Joy in the Morning

Who could resist that endorsement from Douglas Adams on the cover of Joy in the Morning? I used to read loads of PG Wodehouse in high school, but I'm not sure I've picked one up in the last forty years. Have I read Joy in the Morning before? Who knows? It's a Jeeves and Wooster book (always my favourite genre of Wodehouse, though I also dabbled in Psmith and Blandings), and it involves numerous misunderstandings, fancy dress, secret meetings, a cottage burning down (which event everyone takes far too lightly, in my opinion), a zealous Boy Scout, and an earnest policeman. As usual, Bertie Wooster tries to help out his friends, finds himself quickly out of his depth, and has to call on the inimitable Jeeves for solutions (there was not quite enough Jeeves in this volume for my money, but I'm sure I can rectify that elsewhere). The thing about Wodehouse is, you know exactly what you're in for.

At first I couldn't help hearing Wooster's narration in the perfect voice of  Hugh Laurie (what an inspired piece of casting that was!), but I was soon reminded of why I adored these books so much as a teenager. Wodehouse's reputation took a massive hit in the UK after he broadcast to America from Germany during the war (to be fair, he was stuck there, and the broadcasts were comic, not political), but I feel as if he's gradually been rehabilitated, though he never returned to live in the UK again. Joy in the Morning was published in 1948, when he was probably held in greatest scorn in his native land.

Wodehouse excels at two things: neatly constructed, absurdist plots, and an utterly delightful, idiosyncratic voice. Playful, energetic, mellifluous and uniquely convoluted, every page presents fresh treasures. Opening at random:

There arose before me a vision of this relative by marriage, as he would probably appear directly I mentioned Boko's name -- the eyes glaring, the moustache bristling and the tout ensemble presenting a strong resemblance to a short-tempered tiger of the jungle which has just seen its peasant shin up a tree. And while it would be going too far, perhaps, to say that Bertram Wooster shuddered, a certain coolness of the feet unquestionably existed.

Now, you either love this stuff or you hate it. Me, I think I still love it.

The Death of the Heart

I have very dim memories of reading this copy of Elizabeth Bowen's 1938 novel, The Death of the Heart, as a teenager in the 1980s. I have a feeling that my mother might have been studying it when she did HSC English as an adult.

The Death of the Heart is regarded as Bowen's best work. Sixteen year old Portia comes to live with her half-brother and sister-in-law in London after the death of her parents, and finds herself lonely and adrift in a social world whose rules she struggles to comprehend. Frankly, her sister-in-law Anna is a bit of a selfish bitch, who reads Portia's diary and makes no attempt to welcome her; her brother is at a loss; Anna's erstwhile toyboy, Eddie, is a self-absorbed dick who can't resist flirting with Portia. The only person in the household who seems to have any real relationship with poor Portia is the maid, Matchett, inherited from Thomas and Portia's father.

This is an incredibly sad novel, in which various isolated and self-loathing or bewildered characters orbit around each other without ever making any real contact. The figure of Major Brutt, in his shabby hotel, imagining he's friends with Thomas and Anna, is absolutely heart-breaking. The one character I couldn't feel too sorry for is the 'charming' Eddie, whose company I couldn't bear even for a few pages; of course Portia falls in love with him, but he's such a pretentious little shit, I felt like throwing him across the room. 

It's possible that I didn't finish reading The Death of the Heart the first time around, because I found a possible bookmark wedged in its pages about how to care for ear-piercings, which would have to date from 1990 (so slightly later than I first thought). If that's the case, I only made it about a third of the way through. 

Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul

I have a feeling I might have read this biography of Dorothy L. Sayers before -- I think I borrowed it from the Stockbridge Library in Edinburgh in 1991, I'm sure I remember reading it in Jo and Alyson's flat in East Claremont St. Anyway, I had forgotten almost everything except the rather astonishing fact that she had a son in 1924, out of wedlock, telling no one. Fortunately she was able to foster the baby with her discreet cousin Ivy, who did this for a living, and was able to keep in contact with her son and support him for his entire childhood, until she 'adopted' him at the age of about eleven. He suspected that she was his biological mother but was not able to confirm this until after her death. (Also, apparently adoption as we know it was not legal in the UK until 1926! How extraordinary.)

