Westovers, firmly ensconced in the social order of the town.

But something is out of kilter. No one has come to meet her, she stands with her luggage all alone, wondering why she’s come, and if this will indeed prove to be what she’s looking for: a breathing space, a way to regain her emotional equilibrium to go forward and then back to whatever it is she’s stepped away from.

What had possessed her to come? The heat curled up about her ankles, pressed a straw odor out of the shantung silk across her shoulders. Even the drug store windows were a duplicate of the city. Traffic lights regulated automatically for all of life. This place would have no virtue for her, no wisdom for her need. There was the movie house her grandmother had built, and how the family had pounded against it! The Westover Block cut in stone over the entrance, garish posters on the boards beside the door. LAWRENCE TIBBETS (sic) IN “THE ROGUE SONG.” Radios in the window of the furniture store, and a set of porch furniture with striped awning cushions and a sun umbrella, quite in the Long Island manner. Everything was a duplication of everywhere else…

When Amy reaches her parents’ house, she does settle into a sort of normal, though there are obvious cracks in the smooth surface of things-as-they-were. It is 1930, a year after the great Wall Street stock market crash, and instability is permeating every aspect of the American economy; even the most well regulated of businesses is finding that things are getting difficult; the money isn’t where it once was. Everyone’s uneasy.

The summer heat isn’t helping. No rain has fallen for months, it’s turned into a drought. Leaves hang limply on trees, flowers are burning up in gardens as crops are in fields, dust is thick enough to taste, and tempers are flaring to match the weather.

Early edition dust jacket, sadly not present with my own copy.

Melodrama is lurking in the sultry shadows, and no sooner does Amy arrive then things long brewing start to boil over: a baby is born too early, an illegitimate sibling is identified, a bootlegger’s stash leads to violence, a hired girl’s pregnancy implicates a Westover son, the wealthiest brother fights bankruptcy with vicious amorality, a will is destroyed, a matriarch dies. The foundations everyone never really  thought about but assumed were rock solid are shaking.

Amy, hoping to gain wisdom in her own moral dilemma by observing and learning from her admired mother and grandmother, finds herself an unwilling voyeur of bad decisions coming home to roost, with sordid family secrets and true natures – good and bad – revealed.

This is a quietly powerful book. Despite the dramatic embellishments, Hull keeps her character Amy moving steadily forward, working out her personal dilemmas, drawing up her roadmap for moving on with her own life, and watching carefully how her disparate family navigates the small and large tragedies which have befallen them.

Heat Lightning is a fascinating period piece which embellishes our understanding of how the onset of the Great Depression affected the stolidly respectable and secure American urban upper middle class. No picturesquely dusty farmers here, merely small town businessmen finding their investments crumbling away bit by bit, watching their inventories stagnate, and hearing whispers of discontent and fear from all around.

Helen Hull was a noted feminist in her time, and Heat Lightning addresses the ever-thorny issue of womens’ roles in society. She talks both in veiled terms and then quite frankly of premarital sex, abortion, lesbianism, and the quandaries of navigating as an “advancing woman” through the status quo of a patriarchal society and its matriarchal shadow world.

Thought provoking stuff, all wrapped up in a rather engaging fictional form.

I liked it. I want to read more things by Helen Hull.

My rating: 8/10

Heat Lightning, which was a Book-of-the-Month selection in 1932, is easy to find secondhand, and it was also republished by Persephone a few years ago. (Author bio here.) A few of her other novels were republished by university presses and are relatively common: Quest (1922), and Islanders (1927), were “feminist studies” set novels for some years and copies are easy to find. As for the rest of Helen Hull’s twenty or so novels, keep your eyes open, and good luck.

The search might be complicated by the fact that there are no less than three authorial Helen Hulls writing in roughly the same time period. Heat Lightning‘s author is Helen R. (Rose) Hull, but you may find works by Helen Hull Jacobs popping up in your search engine (a noted tennis player, she wrote a number of mostly sports-related books later in her career), and garden writer Helen S. Hull will show up, too.

