Look Back With Gratitude

The final volume of Dodie Smith's autobiography, Look Back With Gratitude, is the only one not available from the Athenaeum library, so I took the liberty of buying myself a copy as a Christmas present. Gratitude covers what might be called 'the American years.' Smith's partner, later husband, Alec Beesley, was a conscientious objector, and when World War II broke out, they decided to stay in the United States so that he would escape imprisonment (this became complicated later in the war, when the US joined the fight and Alec faced even more stringent rules around conscientious objection). This was not a decision taken lightly; Smith was horribly homesick and was tormented with guilt about missing out on her country's wartime sufferings. Then, when the war ended, neither could face the prospect of quarantining their three beloved Dalmatians for six months (journalists found this difficult to believe, but it was true!)

Smith's income was erratic; she earned huge chunks of money consulting on screenplays, but the last section of the book is largely concerned with the failure of her play, Letter From Paris, in London after the war. It sounds absolutely agonising, juggling cast, director, set designer, producer -- it made me realise how many elements need to gel to produce a theatrical hit and just how chancy it can be. 

It's been so odd reading these memoirs; my conception of Dodie Smith is as a fiction writer first and foremost (and Gratitude also deals with the writing of I Capture the Castle), but clearly she saw herself as principally a playwright. I have never seen or read a single one of her plays and have no idea if she was actually any good or not (I mean, she must have been, she was popular in her time and made a good living from it). Yet all those plays she fretted over and which so consumed her energies have largely vanished without a trace.

Gratitude ends with Dodie, Alec and the dogs returning to live in England in 1953, she says hopefully forever, and I think it was.

Can Any Mother Help Me?

 

Can Any Mother Help Me? was such a fascinating book! In the 1930s, an anonymous, lonely mother wrote a letter to a UK parenting magazine, which resulted in a group of women in similar situations beginning a correspondence club that lasted until 1990.

The way it worked was that the women would write 'articles' or letters to the group in general, which the editor would bind up in a lovely embroidered linen cover and post off to the first name on the list, who could then add her own comments or notes if she wished, and post it to the next person. New volumes were sent off fortnightly, so there were always various editions in circulation. In a way it functioned like an early kind of community internet forum, without the immediacy of response, of course, but bonds of lively interest, sympathy and friendship grew between these women who came from all backgrounds and different parts of the country. Most, however, were well-educated, intelligent women who were denied careers by the demands of family, and consequently felt frustrated.

The author, Jenna Bailey, discovered an archive of the letters and has compiled these extracts into a thoroughly absorbing book, covering the years of World War II and after, through domestic heartbreak, career success, worries about children and money, and everyday experiences. One episode is especially striking -- one member who developed a romantic crush on her doctor, which seemed to be reciprocated, though nothing ever happened beyond meaningful glances. She finally, after much inner torment, told him it would be better if they didn't see each other again, whereupon the doctor called her husband and Told All (not that there was much to tell...) The woman relayed this whole saga, in installments, years afterwards, and it reads like part of a novel.

It might not be everyone's cup of tea but I was completely gripped by this book, part memoir, part diary, part potted biographies of a host of everyday women. One woman, known to the club as Angharad, wrote successful TV screenplays and also several books on the 'aquatic ape' theory of human evolution. And I was amused that Heal's furniture store made another appearance -- one woman's husband made bookends for them (which seems like a very niche way to make a living).

Birdy

Birdy is South Australian author Sharon Kernot's second verse novel, after her acclaimed debut, The Art of Taxidermy. I'm not usually a fan of verse novels, but Birdy won me over, packing in a huge amount of plot, backstory, mystery and emotion into relatively few, but well-chosen, words. 

Maddy has been mute ever since 'the Incident,' which we gradually learn involved some kind of sexual assault and social media exposure (she seems more traumatised by the social media aspect than the assault). But as she gradually thaws in the peace of the countryside, and befriends young Levi and old Alice, she begins to heal. Alice says that Maddy reminds her of her missing daughter, Birdy, and Maddy feels an affinity with the other long-departed girl, and it's through Maddy that the mystery of Birdy is finally brought to closure.