Barbara Reynolds focuses a lot on Sayers' religious work and spiritual philosophy, which is of less interest to me than her detective fiction, so I skimmed over the last section of this book fairly quickly. I am intrigued to find her radio plays, The Man Born to Be King, which at the time were a revelation in their realistic presentation of Jesus' life. Something I'd forgotten was that Sayers pronounced her name 'Sairs' and strongly disliked the pronounciation SAY-ers, which is of course how I've said it my whole life. Whoops. Sorry, Dorothy. 

I don't think Dorothy Sayers and I would have agreed on much, but she had a brave, rich and resourceful life and I celebrate her.

The Blessing

I found this omnibus edition of three of Nancy Mitford's novels in a secondhand book shop. I already own a very well-thumbed copy of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate so I just bought this for The Blessing, which oddly I have never owned and I don't think I've read it since high school (a long time, anyway!)

The Blessing, while not reaching the comedic heights and poignant depths of the other two novels, stood up very well, though I expect I would have got more out of it if I knew more about French high society in the 1950s. Womanising Charles-Edouard is of course yet another portrait of Gaston Palewski, this time elevated to a dukedom and terrifically handsome. Despite being married to beautiful, languid, easy-going Englishwoman Grace, he can't keep his eyes or hands off other women; the central cultural conflict of the novel lies between the worldly, sophisticated French attitude to these affairs, and the uptight priggish English intolerance of such behaviour.

All through the story, Grace is urged to adopt a kind of radical acceptance of Charles-Edouard's roving eye, even when she catches him in flagrante. It occurs to me that Charles-Edouard could equally have exercised some radical self-control, but hey. The real villain of the piece is the couple's young son Sigi, who shamelessly manipulates them both to keep them apart and enjoy the fruits of their undivided attention. I have no idea what the contemporary attitude to extra-martial affairs is in France these days, but I suspect it might be a little less forgiving that it was in 1951. 

Yellow Notebook

It's hard to believe that six years have passed since the publication of Helen Garner's first volume of diaries, Yellow Notebook. It came out before Covid! In some ways that feels like another lifetime, but in some ways it seems like the blink of an eye.

It was an interesting experience to go back and reread Yellow Notebook, knowing what's coming in volumes 2 and 3. This book covers the years from 1978, just after Monkey Grip, to 1987, when she's poised on the brink of her third marriage to 'V.' When V first appears in the last sections of the diary, you feel like yelling, 'No, Helen! Don't do it!' In spite of her attraction to him, we can already see V's fatal rigidity, his self-centred intellectualism, his insistence on his own point of view, all of which are going to capsize their future relationship.

Some of my favourite parts of Yellow Notebook deal with Garner wrestling with what she calls 'the mighty force,' which is some sense of the numinous or spiritual, which she almost seems to experience as a wild beast stalking her, waiting to pounce. At this stage she seems determined not to surrender to it.

I'm so happy that these diaries have begun to draw attention from overseas readers; at long last, Garner is getting the acclaim that she's always deserved.
 

Wish for a Pony and The Summer of the Great Secret

 

Total comfort reading here: Monica Edwards' first two books in the Romney Marsh series, Wish for a Pony and The Summer of the Great Secret, from 1947 and 1948 respectively. I can't tell you why, but I was absolutely in love with these books as an eight or nine or ten year old growing up in the Highlands of PNG. I know now that the Romney Marsh books are widely beloved by ladies of, ahem, a certain age, as attested by the fact that Girls Gone By have reprinted several of the titles, which I have duly sought out and bought -- but it's these two first stories that captured my heart (there were later books in the Mt Hagen library, but I wasn't impressed when boys came into it).