Below, the Book-of-the-Month Club insert for Heat Lightning, snagged from Scott’s excellent Furrowed Middlebrow review.

Couldn’t resist adding this 1930 movie poster featuring Lawrence Tibbett, as referenced in the first few pages of Heat Lightning. (Either Hull or her editor spelled Tibbett’s name wrong in the novel.)

 

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Three solo lives, united: The Girls by Edna Ferber

Posted in 1920s, Century of Books - 2018, Ferber, Edna, Read in 2018, tagged , , , on November 14, 2018| 6 Comments »

The Girls by Edna Ferber ~ 1921. This edition: Collier, circa 1930s. Hardcover. 374 pages.

It is a question of method. Whether to rush you up to the girls pellmell, leaving you to become acquainted as best you can; or, with elaborate slyness, to slip you so casually into their family life that they will not even glance up when you enter the room or leave it; or to present the three of them in solemn order according to age, epoch, and story. This last would mean beginning with great-aunt Charlotte Thrift, spinster, aged seventy-four; thence to her niece and namesake Lottie Payson, spinster, aged thirty-two; finishing with Lottie’s niece and namesake Charley Kemp, spinster, aged eighteen and a half— you may be certain nobody ever dreamed of calling her Charlotte. If you are led by all this to exclaim, aghast, “A story about old maids!”— you are right. It is.

A story about old maids, indeed, and how rich a field for harvesting by the right author. Edna Ferber is definitely that, garnering a full measure, a basketful – a book full! – of personal stories, mixed joys and tragedies, promises fulfilled and wasted.

We meet our three Charlottes in the early days of the 20th Century, in Chicago. Their family, the Thrifts, is in the upper echelon of that city’s society, even though their finances have of late begun to show signs of stress, what with the war in Europe and all.

In a series of extended vignettes – flashbacks interspersed with the present – we learn the stories of these three women, destined to walk their paths without male partners, though all three are not unloved by men.

The theme which unites these three femmes sole – aside from their warm and sustaining love for each other – is that of war. For Charlotte, the war between the states, taking place as she leaves her girlhood behind, erasing the life of the man whom she loved. For Lottie and Charley, the Great War strikes similarly brutal blows.

Edna Ferber was a gifted storyteller, and The Girls is a perfect example of her ability to stir the full spectrum of her readers’ emotions, from amusement to heartbreak, and everything in between. Some clever technique here, too, in the flashback sequences.

My rating: 9.5/10

Now out of copyright, many of the secondhand copies on ABE are print-on-demand, though a few originals are there as well. If you don’t mind reading from a screen, The University of Michigan has a scanned copy to peruse.

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Trouble in Paradise: Closed at Dusk by Monica Dickens

Posted in 1990s, Century of Books - 2018, Dickens, Monica, Read in 2018, tagged , , , on November 8, 2018| 2 Comments »

Closed at Dusk by Monica Dickens ~ 1990. This edition: Penguin, 1991. Paperback. ISBN: 0-14-012371-7. 220 pages.

Monica Dickens, middlebrow writer extraordinaire, made her name at a very young age with several creatively autobiographical books based on her pre-war and wartime jobs – One Pair of Hands (working as a cook-general) in 1939, and  One Pair of Feet (nursing) in 1942 – and a whole slew of excellent novels, all sharing strong characterizations and allowing Dickens much scope to share the thoughts generated by her keenly contemplative X-ray eye, embellished with her sometimes rather biting sense of humour.

Occasionally Monica Dickens turned her hand to mildly macabre suspense novels, and this one, published just two years before her death at the age of seventy-seven, is really quite disturbing in an insidious way.

Closed at Dusk is an increasingly eerie story of thwarted love and revenge intruding upon a normal, happy, absolutely well-meaning British family, whose main collective sin is of occasional obtuseness to the emotional lives of those around them.

