Jane Haddam, “Glass Houses”

After all my highbrow Virago reading last week I’m faintly embarrassed at returning to murder mysteries, but there you have it. Sometimes all i want from a book is escape, and over the years Jane Haddam’s series mysteries have provided that reliably. On the other hand, I did spend some time thinking about what separated Haddam from, say Elizabeth George, who also writes series mysteries. George is a much bigger deal, commercially speaking, and that’s not entirely a question of marketing.

See, I think readers like me, reliable consumers of mysteries, often want something more than the puzzle — even more, perhaps, than the reassuring trajectory of order disrupted and restored. Elizabeth George and some other writers like Susan Hill, Fred Vargas and the goddess Tana French also manage to write about something. This is not the same as Denise Mina’s avowed social-work focus or Jane Haddam’s propensity to break into rants on behalf of her characters. Rather, the former writers use the mystery genre to think about something more abstract like, perhaps, memory (French’s In the Woods) or epistemology (Fred Vargas‘ Adamsberg novels). This doesn’t mean that I won’t follow Sue Grafton all the way to “Z” or that I’m never going to read Margery Allingham again. But mystery readers may be eager for a more multi-dimensional experience than the police procedural with an entertaining cast of sidekicks.

Haddam has been writing for years about Gregor Demarkian, a former  FBI profiler of serial killers. The books are set in or around Philadelphia, and include a large cast of neighbors, friends, a love interest, and city functionaries, my favorite of whom, John Henry Newman Jackman, is a hyper-competent, hyper-ambitious, black Catholic politician. I’ve always liked Haddam because she’s a crackerjack social observer. She has a wonderful grasp of the opportunities and limitations afforded by a wide range of social strata, and she’s not afraid to share her opinions. But I have found with the recent novels that opinion — raw, unedited — is occupying more of the page than I would like.

So, Glass Houses. There’s a serial killer loose in Philly. He (they’re almost inevitably male) strangles women then cuts their faces with broken glass and leaves the bodies in alleys. Gregor Demarkian has to contend with severe police dysfunction in this case, as well as with the reappearance of his highly neurotic consort Bennis Hannaford who is ravishing and rich. The case gets solved. I never thought it wouldn’t.

Enid Bagnold, “The Loved and Envied”

I’ll get the trivia out of the way first: Enid Bagnold’s great-grand-daughter is Samantha Cameron, wife of David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Also, the film of National Velvet (based on a book by Bagnold) appeared in 1944, seven years before the 1951 publication date of The Loved and Envied.

Now I’ll get the cheating out of the way: though The Loved and Envied was published by Virago, it’s very hard to find in that edition and I re-read it in hardcover. I regret this deeply because the cover of the Virago is a ravishing portrait of Lady Diana Cooper, I believe in her wedding dress. I’d guess it was an Oswald Birley;  if you have it on your book shelf would you tell me?

Lady Diana Manners in 1916

Lady Diana is crucial to The Loved and Envied because this is a book about beauty and old age. I have believed for a while that Bagnold and Lady Diana Manners, as she was then, were debutantes together, though the dates don’t quite tally. Bagnold was presentable but not a beauty. Lady Diana was widely considered the loveliest woman of her era. She was also very near-sighted, hence the slightly unfocused blue stare. And I think I remember from the Philip Ziegler biography of her that she, like Ruby Maclean in The Loved and Envied, felt quite detached from her face. Late in the novel, at the age of 53, Ruby tells a friend that having beauty like hers “gives one, all the time, the something more than one asks, and I shall have now to grow used to the little bit less,… that will in future be given one on demand.”

We meet Ruby as an older woman — actually we see her first, through the eyes of one of the many female characters in the book who envy her. It’s a wonderful set-piece, as Ruby appears in a theater box, decked out in a diamond necklace. What the descriptions of jewels and clothes in this book must have meant in 1951 Britain! The narrative zigzags back and forth, stitching together Ruby’s life with the lives of her family and friends. It is an unrepentantly glamorous story, in which most of the characters are titled and most of the rest are their servants. I admit a deep fascination with the milieu. Especially with the clothes — there is a little haute-couture Cinderella section toward the end that I read several times, almost swooning.

But The Loved and Envied is more than a vintage Vogue between hard covers. It’s a fascinating question: how does stupendous beauty form a character, shape a life? And then what happens as it retreats? To help her story along Bagnold gives Ruby a friend who has overcome ugliness and crafted a satisfying career. Yet Cora says, “Can you faintly imagine what it is not to be well served by one’s appearance, to have, at each new relationship, to live it down?”  Men fall for Ruby like dominoes, and her daughter Miranda — pleasant-looking enough — burns with agonized jealousy of her mother.