 

Perhaps it was the rock solid friendship between Tamzin and Rissa that appealed to me -- I used to put myself to sleep at night imagining I was their friend, too, and that we all had adventures together. Perhaps it was the pony content; of course I wanted a pony, but not in any realistic way. Perhaps it was the very staid English village setting; perhaps it was the glamour of film-making in the second book, which tied in with the Noel Streatfeild books I was also addicted to. In fact, there is a lot going on in the second book, which was the one I loved most -- smuggling, making a film, pony stuff, and the intertwined story of Lesley, the original owner of Tamzin's pony Cascade, who can no longer walk after a riding accident (don't worry, there's a happy ending).

 

I used to know The Summer of the Great Secret so well that when I borrowed it from the library I wouldn't even need to read it; I'd stash it under my pillow as a talisman and never even open it. By the time I got to it, it had lost its cover, so I never knew it looking as it does above, just with a plain blue hardcover from the Seagull Library, which is the same copy that I have since acquired. I can't put my finger on why these books bewitched me so thoroughly, but they will always have a special place in my heart. 

Charlotte Sometimes

I was so riled up by Ian McEwan's dismissal of children's books as not proper literature that I pulled out an old favourite to see if it would stand up to scrutiny. Penelope Farmer's 1969 masterpiece, Charlotte Sometimes, is less than 200 pages long, and yet it packs a punch more powerful than some novels twice the length. Every time I read it, it seems darker: the dank November weather, the austere boarding school corridors, the grieving Chisel Brown family in their cold dark house, in mourning for their soldier son, the neglected Japanese garden -- it all adds up to an eerie, haunting story, quite apart from the creepiness and gnawing anxiety of Charlotte's helpless swap with Clare from 1918.

Charlotte Sometimes is an evocative exploration of identity, fragmentation and fate. In some ways, it's a very small story -- at first, only Charlotte and Clare are aware of what's happened to them as they mysteriously swap places, though later Clare's sister Emily and Charlotte's friend Elizabeth also learn the secret. The sinking horror when Charlotte realises that she is trapped in the past, because of adult whims, and her utter helplessness to change the fact, is genuinely terrifying. Not much happens: Charlotte and Emily try unsuccessfully to get Charlotte into the magical bed one night, they gatecrash the Chisel Brown's seance, they are caught up in street celebrations at the end of the war -- but none of these events directly change the narrative. By denying agency to the protagonist, Charlotte Sometimes seems to break every rule of writing for children; perhaps this is what makes it stand out as genuine literature!

One of the absolute classics of the time-slip tradition, Charlotte Sometimes remains as vivid and disturbing as ever.
 

The Player's Boy and The Players and the Rebels

Here is a real treat! I read these two books of historical fiction together, as Antonia Forest originally intended them to be just one volume; they were split into two by her publisher, Faber. I managed to get hold of the Girls Gone By edition of second part, The Players and the Rebels, a few years ago, but they've only just reissued part one. So I was able to read The Player's Boy for the first time since I left my high school library behind, decades ago. Woo-hoo!

The eponymous player's boy is Nicholas Marlow, an Elizabethan ancestor of the Marlow family of Forest's other books, who runs away from home and ends up joining Will Shakespere's theatre company. As the expert forewords to both volumes make clear, while Forest did lots of research and used the best resources available at the time (the books were published in 1970 and 1971 respectively), Shakespeare scholarship has moved on since her time and some of her conclusions and characters might not agree exactly with current thinking (for example, there is no way that yeoman's son Nicholas and high-born page Humfrey would ever be friends). Still, Forest excels at evoking everyday Elizabethan life and the fascinating detail of the player's life -- some things don't seem to have changed at all. As ever, she is so skilful at showing us rivalry between players, conflicting loyalties, political subtleties, and the real perils of Elizabethan life, from plague to knife fights to execution for heresy.