The upper class Taylors own a palatial country residence, surrounded by beautiful gardens. They have worked hard to keep their home in the family and to restore it from the combined ravages of wartime army occupation and the eccentric ways of the late family matriarch, who lived reclusively in one room while the house deteriorated around her.

The estate is known as The Sanctuary, and it is open to paying visitors much of the year, who patronize the tea room, walk through the beautifully landscaped grounds, and enjoy the animal-themed statuary originally collected by the earlier generations of the current family, as they established a Victorian era rural retreat “where all things could be at peace.”

All is indeed well with the Taylors, but things are about to change…

Tessa, adult daughter of the current owners, has some years earlier made an unfortunate marriage, in that her husband has heartlessly divorced his first “bland, beige” first wife to take up with vibrant Tessa. They have a child, and then the fickle Rex is off with yet another woman, divorcing Tessa in her turn.

Tessa copes quite well with her fate as a cast off wife, for her ex-husband is, to put it mildly, an utter jerk, and she’s well rid of him and knows it, but Discarded Wife Number One is still out there, very much not coping well with her destroyed life, and she is plotting a revenge scenario against the woman whom she blames for the destruction of her marriage, and the terrible loss of her own unborn child.

Taking on an invented persona, the meek, bland Marigold transforms herself into the vivacious Jo, and she cleverly slides into a an ever-more-involved position as a trusty staffer at The Sanctuary, gaining the confidence of the family and learning what makes them all tick, in order that her eventual revenge shall hurt the hardest it possibly can.

Oh, yes, and there’s a subplot of supernatural goings-on – perhaps imagined, or maybe not – which adds a decided miasma of foreboding to this well-paced, ever-more-troubling tale.

Creepy, and very well written. Think shades of Joanna Trollope at her family drama best, blended with Shirley Jackson noir.

My rating: 7.5/10.

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Standing (well) behind her man: What Every Woman Knows by J.M. Barrie

Posted in 1900s, Barrie, J.M., Century of Books - 2018, Read in 2018, tagged , , , on November 7, 2018| 2 Comments »

What Every Woman Knows by J.M. Barrie ~ 1908. This edition: University of London Press, 1954.  Hardcover. 128 pages.

A bit of a departure from the norm of my usual reading  this one is, in that it is an annotated stage play script versus a novel. But as it represents the cultural scene of its time, I am presenting it here as a suitable item for inclusion on the Century list.

Abandon all sense of plausibility, please. We are entering J.M. Barrie’s fantastical theatrical world.

Maggie Wylie, plain but highly intelligent daughter of a well off Scottish family – Wylie and Sons operate the local granite quarry – is facing her spinsterhood with sober equanimity. She knows her chances of marriage are lessening year by year, and as she has reached her twenty-seventh birthday without attracting a suitor, the writing is on the wall.

She occasionally privately mourns her state of singleness, and her adoring but undemonstrative father and brothers wish they could find some way to fulfill her secret wish for a husband of her own.

Enter John Shand, a poor but intelligent (though not as bright as Maggie) university student, who has taken to breaking into the Wylies’ house at nights to read the otherwise untouched books in their large purchased-for-show library. The Wylies have twigged to the fact that they have a nocturnal visitor, and they lie in wait one night, catching John in the act.

John is rather grumpy at being apprehended, but being of a serious and literal nature (and incidentally completely without a sense of humour) he sturdily defends himself by stating that they have the books, he needs them, so what’s the big deal?

Well, the Wylies are rather taken aback by this attitude, but as John continues to lay down the law (according to him) regarding the unfairness of a world where a studious young man is at the mercy of his desperate financial situation, a glimmer of an idea begins to appear.

Sending Maggie off to brew the tea, the Wylie menfolk propose the following to John Shand. If they will promise to finance his university education, will he promise, at the end of five years, to marry Maggie? (If she wants to, that is. She gets “first refusal”, as it were.) Well, Maggie comes in to the conversation part way through, and after some to-ing and fro-ing, the bargain is struck.