Bagnold settles nothing. That’s not her intention (though the end does get a little bit talky as she tries to settle a few characters’ fates). She just wants to set us thinking. I have to add that I adored, as well as the setting and the genuinely attractive characters,the highly metaphorical writing style. It’s very mid-20th century English — far from American simplicity  – and I find it playful, moving, and immensely enjoyable. For instance, about friendship Bagnold says, “… little spoken of is the friendship, in age, of two people who might have loved. For them what has never been said is a last elixir of youth, the only bottle on the shelf never taken down.” If this is the kind of writing that pleases you, The Loved and Envied will be a great treat.

Late-breaking addition: Darlene at Roses Over a Cottage Door found a copy of this in a second-hand shop and has posted a photo if you want to see the lovely cover.

This is my last effort in the Virago Reading Week Challenge, and thanks to Rachel’s and Carolyn’s hard work in putting it together, I’ve read dozens of wonderful blog posts. It’s really been inspiring. The TBR stack (I keep mine in my head where it gathers wool rather than dust) just got a lot taller!

 

 

Elizabeth Taylor, “Palladian”

“Cassandra, with all her novel-reading, could be sure of experiencing the proper emotions, standing in her bedroom for the last time…” This is the first line of Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian, and it certainly got my attention. Another novel about a life ruined by books? After all, you don’t idly name your bookish heroine Cassandra Dashwood. In fact I could write a nifty 500 words right now on what the characters in Palladian read, and what I make of their reading matter…. but that would be to undersell this sly little novel, because it would sound like an annoying meta-literary exercise instead of a tightly focused satirical romance.

1985 U.S. edition

Or is it a satire? Are we meant to take Cassandra — the drab orphaned governess in the big house — seriously? What about her tragic employer, migraine-struck Marion Vanbrugh, or her diabolically precocious charge Sophy? Taylor controls her tone beautifully; at the beginning and the end of the novel, she exaggerates description and allows the narrator sardonic commentary that puts a little bit of space between the reader and the story. Thus we meet Mrs. Veal (!) in the train, with her “way of settling her blue fox across her breast and smiling down with pleasure and approval — it might equally well have been pleasure at the fur or the bosom, both of which were magnificent.” She is the wife of the pub-owner in the village and she will play a secondary part in the plot, but as Taylor unfurls the action, Mrs. Veal loses her exoticism and becomes three-dimensional. Then, as the novel ends, she resumes her highly-colored, affected role, and we are distanced once again from the action.

What action, you ask? I think you know. What happens when a young and sheltered girl comes to an isolated country house where there is no wife but only a widower with cherished memories of the beautiful paragon he married? Taylor’s achievement is to mock while re-enacting the Jane Eyre trope with a post-Freudian spin. (There’s even, I’d say, a little hommage to Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, published eight years earlier. Palladian’s Nanny is Mrs. Danvers made slightly ridiculous but also slightly sympathetic.)

The title refers, of course, to the Big House, which is falling apart or perhaps to the architectural style of the hero’s namesake Sir John Vanbrugh. Taylor muses about a future in which “…the house became a shell only, seeming to foreshadow its own strange future when leaves would come into the hall, great antlered beetles run across the hearths, the spiders let themselves down from the ceilings to loop great pockets of web across corners; plaster would fall, softly, furtively, like snow… ”  Then a character says prosaically, “‘On the whole though, decrepit as it all is, I think I was better here than at home in the flat.’” I loved the way Taylor punctures her own authorial flights of fancy, though the house itself reminded me of the one in Sarah Waters‘ wonderful The Little Stranger.

Melanie at The Indextrious Reader reviewed Taylor’s Angel yesterday for Virago Reading Week and I bet there will be more on Taylor in the week to come.

This is my second Virago Modern Classic of the week. I think I can manage one more, which will be Enid Bagnold’s The Loved and Envied. That makes for three mid-century English books, a pretty narrow range, but I’ve noticed that a number of bloggers haven’t liked The Loved and Envied which I adored on a first reading. So I’m going back for a second look.

Antonia White, “Frost in May”

I was rather horrified when I first read this book, oh, a long time ago. So when Rachel of Book Snob and Carolyn of A Few of My Favourite Books proposed the delightful Virago Reading Week, Frost in May was the first title I thought of revisiting. I’m no longer horrified but I can see that Antonia White wanted me to be. What I can’t make out is where else the merit of this bitter little novel lies.