I enjoyed Birdy much more than I expected to -- it wraps up pain, grief, betrayal, nature, secrets and friendship in a beautifully judged package. It might even be my top pick of the CBCAs so far.

A Shilling For Candles

Of course I found this Josephine Tey mystery at the good old Athenaeum. A Shilling For Candles is the second Inspector Grant novel and when I went hunting for a cover image, I found about a gazillion different editions since it was first published in 1936.

A Shilling For Candles kicks off with the discovery of a body on the beach, but was successful young starlet Christine Clay murdered or suicidal, or was her death a terrible accident? As always, the real interest for me in a period mystery story is the historical detail: 'cranks' (hippies and vegetarians), 'fanatics' (anyone overtly religious) and unfortunately, a light vein of anti-Semitism. I'm struggling with whether to call it anti-Semitism, since the Jewish character I'm thinking of is very sympathetic, but attention is continually drawn to his 'race' and his alleged racial characteristics, in a way that shines a horrible light on the general mood in 1936.

I particularly enjoyed the character of Erica Burgoyne, self-possessed, serious, seventeen year old would-be-detective, daughter of the Chief Constable, practical and not at all girly. I'd read a whole series about her, please.

And apparently there is a whole mystery series by Nicola Upson which features Josephine Tey herself as the detective! Of course they have them at the Ath -- I might need to check them out, too.
 

A Wreck of Seabirds

Karleah Olson is a young, first time author whose manuscript for A Wreck of Seabirds was shortlisted for the Fogarty Literary Award in 2023 and was subsequently published by Fremantle Press. This is a very WA novel, set in a coastal town and filled with the presence of the sea in all its moods -- beguiling, sunny, violent and threatening.

This novel is ambitiously structured into three threads. One is set in the present day, centred on the growing relationship between Ren, who has lost his younger brother, and Briony, whose sister has disappeared. One is set in the past, tracing the troubled history of Ren and Sam's family, and the last is ambiguous, following what has happened to Briony's missing sister. The different chapterlets are all very short, usually no more than a page or two, and until I twigged that each thread was labelled differently, I sometimes found myself a little lost.

A Wreck of Seabirds contains some beautiful writing and fits perfectly into the Coastal Gothic genre (Olson is studying this for her PhD). The mystery at the heart of Briony's sister's disappearance isn't fully answered, but perhaps, like the unresolved mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock, this is what gives the story its submerged power? I'll be interested to see what Olson does next.

A Way Home

For the last few years, I've been neglectful of new children's and YA fiction; I've burrowed into the comfort reading and nostalgia of my childhood and steered away from recently published titles. But my new resolution is to do a bit of catching up, and my means for doing so is to read the current CBCA Notables list. (I'm very well aware that this method means I will miss some gems which the committee don't see fit to include (cough Tumbleglass) -- not that I bear a grudge or anything...;-)

I'm proceeding alphabetically, so the first cab off the rank is Melbourne author Emily Brewin's A Way Home, her first YA novel (she has previously written two novels for adults). Sixteen year old Grace is homeless, sleeping on the streets of the city -- technically, on a ledge under a bridge. Melbourne definitely has a terrible situation with homeless people at the moment, and it was bracing to see them through Grace's eyes, as friends, acquaintances or threats, but always as fully rounded people, not just shapes to hurry past.

Grace finds some solace and kindness in a city library. It's always cheering to see libraries and librarians championed, even though I struggled with the likelihood of the sympathetic librarian being able to hand out casual work to a homeless teenager (and also the non-fiction books being filed alphabetically??) Grace's mother has a serious mental illness, and the story if them losing their home is very moving. Less successful was the sub-plot concerning Grace's father, which ended in anti-climax. Again, Grace sometimes seemed a little young for her supposed age, but I guess this book's intended readership is probably in the early teens. A Way Home is a cry for the power of music, friendship and the compassion of strangers, and while Grace doesn't find a fairy tale ending, Brewin offers a plausible amount of hope.