*****

Five years later, we find Maggie married to John, who has acquitted himself well in his studies, and is now setting his sights on a political career as an MP. Though he doesn’t love Maggie in the traditional sense – it was a business arrangement, after all – he behaves quite decently to his wife, and she in turn behaves more than decently to him, helping him with his speeches, and, unrealized by him, gingering them up somewhat in the process of her typing them out (John is smart but not overly bright, if you catch my meaning) with the result being that he comes across as someone perhaps a bit more intellectually lively than he actually is.

John is essentially humourless; he’s a bit of a plodder; his ideas of romance are just as soberly conventional as his speaking manner, and he falls into a predictable scenario in regards to his wife. As he ascends the ladder towards political prominence, he starts to look at his dowdy little Maggie with some dismay. Wouldn’t a younger, prettier, more vivacious wife suit his new stature better? Someone like the charming Lady Sybil, perhaps? – who is everything Maggie is not.

Except smart enough to write good speeches, upon which the denouement of this little story lies.

So what does every woman know, according to Mr. Barrie?

Well, she knows and quite happily accepts (this is where the fantasy element really kicks in) that behind every successful man, there is a clever but utterly self-effacing woman, who expends all her best efforts in making her masculine appendage look good while refusing to push herself forward. Her reward in this is the knowledge that she has helped him to his rightful place in society, even though her efforts are not recognized as they would be if her guy were a bit brighter and fairer in assessing her contributions to his social and career ambitions.

This is supposed to be a comedy, and it does have its funny moments – the author quite lets himself go with some occasionally rather sly and witty “Scotsman” jokes throughout – but my reaction was of restrained enjoyment, as the premise of the whole thing jarred rather with present day notions of gender equality and suchlike.

An interesting period piece, let us say. And as such, an appropriately restrained personal rating. I’m giving it a 5/10 – a bare pass – though if experienced as a stage play I might well rate it higher, depending upon the actors’ skill at fleshing out Barrie’s script.

 

 

 

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Anna the Adventuress by E. Phillips Oppenheim: A Sort-of-Sizzling Swapping-Sister Story

Posted in 1900s, Century of Books - 2018, Oppenheim, E. Phillips, Read in 2018, tagged , , , on November 4, 2018| 6 Comments »

Anna the Adventuress by E. Phillips Oppenheim ~ 1904. This edition: Ward, Lock & Co., circa 1904. Hardcover. 318 pages.

The girl paused and steadied herself for a moment against a field gate. Her breath came fast in little sobbing pants. Her dainty shoes were soiled with dust and there was a great tear in her skirt. Very slowly, very fearfully, she turned her head. Her cheeks were the colour of chalk, her eyes were filled with terror. If a cart were coming, or those labourers in the field had heard, escape was impossible.

Two lovely and nearly identical-in-appearance English orphans are living in an apartment in Paris. One is the volatile, pleasure-loving and risk-taking Annabel (see above: she’s just escaped a car crash she’s caused, leaving behind what she thinks is a dead man), the other is Anna, a strictly virtuous and self-denying art student.

When Annabel inadvertently has a chance to escape the consequences of her rake’s progress in Paris by marrying an English lord who thinks she is her virginal and sedate sister, Annabel grabs it with both hands, leaving Anna to step into her place. Anna, hoping that this über-respectable marriage (not to mention access to wealth and luxury) will help Annabel reform her wicked ways, staunchly takes upon herself all the messy loose ends her sister has left so suddenly behind.

These include the not-quite-dead man of the car accident, who turns out to have some astonishing claims upon the sister he thinks is Annabel, not to mention a whole string of handsome, fast-living English gentlemen who obviously are on rather intimate terms with Sister A, to the hidden (and not so hidden) shock of Sister B.

Realizing that she will never make a successful artist – her talents are genuine but not outstandingly so – Anna (as Annabel) decides to return to England, where her presence causes immediate issues with her sister’s masquerade, as Annabel’s (er, fake Anna’s) uptight noble husband (the wedding went off as planned) objects to his wife’s supposedly disreputable sister hanging about.