1980 U.S. edition

Fernanda Grey, age nine, is dropped off by her father at the Convent of the Five Wounds in the small village of Lippington. It is her first experience of boarding school, and her father is a new convert to Catholicism. Fernanda is being sent to the convent school to receive a Catholic education. Since Antonia White was herself educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton, I suspect some of her anger stems from that experience. Certainly the fine-grained description of daily life at the school — the nuns’ handwriting, the descriptions of food, the pious fads, the way school routine erases home life — rings true. Fernanda is an observant, intelligent, imaginative little girl who grows into an observant adolescent who likes to write. Stand-in for the author? Seems likely, doesn’t it?

Since the entire book is narrated from Nanda’s point of view it’s a good thing she’s observant. She uses the sharp gaze of an outsider, for not only is she a convert, she is also middle-class. But “Lippington,” as the school is known, is the favored educational venue for a kind of borderless European aristocracy. The glamorous girls are Spanish, Irish, Franco-German, and feature cardinals and abbesses on their family trees. Nanda, though accepted as a friend, can never share their easy identification as members of the one True Church.

But as we might guess from the title, this is an education gone awry. White is sharp about the power the nuns exert over their charges, the surveillance and what we might call emotional blackmail. The founding principle of the school is the breaking of a child’s character so that it may be re-formed in a manner more pleasing to God. This is the “frost” of the title, of course.

But is there more to the tale than the humiliation and grief visited upon a young girl?  Nanda is well-drawn, but the secondary characters — those glamorous aristocratic Catholic girls — tend to be endowed with marvelous heads of hair and a few tics. The nuns are stock figures as well, remote and manipulative. (Rumer Godden does a much better job of seeing beyond the habit.) White’s hurt and outrage are fresh, but they are the only note she sounds.

Here’s a link to a Guardian piece from 2008 which informed me that Frost in May was the first volume Virago published. The author, Eloise Millar, reveals how closely autobiographical the novel is — promise I didn’t know!

This is my first entry in the Virago Modern Classics Reading Week challenge. Next up, Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian. I’m afraid it looks a little cheerless, too!

 

Eleanor Brown, “The Weird Sisters”

I fought against The Weird Sisters. After reading Janet Maslin’s review in the New York Times, I thought, “That’s one I’ll skip.” Then a friend gave me a copy, saying, “I thought this might be interesting for you, being one of three sisters.” Yes — but who’s to say Eleanor Brown was going to get it right? Then I was drawn in by the quotation on the cover: “See, we love each other. We just don’t happen to like each other very much.”

So I started reading. The novel’s premise is artificial, borderline annoying. The three sisters in question are Rosalind, Bianca, and Cordelia, named after Shakespearean heroines because their father is an eminent Shakespeare scholar. He teaches at a small liberal-arts college in Ohio. (I pictured Oberlin or Kenyon.) The family is bookish in the extreme, given to quoting the Bard to each other, frequently vanishing into any volume within reach.

this guy looms over the proceedings

This much of the exposition had me squirming. It struck me as forced, twee, self-admiring. Strangely, though, Brown’s choice of a narrative voice didn’t rub me the wrong way, and it certainly could have, because she chose to tell the story from the point of view of All Three Sisters at Once. A daring choice, but it paid off.  When only one sister is concerned, it’s a straightforward third-person narrative (in that sister’s consciousness). When the girls share an experience, it’s “We thought… we knew.” Bear in mind that the “weird sisters” of the title refers to the three witches in Macbeth and you’ll understand that Brown gives the trio a slight air of  uncanny power as well as an appealingly wry, witty spin on the action.

The Weird Sisters is really about what the girls, as individuals, lack. When Brown says that sheer force of will “could not make Rose brave, could not make Bean honest, could not make Cordy sensible,” I was reminded of The Wizard of Oz, with each character traipsing to the Emerald City in search of that missing ingredient. But in this novel the Yellow Brick Road leads the three sisters home to Barnwell, Ohio, two of them punch-drunk with failure, as their mother suffers from breast cancer.

So, yes, it’s all somewhat schematic. For instance, Rose the super-responsible eldest has never left Barnwell because she felt she had to take care of her parents. Cordy, the youngest, the flake, has been on the road for seven years. But those birth-order cliches do often ring true, don’t they? And Brown is a good writer. She brings the sisters to endearing, infuriating life. She’s fabulous on the material stuff: food, clothes, the way people sit, the weather, the smell inside the car on a summer night. She has a wonderful ear for dialogue and a tart sense of humor. So finally, around page 275 out of 300 I just relaxed and gave in to the story. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll love the (probably, eventual) movie. But — note to author — lose Mr. Shakespeare next time around.