There are loads of echoes for Marlow fans, or should that be foreshadowing? Nicholas's personality is very similar to modern Nicola's. They are both beautiful but unself-conscious singers and spend time with falcons, though Nicholas's acting skills are more of a nod to Lawrie than her twin. Nicholas and Nicola are both afraid of ghosts and are drawn to the sea. Nicholas hero-worships Sir Walter Ralegh just as Nicola adores Nelson. And there are other references to Forest's other books, like gentle Humfrey who worries about his own lack of courage, just like Peter Marlow. One thing that did pass completely over my head when I read these books at school was the subtle gay content, though it seemed a little implausible that Nicholas, who is 17 or 18 by the end of the story, seems not to be bothered by any sexual yearnings at all!  

I did vividly remember the poignant character of Will Kemp, the company's clown, who finds his improv skills crowded out by increasingly strict scripts. In fact, Kemp seems more like a modern stand-up, creating his own material and responsive to the mood of the crowd. He ends up leaving the troupe, his job pretty much obsolete.

The Rebel part of the story doesn't really come into properly until the last third of the second book, though it's ably set up by what comes before. I think fans of the Elizabethans and of Shakespeare would find a lot to enjoy here, and Will in particular is a most attractive character, kind, dry, level-headed and intelligent, with a hidden melancholy but also wry humour. I really relished making my reacquaintance with these books, and they will join my other Forest volumes in the frequently re-read stack. 

The Leopard

I don't know what happened to my original copy of The Leopard, which I studied in HSC a looong time ago, but I replaced it some time ago with the one pictured above. I was prompted to re-read Guiseppe di Lampedusa's 1958 classic novel partly by Susan Green, and partly by watching the sumptuous Netflix series based on the book.

Watching the series, I marvelled that I'd forgotten so much of the story -- well, it's not that surprising, because the script writer fleshed out some episodes with invented scenes. But in fact there was quite a bit that I'd genuinely forgotten. I remember how much I adored The Leopard, but what I mostly retained was the atmosphere of languid, lush sensuality, mingled violence and torpor that gave me my first impression of Sicily. My most vivid recollection, skimmed over in the adaptation, was of young lovers Tancredi and Angelica exploring the long-neglected corners of the family's immense villa, trembling on the dangerous edge of desire but never quite giving in -- it was the sexiest thing I'd ever read!

Now I'm old and grey, it's Prince Fabrizio's musings on aging and regret that speak to me most powerfully. There really isn't much plot in The Leopard, but it's still amazingly atmospheric, and the Netflix version succeeded in bringing that atmosphere to life; also, Kim Rossi Stuart is superb as the Prince. At seventeen, I had a huge crush on Tancredi, but now I find him merely irritating. The Leopard was well worth a re-visit.
 

Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth and Me

 

This is a book that I think I probably acquired thorough the Scholastic Book Sale while we were living in PNG; my edition is from 1974, so I would have been eight or nine. The book sale was just for books (revolutionary, I know) and it was essentially the only way I could access books apart from the library -- there were no bookshops in Mt Hagen. And of course all the books were American... though this is the UK edition, the original US version had the title, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth. I have to agree with the UK publishers re the (slightly) snappier title.

I've hung onto this book all these years, but I don't think I've actually read it since we left PNG. As a child, I loved Jennifer, Hecate, but there was plenty in it to mystify me -- Pilgrim costumes for Halloween, apartments with elevators, quarts of water, New Math, snow and school at Christmas time and the fact that watermelon at New Year was strange. I was intrigued by witches, too, and I also experimented with magic potions, so I found that very relatable. I can't remember what I thought about the fact that Jennifer was Black and Elizabeth was white, though I was also living in a highly segregated community at the time.

Reading some more recent reviews, I found that some reviewers looked askance at this book because they took the view that Jennifer was 'bullying' Elizabeth by putting her through her 'witch apprenticeship.' Give me a break! Elizabeth has to eat strange foods (a raw egg every day, raw onions). But Elizabeth is well able to stand up for herself, and she undertakes her witch 'trials' willingly -- she adds the egg to milkshakes, and she loves onion sandwiches anyway. Elizabeth is just as sarcastic and feisty as Jennifer is cool and sardonic -- they are a great pair, a fact I only appreciated properly this time around.