Our Anna, unable to attain employment as a shop girl, is reduced to appearing on the London stage, for though she is only an average painter, she’s an accomplished singer, much to her sister Annabel’s jealous dismay, as Anna steps into a role Annabel first initiated back in Gay Paree.

Real Anna proves herself up to it all, dealing with firm hand and cool brow everything that confronts her: overly familiar ex-boyfriends (of real Annabel’s), life in a boarding house (her respectable relatives have rejected her), the difficulties of making a living (she is utterly penniless), and setting to rights complications which the fake Anna manufactures as she starts to return to her old Annabellish ways.

Luckily, real Anna is as truly good as she is beautiful, and soon collects a devoted retinue of handsome young men, who serve to assist her in her endeavours, stopping every so often to bend a knee and propose. Anna rejects them all, very politely, of course, and goes on her rather lonely way, fixing the things that Annabel has ruined in the past, and mitigating the actions of her thoughtless and sometimes resentful sister as she kicks against the social expectations attendant upon her new place in life.

Will Annabel settle down? (And say a proper “Thank you” to her ever-sacrificing sister? And confess her past to her husband?)

Will Anna ever allow herself to love? (And get rid of that pesky “pseudo husband” who haunts her steps? And erase her dodgy adopted reputation and regain her proper place in society?)

Read it and see!

This is a hugely enjoyable period piece, for all of the expected reasons: almost-impossibly wonderful heroine (who is flawed enough to be likeable), high society snobbery, loads of action as the various men in Anna’s circle rally round in her (sometimes literal) defense, and all sorts of misunderstandings.

The language is lush, the plot deliciously ornate, the ending…well…let me just say that E. Phillips Oppenheim wrote over one hundred very popular thrillers from the 1880s till the 1940s, and he knew what his readers liked, and what they liked was the traditionally happy ending after a whole lot of adventuring.

Anna the Adventuress delivers.

My rating: 8/10. (Two whole points lost because of the too-adorable, deeply soppy, baby-kissing scene at the end of this first edition, cropped from later editions and in my opinion vastly improving the story by its absence.)

Just so you know, I adore Edward Phillips Oppenheim, and own a formidable stack of his books (nowhere near all of them, though), and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve written up one of his dramatic romance-thrillers. He may pop up again, as I fill in the difficult gaps in this latest Century of Books; he’s one of those handy book-a-year (sometimes two!) writers, though as is usual with the ultra-prolific, the quality can vary.

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The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting: Charming Youth Tale or Rampant Racism?

Posted in 1920s, Century of Books - 2018, Lofting, Hugh, Read in 2018, tagged , , , on November 3, 2018| 18 Comments »

The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting ~ 1920. This edition: McClelland and Stewart, 1962. Foreword by Hugh Walpole. Illustrated by Hugh Lofting. Hardcover. 223 pages.

Oh boy.

I don’t think I have the resources (time or energy wise) to do this topic – racism in “beloved” vintage children’s books – justice. But I don’t feel right in just passing it over undiscussed, either. So here I go. Bear with me.

The Story of Doctor Dolittle, based on a series of illustrated letters the author wrote from the Great War trenches to his young sons back home in England, was published in book form in 1920, to immediate popularity.

There’s an awful lot to like in here. Written in simple, frequently staccato sentences, the book introduces us to Doctor Dolittle, M.D., who is a prosperous and well-liked physician in the small town of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. The good Doctor has a fondness for animals, and as he progressively fills his home with creatures, a tipping point is reached when the animal residents start causing problems with patients.  (An elderly lady sits upon a prickly hedgehog and so on.) Business falls off, until Docotor Dolittle’s only client remaining is the local Cat’s-meat-Man, who visits once a year at Christmas to get a remedy for indigestion.

What’s to be done? Doctor Dolittle is bemused. Then an epiphany occurs, when his pet parrot Polynesia, able to converse in English, initiates the Doctor into the mysteries of animal languages. He becomes a highly successful animal doctor, and all seems well, until the adoption of a crocodile sends all of his clients scurrying. Hard times again!