Gene Kerrigan, “The Midnight Choir”

What should I have deduced from the fact that The Midnight Choir’s title comes from a Leonard Cohen song? That it would be hip? Sad? Dark? Here’s the quotation: “Like a drunk in a midnight choir/I have tried in my way to be free.” (The true hipsters among you will not need to Google it as I did; it’s from “Bird on the Wire.”)

Anyway, I think I need to add Irish Noir to the growing catalogue of mystery categories to avoid. True, Detective Inspector Harry Synnott of Dublin does not at any point sleep in a reclining chair with an empty bottle of booze by his side, which happens to Inspector Rebus in Ian Rankin’s mysteries. But he is, naturally, estranged from his wife and grown son. He has a troubled past in the police force. He is no longer entirely certain that he trusts himself and his sense of morality is deeply compromised.

Gene Kerrigan’s storytelling is excellent, no doubt. He pulls together the various skeins of his plot artfully and the denouement is both unexpected and satisfying. His depiction of the Ireland of the early 2000s is scathing but fascinating: it’s the era of the Celtic Tiger and the prosperity washing over Ireland seems to have intoxicated many of the characters. One get-rich quick scheme after another unmoors them. Synnott’s patient skepticism provides a reality check.

What’s more, as we get to know Synnott, our relationship to him changes. This is quite a trick for an author. We see much of the action of The Midnight Choir from Synnott’s point of view so we are implicated in his actions. I can’t say much more without giving away plot points but basically four cases intertwine here: a rape, a jewel heist, a double murder and an ugly cocktail of gang activity. Synnott is investigating two of them and as a reader you follow him at first with admiration. Then… well.

But Kerrigan is not writing just another procedural. He’s got beef with the way Ireland is run. So does Tana French, and in a way The Midnight Choir reminded me of Faithful Place, but it’s more biting. Also considerably more gruesome. The Midnight Choir is a good puzzle; well-paced, compelling, and angry. Disturbing, in fact. That may have been Kerrigan’s intention; as Stieg Larsson was, he’s a journalist. Maybe he sees fiction as a way of drawing attention to an ugly situation. It’s effective, but it may not be what you’re looking for in escape fiction.

Frans Bengtsson, “The Long Ships”

Well! I just spent a week reading a 500-page novel about Vikings and I adored every moment of it.

Last fall when I was doing the New York Review Books challenge, I was intrigued by the cover of The Long Ships, which has a very attractive faux-naif air. But — Vikings? Really? Frans Bengtsson’s epic just hammers home the truth that if the writing is good enough, any subject can be appealing.

The Long Ships was written in Swedish as two separate books during World War II, then translated and published as one in 1954. This date situates it squarely in that golden age of historical fiction brought to us by titans like Anya Seton, Daphne Du Maurier, even Irving Stone. (I know I’m missing authors here… who?) But what sets Bengtsson apart is his narrative voice. First, he is funny. On page 14 his young hero Orm has to go without armor “until such time as he could get himself a good [mail] shirt in Ireland; for there dead men’s armor was always to be had cheaply in any harbor.”  Later, Orm and his friend Toke are given fine swords by a powerful woman who, seeing their pleasure, says, “‘Giving a man a sword is like giving a woman a looking-glass; they have eyes left for nothing else.’” Economical, accurate, witty.

But Bengtsson is artful as well as humorous. I know little about the literature of early Scandinavia and Iceland but The Long Ships has a flavor of the saga. This is partly a question of the balance between scene and summary, the firm way the Teller of the Tale guides the reader through fallow patches of time where nothing much happens. Also important is an avowed respect for narrative, built into the culture under examination — which reveres storytelling as both entertainment and religion.

Perhaps the quality that charmed me most in this book, though, is glee. Our hero Orm the Red is a true hero: strong, wise, lucky. (Also something of a hypochondriac, the 20th-century twist of vulnerability without which he would be annoying.) He undertakes long voyages, meets enemies, makes friends. In his wiliness he is not unlike Odysseus. But The Long Ships reminded me even more strongly of  Patrick O’Brian’s work, not only for the particulars of the sea voyages but also for the cheerful mayhem and ultimate triumph of his early novel The Golden Ocean. As he travels all over Western Europe Orm meets with numerous setbacks and Bengtsson keeps the narrative tension strong by layering one conflict over another. Will Orm woo his lady? Will the evil king triumph? Who is the mysterious visitor at the gate? As one conflict is resolved another arises but we always trust Orm’s luck. Though the body count is astronomical, bloodshed and death are met philosophically.

This would be a wonderful book to take on a long plane trip — Tintin for grownups. It also demonstrates that, despite current evidence, not all Swedish writers are gloomy.