Making Sense

David Crystal has written dozens of books about the English language (there are a couple already on my shelves) but I wasn't aware of this smart little series in matching covers. The orange Making Sense deals with grammar; Making a Point (red) is about punctuation; Spell It Out (teal) -- you can guess that one; Sounds Appealing (blue) is about pronunciation; and there is also The Story of English in 100 Words (green) which I've already read without realising it was part of a series.

I was sceptical about the implied promise of the subtitle (The Glamorous Story of English Grammar) to make grammar interesting, and he did mostly succeed. He cleverly starts each explanatory section with the example of his little daughter learning how to speak -- first in single words, then stringing two words together, then more -- and unconsciously picking up principles of grammar along the way. He points out that so many of the 'rules' of grammar traditionally taught were misapplied to English from languages like Latin and Greek, and paid little attention to the way English was actually spoken. Crystal strikes a nice balance by conceding that language is an ever-evolving, living system, and at the same time gently demonstrating that some rules are necessary for clarity of meaning.

I'm fighting a continual battle in my house with my younger daughter, who is definitely from the 'language is always evolving' school, while I'm often fuming in futile pedantry because some radio announcer has said 'less' instead of 'fewer,' or 'different to' instead of 'different from' (I do have to admit defeat on that one, the horse has well and truly bolted there). David Crystal has persuaded me that I should loosen up a little, but I reserve the right to fume -- I'll just have to fume silently!
 

The Constant Gardener

In high school I read a lot of John Le Carré novels. I enjoyed their meaty sophistication, their hints of insider knowledge to a mysterious world of secrets and disillusion. They made me feel very grown up. And they were nice and thick and complex, something I valued in those days when I would tear through a novel at breakneck speed. I haven't read a spy/thriller novel for a long time, but I was going away for a couple of days and when I spotted The Constant Gardener in a street library, it seemed like suitable holiday reading. I might also have been influenced by a recent viewing of The Night Manager, based on a 1993 Le Carré novel.

It's weird to think that Le Carré started writing novels before I was born, and he was still pumping them out until his death in 2020. After the end of the Cold War, he switched to writing about international crime cartels, conspiracies and corruption, and The Constant Gardener centres on Big Pharma shenanigans in Africa, where a bereaved husband sets out to solve the mystery of his activist wife's murder. I really enjoyed the early part of the novel, in the immediate aftermath of Tessa's murder, with various players in the diplomatic corps observing the reserved Justin and speculating on the situation and his inner state. And I also liked the middle part, where Justin starts investigating and we find out exactly what Tessa was up to and the truth about her relationship with African doctor Arnold, who has disappeared. But the last section, which became a pure thriller really, with chases and confessions, was less interesting to me, though I'm sure it probably formed the core of the movie adaptation.

I'd be quite interested to see the film version now; I was definitely picturing Ralph Fiennes as the mild-mannered but steely Justin all the way through. It's a pity there weren't more actual African characters in the story to give a different perspective to the world of aid workers, corporations and foreign diplomacy.

 

Thus Far and No Further

This was a treat for myself and to plug a gap in my Rumer Godden collection. It was first published in 1946v as Rungli-Rungliot, then reissued in this edition under the title Thus Far and No Further in 1961. This is another book adapted from a diary. Godden and her two young daughters (plus various staff and servants, some who travelled with them and some who were acquired on the spot) spent only a few months in this isolated house on a tea plantation in Kashmir, but though their stay was brief, it made an indelible impression.

The events of their time in Kashmir also formed the basis for Godden's later novel, Kingfishers Catch Fire, but there is no whisper of that drama in these pages (one of their servants apparently tried to poison the family with ground glass). Instead, the focus is on the utter physical beauty of the mountains, the quiet serenity of their lives there, Godden's gradual calming after a turbulent period in her life. It's a very meditative book, short passages, sometimes no more than a sentence or two, or a brief snatch of dialogue. Godden reflected that this time was valuable in truly getting to know her children, and 'Rafael' and 'Sabrina' emerge as vibrant characters.