Then a message arrives from Africa. The monkeys there are all succumbing to some terrible disease. Will Doctor Dolittle come to the rescue? Of course he will! Borrowing a boat from a friendly sailor, off goes the Doctor, accompanied by several of his favourite pets, and also that troublesome crocodile, an ex organ-grinder’s monkey, and Polynesia the parrot, those last three intending to be repatriated to their native land.

As soon as they hit the shores of Africa, the reader’s real dilemma starts.

So far all has been quite good clean fun, but for a few casual era-expected racial slurs here and there easily glossed over by the keen-eyed adult reader-aloud – the usual, “We’ll have to work like n******!” pops up at least once.

The Doctor and his animal entourage crash their ship on the rocky shores of Africa, and head into the jungle, where they arrive at the mud palace of the King and Queen of Jolliginki. The King eyes the Doctor with displeasure.

“You may not travel through my lands,” said the King. “Many years ago a white man came to these shores; and I was very kind to him. But after he had dug holes in the ground to get the gold, and killed all the elephants to get their ivory tusks, he went away secretly in his ship— without so much as saying ‘Thank you.’ Never again shall a white man travel through the lands of Jolliginki.”

Then the King turned to some of the black men who were standing near and said, “Take away this medicine-man — with all his animals, and lock them up in my strongest prison.”

Fair enough, we’re thinking, though a bit hard on the beneficient Doctor. But he doesn’t need our concern, for he soon escapes, pursued by the soldiers of the King, and makes his way to the part of the jungle inhabited by the monkeys. There he easily cures the sick ones by means of wide scale vaccinating (Lofting doesn’t bother with pesky details such as how the Doctor comes by and/or manufactures this magical vaccine), and sets off to return to England.

The soldiers of Jolliginki soon capture him, and back into the dungeon he goes. This time he is rescued by a clever plot dreamt up by Polynesia (who is still hanging about, though she intends to stay in Africa when the Doctor departs) concerning the King’s son Prince Bumpo, who is enamoured of European fairy tales, and has been emotionally scarred by an episode so related.

Here, I’ll give you the works:

“Listen,” whispered the parrot, when John Dolittle’s face appeared: “Prince Bumpo is coming here to-night to see you. And you’ve got to find some way to turn him white. But be sure to make him promise you first that he will open the prison-door and find a ship for you to cross the sea in.”

“This is all very well,” said the Doctor. “But it isn’t so easy to turn a black man white. You speak as though he were a dress to be re-dyed. It’s not so simple. ‘Shall the leopard change his spots, or the Ethiopian his skin,’ you know?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Polynesia impatiently. “But you must turn this coon white. Think of a way—think hard. You’ve got plenty of medicines left in the bag. He’ll do anything for you if you change his color. It is your only chance to get out of prison.”

“Well, I suppose it might be possible,” said the Doctor. “Let me see—,” and he went over to his medicine-bag, murmuring something about “liberated chlorine on animal-pigment—perhaps zinc-ointment, as a temporary measure, spread thick—”

Well, that night Prince Bumpo came secretly to the Doctor in prison and said to him,

“White Man, I am an unhappy prince. Years ago I went in search of The Sleeping Beauty, whom I had read of in a book. And having traveled through the world many days, I at last found her and kissed the lady very gently to awaken her—as the book said I should. ’Tis true indeed that she awoke. But when she saw my face she cried out, ‘Oh, he’s black!’ And she ran away and wouldn’t marry me—but went to sleep again somewhere else. So I came back, full of sadness, to my father’s kingdom. Now I hear that you are a wonderful magician and have many powerful potions. So I come to you for help. If you will turn me white, so that I may go back to The Sleeping Beauty, I will give you half my kingdom and anything besides you ask.”

“Prince Bumpo,” said the Doctor, looking thoughtfully at the bottles in his medicine-bag, “supposing I made your hair a nice blonde color—would not that do instead to make you happy?”