Carol Wallace, “Leaving Van Gogh”

No, I’m not actually going to review my own book! But I’ve made a page for it — see the tab above, far right. It doesn’t come out until April but we are starting to build an online profile for it. I’ve also made a Facebook fan page that will feature regular updates.

Joseph Roth, “The Radetzky March”

In a scene about three-quarters of the way through The Radetzky March , Joseph Roth shows us the old Emperor Franz Joseph reviewing troops in an eastern portion of the empire. The Emperor loves his troops, loves the noise, the pageantry, the horses, the polished brass — he regrets that on this day the men are all wearing “field gray uniforms,” an innovation that does not please him. Indeed, Roth has spent much of the novel until now lovingly describing the multi-colored gaiety created by the armed forces of the Austro-Hungarian empire. (Do listen to this: you actually know Strauss’s famous “Radetzky March” and having it in your head will make the novel all the more poignant.) He uses the showy external glory as a marker for social rank, as early as page 5. Young Joseph Trotta, having saved the life of the Emperor at the Battle of Solferino, has been elevated to the rank of Captain and the civil rank of Baron. As a new aristocrat he visits his father, a groundskeeper. The young man “stood… wearing a gleaming officer’s scarf, a lacquered helmet emanating virtually its own black sunshine, smooth fiery waxed riding boots with glittering spurs, two rows of lustrous, almost blazing buttons on his coat, and the blessing of the ethereal power of the Order of Maria Theresa.”

der Kaiser Franz Josef

Over and over in The Radetzky March, clothes make the man. But Roth makes the baubles work hard, too; they not only rank and place each character but they actually hold them together, carapace-like. And when, toward the end of the novel, the third-generation Baron von Trotta leaves the army, the shedding of the uniform becomes a ceremony of its own.

But I’ve gotten beyond myself. The first Trotta is the Hero of Solferino, a career military man. His son becomes an imperial administrator, the district captain of a town in Silesia. The third Trotta, Carl Joseph, a young man of very moderate gifts, follows his grandfather’s example and joins the cavalry. The relationships between the generations of men (wives & mothers conveniently dead: women are nothing but trouble in this book) are governed by formality and shyness. Roth moves smoothly from the point of view of one character to another, even-handedly exposing the aching tenderness, the yearning, the nascent affection. Even the Emperor functions paternally, with a perpetual beneficence toward the Trotta family.

Only, of course, it’s the early twentieth century. Roth seeds the tale with clues: telephones, labor unrest, ethnic and national impulses. Poor Carl Joseph, the main protagonist, loses first his mistress then his only friend to early deaths. He’s not going to outrun that shadow. (And Roth makes it, literally, a shadow: watch for the way he uses color throughout the book.) The set-piece in which the news of Sarajevo reaches Trotta is magnificently cinematic, with a thunderstorm, darkening skies, blasts of lightning prefiguring you-know-what.

“The Radetzky March is the great poem of elegy to Habsburg Austria,” said J. M. Coetzee in a wonderful New York Review of Books article back in 2002. I’m not going to argue.

Are You a Virago?

I finally looked the word up. I thought I knew that it meant an outspoken, hot-tempered woman — a shrew, in fact. My dictionary (Webster’s Third International: old school) offered “termagant” as a synonym. Don’t you love the word “termagant?” I hope to use it soon. But Webster’s also offered me “a woman of great stature, strength, and courage: one possessing supposedly masculine qualities of body and mind.” The root, of course, is the Latin vir, or man. The adjective, thrillingly, is “viraginous.”

When Virago Modern Classics began appearing back in the 1970s I assumed the name of the imprint referred to the supposedly shrewish, outspoken qualities of women. But I must have had it wrong. Virago, in this instance, probably referred to women of stature and courage — a wonderful name for an entity that published forgotten books by women.

Which brings me to the Virago Reading Week organized this month by Rachel of Book Snob and Carolyn of A Few of My Favourite Books. Latest news from Rachel is that it will kick off on Monday January 24, ending Sunday January 30. I was incredibly impressed by the spreadsheet put together by the Virago Modern Classics group on Librarything. For reviews, check Verity’s Virago Venture. I expect to do the bibliophile’s version of “shopping in your closet,” i.e. shopping on my book shelf. Antonia White’s Frost in May and Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian beckon, but I might also fall into the entertaining arms of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd.

So all that remains to be determined is how we pronounce the word. VirAYgo? VirAHgo? I await instructions.

(Post script: Instead of Aurora Floyd I read Enid Bagnold’s sublime The Loved and Envied. Even won a new Virago book for the post! Thanks, Rachel!)