Godden returned again and again to this precious, brief time in her writing; it was obviously both a golden period of joy and beauty, and a harrowing crisis. Though she doesn't talk about the bad side, that emotional intensity colours Thus Far and No Further.
 

What The Dog Saw

Picked up from a local street library, What the Dog Saw is a collection of articles and essays published in 2009. For a few years I've been a fan of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, Revisionist History, and the pieces in this volume are very similar in style -- I can hear Gladwell's voice in my inner ear while I'm reading.

Gladwell says he wants to provoke and challenge his readers (and now his listeners, presumably) to think about aspects of the world in a new way, and something from this broad range of topics will surely needle any given reader. The pieces here discuss everything from the seemingly trivial (why is it so hard to market different kinds of ketchup while many different styles of mustard flourish?) to the socially important (if it's actually easier, and cheaper, to solve the problem of homelessness by giving homeless people somewhere to live, why don't we do that?). I was slightly appalled to read Gladwell's efficient demolition of FBI crime profiling (nooo, Malcolm, don't tell me that Mindhunter is garbage!) and fascinated by his account of the way the contraceptive pill was developed to seem more 'natural' (to get the approval of the Catholic Church) when in fact it's not 'natural' at all to expect a modern woman to endure hundreds of periods over her lifetime.

The difference between panicking and choking; the evolution in strategies for selling hair dye to women (especially interesting if you happen to be re-watching Mad Men at the moment); the secrets of dog training; the flaws of the job interview system -- there is something here to amuse, puzzle and yes, challenge, every reader.

Life Below Stairs

Regular readers of this blog will already know that I am fascinated by servants, probably because in another life I almost certainly would have been one. So how could I resist Alison Maloney's Life Below Stairs: True Lives of Edwardian Servants?

When it arrived, Life Below Stairs proved to be a slim little volume, under 200 pages, and doubtless published to cash in on the popularity of Downton Abbey (Julian Fellowes, its creator, is even quoted a few times). It is, however, a really solid informative little source book for useful information about the exact hierarchy of roles and duties inside a house, wages and uniforms, etiquette and rules of behaviour. If I were writing a novel set in an Edwardian grand house, this would not be a bad place to start. For one thing, it would have cleared up Anna's confusion about whether or not she was a 'tweeny' in Countess Below Stairs.

To my amusement, I found quotes from other books about domestic service that I've already read, but I did find out some information I didn't know before -- like the fact that young girls hoping to secure a job as a maid had first to work and save up (maybe for a couple of years) to afford to buy the dresses and aprons they'd be expected to wear on the job! However, footmen, despite being paid more, had thier uniforms supplied. And did you know that a 'servant's bed' measured only 2 foot 6 across, compared with a standard single bed, which was 3 feet in width? (I was chuffed to see an advertisement for such furniture from Heal's, where Dodie Smith worked.)

I was really hoping for more in the way of personal stories and experiences, but I'm sure I'll find those elsewhere.
 

Metal Fish, Falling Snow

As you can see from the huge number of award stickers on the cover above, Metal Fish, Falling Snow gleaned a long list of prizes and shortlistings for debut author Cath Moore when it was published in 2020. Fourteen year old Dylan sees the world aslant, and when her beloved mother dies in an accident, she is forced to make a long road trip with her mum's boyfriend to reconnect with the only family she has left. The metal fish and the snow globe of the title refer to the only tangible mementos Dylan possesses from her parents.