A Month in the Country

J.L. Carr's short novel (just over 100 pages) was first published in 1980, and I studied it for either English or English Lit a few years later. I remember loving it, and it was safe on my shelves, but I hadn't revisited it for forty years, until I was prompted to do so by a Facebook friend.

A Month in the Country is a beautiful, elegiac little book, set in an idyllic English summer in 1920. The narrator, Tom Birkin, is restoring a painting in the church; Charles Moon is excavating someone's lost ancestor in the grounds outside. Both are survivors of the War, and both are deeply scarred. Nothing much happens, but gradually some things shift and begin to heal; in fact, what happens is that Birkin begins to make connections in the village, and these connections continue to nurture him long after that magical summer is gone.

A couple of years after I studied the book in high school, and unbeknownst to me, they made a film out of it, starring Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh in very early roles. I'm very excited to see it (though apparently it's not as magical as the book). It's so weird what survives in the memory -- as I re-read it, I remembered reading about Alice Keach's father testing her on obscure types of apple, and the fig leaves pressing up against the windows of the vicarage like hands, and one character being found 'in bed with his batman,' and what that implied, and I remembered what was particular about the missing ancestor and how he featured in Birkin's altarpiece. But loads of more dramatic scenes and details had vanished from my mind completely. I found myself thinking, oh, that's where that came from.
 

True Stories

Wow, what a collection! When this hefty brick arrived on the reserve shelf, it was like getting the Fitzroy pool itself delivered, promising hours of bliss to dive in and swim around.

As a Helen Garner devotee, there wasn't much in this volume of forty years of short non-fiction pieces that I hadn't already read -- a handful of reviews, maybe a couple of articles for obscure magazines. But the fact that most of it was familiar didn't detract at all from the pleasure of re-reading it. Garner's prose style is exemplary; her eye is so keen; her intellect is astringent. She can be judgey, but she is also compassionate, and she is very aware of her own flaws. 

There is a grab bag of subjects here -- reviews and portraits, quotidian experiences, bits of diary, newspaper columns, murder and death, relationships and encounters. True Stories is 650 pages long, but every page was a treat to read. I've decided that if I were marooned on a desert island, I could survive without any new books to read as long as I had the collected works of Helen Garner, Elizabeth Goudge, Rumer Godden and Alan Garner to see me through.

The Children's Bach

The Children's Bach (for the longest time I vaguely thought that 'Bach' might refer to a NZ beach shack. But it doesn't.) is a short and exquisitely formed novel, only 160 pages of quite big print, and it was met with great acclaim when it was first published in 1984 (my edition is branded as a Modern Classic). I got great pleasure from recognising the Melbourne setting: Merri Creek, St Georges Rd, Melville Rd, the Fitzroy pool (again).

Having said that, I could see how an impatient reader or someone who likes a clear plot might feel frustrated with this novel. We are presented with an outwardly almost perfect family, and then witness how they crack and buckle under the influence of Dexter's old friend, Elizabeth, her much younger sister Vicki and Elizabeth's musician lover, Philip (musician -- there's your first red flag, ladies). Almost nothing is explicitly stated, almost everything is implied. As Philip advises a young songwriter, 'Don't explain everything. Leave holes. The music will do the rest.'

I think if Garner were writing this novel today, forty years later, she might reconsider the way she writes about Dexter and Athena's child Billy, who seems to be neurodivergent; and she might (or then again, she might not!) reconsider a sexual encounter between a forty year man and a seventeen year old girl, however insouciant the seventeen year old might seem the morning after.

I'm coming to the conclusion that Garner is more of a natural observer than an inventor, but I might talk more about that later.
 