“No,” said Bumpo. “Nothing else will satisfy me. I must be a white prince.”

“You know it is very hard to change the color of a prince,” said the Doctor—“one of the hardest things a magician can do. You only want your face white, do you not?”

“Yes, that is all,” said Bumpo. “Because I shall wear shining armor and gauntlets of steel, like the other white princes, and ride on a horse.”

“Must your face be white all over?” asked the Doctor.

“Yes, all over,” said Bumpo—“and I would like my eyes blue too, but I suppose that would be very hard to do.”

“Yes, it would,” said the Doctor quickly. “Well, I will do what I can for you. You will have to be very patient though—you know with some medicines you can never be very sure. I might have to try two or three times. You have a strong skin—yes? Well that’s all right. Now come over here by the light—Oh, but before I do anything, you must first go down to the beach and get a ship ready, with food in it, to take me across the sea. Do not speak a word of this to any one. And when I have done as you ask, you must let me and all my animals out of prison. Promise—by the crown of Jolliginki!”

So the Prince promised and went away to get a ship ready at the seashore.

When he came back and said that it was done, the Doctor asked Dab-Dab to bring a basin. Then he mixed a lot of medicines in the basin and told Bumpo to dip his face in it.

The Prince leaned down and put his face in—right up to the ears.

He held it there a long time—so long that the Doctor seemed to get dreadfully anxious and fidgety, standing first on one leg and then on the other, looking at all the bottles he had used for the mixture, and reading the labels on them again and again. A strong smell filled the prison, like the smell of brown paper burning.

At last the Prince lifted his face up out of the basin, breathing very hard. And all the animals cried out in surprise.

For the Prince’s face had turned as white as snow, and his eyes, which had been mud-colored, were a manly gray!

Need I really say more?

Now in the 1960s, after The Story of Doctor Dolittle and its numerous sequels had been selling steadily for some decades without much comment – though presumably not being embraced by families-of-any-sort-of-colour-other-than-white – people started to say “Hey! This is kinda-sorta-maybe-a-little-bit RACIST!”

Yeah, you think?

And so the troublesome bits were bowdlerized.

And Doctor Dolittle continued on as a steady seller in his now altered form.

And I don’t quite know what to say about all of this, being in general quite firmly against censorship and alterations to text of older books in response to subsequent adjustments to social standards of acceptance.

But I didn’t read this to my own children back-in-the-day when they were little because it made me utterly queasy, and I shelved that whole Dolittle series which someone had given to me as “charming children’s tales!”, packing it away in a box which still sits in storage because I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the books.

Does one release something like that back into the world to be acquired by other unsuspecting parents? Destroy them? Which feels wrong too, on a wholly different level, because I think we can get an awful lot out of keeping intact reminders of how we used to think in days gone by, and by being shocked by it (or not, as the case may be) examine our own social consciences.

So there it is, and here I sit, looking at what I’ve written, and at the clock (because I need to be somewhere else very shortly) and wondering if I should just hit “post” and see if this inspires any sort of engagement, or if you, like me, are still wondering how best to deal with this particular issue.

Your thoughts are, as always, exceedingly welcome!

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Stuck in Shangri-La-La-La: Lost Horizon by James Hilton

Posted in 1930s, Century of Books - 2018, Hilton, James, Read in 2018, tagged , , , on November 2, 2018| 3 Comments »

Lost Horizon by James Hilton ~ 1933. This edition: World’s Best Reading Series, The Reader’s Digest Association, 1990. Illustrated by Robert Andrew Parker. Afterword by Warren Eyster. Hardcover. ISBN: 0-89577-361-9. 191 pages.

 

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
‘Relax’ said the night man,
‘We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave…’

Remember the 1976 song ‘Hotel California’ by The Eagles? Well, roll four decades or so back, and you could conceivably apply some of those iconic lyrics to James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, in particular the refrain about ‘What a lovely place, what a lovely face…’ And that last verse. Brrr…

Okay, maybe the parallels aren’t that close, really. ‘Hotel California’ is said by those who should know (the writers) to be all about the loss of innocence and the seductions of the high life (with all its connotations) connected to fame, while Lost Horizon, according to Warren Eyster’s afterword in my edition, is a metaphorical utopia offered as an an emotional escape hatch to a readership consisting of those deeply scarred by the Great War and now going through the Great Depression, with another war looming on the horizon.