Dylan's story is told in an idiosyncratic, very original voice, alive with word play and metaphor, and I can understand why the judges of literary prizes would have sat up when they opened these pages. It's beautifully written, often droll, sometimes very sad. Dylan seems sometimes much wiser than a typical fourteen year old, and sometimes much younger. For me, Metal Fish, Falling Snow falls into the category of books for adults who like YA or kidlit, which is a perfectly respectable category with plenty of readers and one I aspire to write for myself (as well as reading it :-)
 

The Sentence

Louise Erdrich has become one of my favourite authors. The Sentence, published at the end of 2021, is partly a pandemic novel, partly about Black Lives Matter, partly about ghosts, and mostly about reckoning with the past.

Links with Erdrich's life seem clear -- Tookie, our narrator, works in a bookshop owned by an author called Louise which focuses on Native American and marginalised voices, just like Erdrich's own Birchbark Bookshop (Trump will probably try to shut it down soon). Tookie spent a decade in jail and she was first arrested by the man who is now her beloved husband. Her life is now safe and comfortable, but there are elements of her past that she has never come to terms with, signified by the fact that she is being haunted by the ghost of a former bookshop customer.

The Sentence covers a tumultuous year in Minneapolis as Covid sweeps the country and then the murder of George Floyd sparks protests, riots and brutality in the streets. Erdrich expertly weaves national and even global trauma with the deeply personal story of Tookie and her family. She must have written it so fast! As always, I'm struck with admiration for the way Erdrich combines the spiritual, the political and the domestic. The Sentence is a powerful and moving novel.
 

We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord

I enjoyed this book a lot. Garth Nix has mined his own Canberra childhood, his history as a teenage D&D Dungeonmaster and put a John Wyndham-esque sci-fi twist on it all to produce an action-packed middle grade novel.

Kim (Chimera) and his younger sister Elia (Elieithyia) live with their eccentrically hippie parents on the outskirts of 1970s Canberra, spending most of their time hanging out with their friends Bennie and Madir, but everything changes one day when they fish a mysterious golden globe out of the lake. This incident is based on a true story from Nix's childhood, when he thought he saw a severed head in the murky waters one day (I think it turned out to be a motorbike helmet). Before long, child prodigy Elia is in communication with the strange sphere, which becomes progressively more and more threatening and dangerous.

We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord reminded me of John Wyndham's classic Chocky, which scared the suitcase out of me as a child, and also fascinated me. Things never get too terrifying here, though there is certainly plenty of danger and lots of action. I raced through it and I hope plenty of young readers do the same. My only quibble is that I was never quite sure how to pronounce Elia.
 

Madly, Deeply

I first came across Alan Rickman as the superbly smarmy Obadiah Slope in The Barchester Chronicles (a performance that JK Rowling has said inspired the character of Severus Snape, so how appropriate that Rickman ended up playing him). But I fell in love with him in Truly, Madly, Deeply when he played the ghost of Juliet Stevenson's husband, and even more as Captain Brandon in Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility. For most people of a certain generation, he will always be Professor Snape; for an older demographic, he is the villain in Die Hard (never seen it). What always set him apart was his divine, languid voice -- the result of being born with a tight jaw, apparently.

These diaries run from 1993-2015. Unlike, say, Michael Palin's diaries, which always seem to have written with at least one eye firmly on eventual publication, Rickman's diaries sit in an uneasy space between being shorthand enough to seem purely personal, but elliptical enough to be frequently opaque to future readers.

It's weird to read about the actual process of film-making from the actor's perspective. I think somewhere in the back of my mind I've assumed that if the action covers a year, then they've spent a year making it... whereas of course the actor might be on set for only a few days. One gathers that Rickman wasn't always easy to work with -- he's exacting, critical (including self-critical) and he can always see how things could be better. As an actor, he chafed against directors; as a director, he demanded a lot from his actors. But his prickliness was never in service of ego, always in service of the work.

But he was a wonderful, generous friend; he was always politically engaged, and he stayed with his partner from 1977 until he died in 2015. It's worth remembering that most people only write in their diaries when they're unhappy -- I know I certainly did -- and if Rickman comes across as a bit of a grump, that's probably one reason why. He also illustrated his diaries with gorgeous coloured drawings, only a handful of which are reproduced here -- I would have loved to see them all.