Ballet Shoes

I've owned this copy of Ballet Shoes for so long that I don't remember if it ever had a paper cover; this reprint dates from 1968, but I think I received it while we were living in New Guinea, in the early 1970s. This hardback cost $1.50! I know I was immediately enchanted with it and read it dozens of times, though during this re-reading (the first for many years), I was struck by how little plot there is. The story is very episodic. The three babies arrive and grow up, money runs out, the rooms in the vast house in Cromwell Rd are let out to a number of extremely useful lodgers who can tutor the children for nothing, drive them here and there, teach them dancing and lend them money (the only one who is a bit useless is Mrs Simpson, no wonder they wrote her out of the BBC adaptation). The girls take part in various stage productions and in the end, Great Uncle Matthew comes home and they are all going to scatter to live out their dreams (more or less).

But I remember what I particularly loved was the granular detail of the lives of Pauline, Petrova and Posy. I loved the reproductions of Pauline's licence application, the script extract from The Blue Bird, and the charming illustrations by Streatfeild's sister, Ruth Gervis.

I was surprised when my daughters (not knowing I was re-reading the book) started discussing the TV adaptation. The younger one was apparently quite traumatised by the depiction of Madame's death (she doesn't die in the book), and the older one went off on a segue about being traumatised by Little Women, which I honestly couldn't remember even reading to her. Did I really read the fake newspaper parts? Oh well. At least these books are now part of my children's DNA, just as they are part of mine, for good or ill.

I Capture the Castle

 

I last read I Capture The Castle in 2020, when we were all in desperate need of comfort reading. This novel, though I came to it late in life, has cemented its place as one of my all time favourites -- perhaps THE favourite. Smith laboured over it for seven years and it is almost flawless.

There are so many delightful and poignant and agonising elements woven into this story -- the romance of the castle setting, the family's dire poverty, eccentric Topaz with her affected thrilling contralto and her practical good heart; the storybook romance with the painful twist; the absurd set-pieces, like when they all dye themselves green or when Rose is mistaken for a bear; the fully-formed side characters like the Vicar and Miss Marcy -- but what holds the whole thing together is Cassandra's narrative voice. In some ways she is a typical emotional, sensitive adolescent, in some ways a naive child, in some ways truly wise and thoughtful.

Someone dismissed this book as 'hardly high literature' but it's deceptive. There is actually a lot going on here, under the star-crossed lovers story -- about writing and creativity, about freedom and duty, about money and class, about England and romance.

I think I fall in love with I Capture the Castle a little more deeply each time I read it, and I'm sure that I will return to it again and again as the years pass.

The Dark Is Rising Revisited

 

These above are not my books. I do own three out of these five, with these covers, but I also have a single volume omnibus edition of the entire series, which I couldn't find an image of online. That omnibus was published in 1984, when I was eighteen, and you might have thought I would be growing out of middle grade fantasy, but my edition is soft and battered and very well-read, so I mustn't have been too old for it after all.

I re-read The Dark is Rising (volume two, as well as the name of the whole series) a few years ago, as part of a Twitter (RIP) Christmas Eve collective read-through, an enriching and delightful experience. But I haven't read the other titles in the series for years.

As a young teen, I absolutely adored these books, especially the mixture of the everyday and the high stakes magic that evolved once Will Stanton appeared, an eleven year old boy who is also the last of the powerful Old Ones. I loved the simple but potent symbolism of the Six Signs that Will is charged to collect, and the inchoate sea-power of the Greenwitch and its connection to Jane, the only real female protagonist. I loved the enigmatic figure of Merriman Lyon (Merlin), Will's mentor, and the solemn, serious battle between the Light and the Dark.

The last two books of the series, The Grey King and Silver on the Tree, always appealed to me the least, especially the final, climactic volume, where Will and Bran (King Arthur's heir) enter a strange magical city and perform various symbolic ordeals -- this was the point where, for me, the story lost its grounding in reality, and even though the children are left to carry on the fight against the forces of the Dark in our own world, the nature of that battle is left pretty vague (there's only one stand taken against racism, which I did appreciate, but it's mostly Will's brother who fights that battle, so any role the children might take is left largely undefined).

It did feel horribly apt to be reading The Dark is Rising while Trump was being re-elected in the US. It's pretty clear what the battles for us are going to be.