Yeah, that gets deep, doesn’t it?

So let’s back up some, and take a look at the novel.

It’s 1930 or thereabouts, and away off in Afghanistan, where a local revolution has triggered the evacuation of the eighty or so Europeans resident in the city of Baskul. The area’s British Consul, Great War veteran Hugh Conway, his wet-behind-the-ears Vice-Consul Charles Mallinson, American businessman Henry Barnard, and a stray missionary, Roberta Brinklow, are all fortunate enough to be alloted seats on a luxurious, high-altitude-equipped airplane originally built for an Indian rajah.

Some way into the flight, strange things begin to happen. Their pilot, face masked with flying goggles and helmet, turns out not to be the expected fellow Caucasian, but a man of Asian countenance. Looking down, instead of the plains of Peshawar, there are snow-capped peaks, and as the flight continues and attempts are made to query the pilot on just where the heck are they, a revolver is produced and brandished in a businesslike way.

The plane sets down on an isolated airstrip, is refueled by an Asian crew, and takes off again. Where are they going? Are they being kidnapped to be held for ransom?! The unflappable Conway refuses to be distressed; since the war he has cultivated a demeanour of calm verging on apathy, hence his appointment to the backwater of Baskul versus a more lively location. His continued coolness sets the tone, but for occasional outbursts by the volatile Mallinson, which helps to maintain order when the pilot crash lands the plane on a rocky outcrop surrounded by vast peaks and promptly expires.

Now what?

Not to worry, for here comes a group of rescuers, the litter-born Chinese postulant-lama Chang and a group of useful locals, who escort the stranded travellers to a nearby lamasery, “Shangri-La”, perched over an astonishingly fertile Tibetan valley, with the massive mountain Karakal (“Blue Moon”) looming in the background.

Things just keep getting weirder, as the stranded travellers discover that though they are most welcome to settle into the unexpectedly lavish quarters assigned to them by Chang, there seems to be some difficulty about formulating plans to travel out of the mountain valley to India. Direct questions are met by evasively polite answers, and Mallinson in particular grows increasingly agitated as the days pass by.

Conway, on the other hand, decidedly welcomes this respite from the troubled outside world. Miss Brinklow settles down, too, occupying herself with the study of Tibetan in order to communicate her message of sin-needing-salvation to the heathens she has found herself amongst. As does Mr. Barnard, who cultivates a cheerful attitude and greatly enjoys his escorted trips down to the village, where he presumably indulges in some mild carousing with the local women-of-easy-virtue.

After some gentle scene-setting, the secrets of Shangri-La are slowly revealed to Conway by interviews with the incredibly (and I do mean incredibly) aged High Lama, who communicates with a combination of perfect English and mental telepathy, and a vital decision is faced by our protagonist and his companions. To stay is so easy…the valley is so secluded…the world outside is so troubled…

Most of you probably know how this plays out, but in case you don’t, I’m going to leave you there. Read this for yourself, in the interests of cultural literacy if nothing else. It’s a slender novel, a quick read, and though you may find (as I did) that there is little of substance to really grab on to, the general effect is curiously memorable.

Here I have to admit that though I don’t exactly dislike James Hilton’s style, I do find it occasionally underwhelming, and this is true of my response to Lost Horizon, though it was an astounding bestseller in its time, inspired at least two movies, brought the term “Shangri-La” into our vocabulary, and remains in print and presumably selling well today.

I model myself on early-in-the-novel Conway, refusing to get too worked up about it all. Hence my moderately positive rating: 6.5/10.

Oh! I forgot to mention the girl.

There’s also a mysteriously ageless (hint hint) girl.

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