I’ll give you a minute.

Maybe if I add a photo of my passport?

Yes! You got it! I’m heading to  Highclere! Not only that — I’m going on a tour billed as “At Home with the Edwardians: A Tour of Downton Abbey Film Locations.” And I am the “Study Leader.” So I’m studying — hence Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey.  

I must admit I had avoided Lady Almina, largely out of envy, because this book outsells my own To Marry an English Lord and because its author, the Countess, gets to actually live at Highclere. But it was an entertaining and informative read. Almina Wombwell was the illegitimate daughter of Alfred de Rothschild. In a very sophisticated arrangement, her parents stayed together and Rothschild bankrolled Almina’s dowry as well as numerous subsequent expenses. The two appear to have been very happy together, which creates a challenge for the author. Much of the early part of the book is devoted to the running of Highclere, both upstairs and down; Carnarvon clearly had access to excellent records but even anecdotes about the castle’s inhabitants don’t quite add up to a story. Far more interesting was Almina’s devotion to medical care during World War I — she set up a rehabilitation unit at Highclere and later in London. And there’s fascinating material about her husband the Earl of Carnarvon’s Egyptian obsession. He bankrolled Howard Carter’s excavations in the Valley of the Kings, and the two opened King Tut’s tomb together. Almina was there. It’s quite a spell-binding moment, and Carnarvon does a great job with the historical context and the competing political agendas.

As for A Night to Remember, surely you remember those first moments of Season 1, Episode 1, when Lord Grantham takes up his freshly-ironed newspaper and reads that the Titanic has sunk? Evidently Walter Lord’s book about that event is still authoritative. He interviewed scores of survivors and put together a deceptively simple moment-by-moment narrative that makes for amazingly suspenseful reading, considering that we all know more or less what happened. It’s the fascination of the horror movie, when you see the monster creeping up on the campfire where all those innocents are cluelessly toasting marshmallows. Lord speculates that the Titanic tragedy still exerts fascination as a kind of precursor to the loss of innocence brought about by World War I. He doesn’t press the point, but the sinking of the unsinkable ship does make for an excellent metaphor. The assurance of the 19th century gives way to the jittery insecurity of the 20th — and all because we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

Entrance to Horne Barracks, Larkhill, England; photo Trish Steel. A world apart.

But the book business has changed, as I never cease noticing, and moderately well-known writers like Trollope have gotten somewhat lost in the shuffle. Her books now lack that essential quality, “discoverability.” Which is a horrible word, but useful, since it stands for something we writers didn’t used to worry about: the potential for a book to appear on a reader’s radar. I would have thought that Trollope had retained legions of loyal readers even in the US, but I’m not sure that’s true since even I, a loyal fan, stumble over them by accident. (So much for Amazon’s algorithms.)

I was a little bit apprehensive about The Soldier’s Wife; afraid it might be more of a polemic than a novel. And Trollope obviously did do a lot of research about family issues in the military. But I should have trusted in her ability to transform research into a fictional world, and above all to create believable characters. So Alexa Riley’s apprehension about her husband Major Dan Riley’s return from deployment in Afghanistan is utterly convincing, as is Dan’s disorientation. So are the wives on the base, so are Dan’s commanding officers and colleagues. Trollope has always had a special gift for writing about children, and the three-year-old twins, Flora and Tassy, are practically scene-stealers.

Trollope’s perennial source of conflict is the differing needs and desires of her appealing characters. In The Soldier’s Wife, as you’d expect, the stresses of Army life are laid out in detail: the impermanence, the lack of control, the rigid hierarchy, the old-fashioned assumption that a military wife must subordinate her career aims to her husband’s. Dan, returning from the violence and unpredictability of Helmand Province, is jumpy and preoccupied. Alexa, who loves him, is overwhelmed and resentful. Dan is a good officer, likely to be promoted, and the Army is his identity. Alexa’s thirteen-year-old daughter Isabel, from a previous marriage, precipitates much of the action by running away from a despised boarding school. Maybe the resolution feels a little bit rushed. Maybe if you’re not a total Trollope fan, you’ll feel the book is formulaic. I still found it very absorbing.

And do admit: aren’t you curious to see what Trollope is going to make of Sense and Sensibility?

An 1815 set for “The Magic Flute,” by Karl Friedrich Schinkel

As we know, the border between the literal and the fantastic isn’t a very comfy place for me. The same is true of earnest, hardworking young Alice Pilling, who when we meet her is a third form student in a mediocre girls’ school. Into the school, and Alice’s life, erupts Jem McCrail, a brilliant and iconoclastic life force, even if she is only thirteen. Trapido lays out her premise in the first sentence: “Jem was a joyful mystery to Alice.” And even though Jem disappears from school after a few months, her influence shapes Alice’s response to life for years thereafter. I can only give you the barest bones of the plot because it’s quite rambunctious, for a story about a clever girl’s coming of age. There are deaths and births, seductions and betrayals, three suitors for Alice… oh, golly. Do I see an allegory appearing? Does it mean something that Alice’s first boyfriend is named Roland? Or that Mozart’s The Magic Flute keeps shuffling in and out of the narrative? Of course it does.

And what, exactly, is Trapido driving at, with an infant named Pamina and a devilish-looking love interest named Angeletti, and nuns everywhere? I didn’t even try to sort it all out. For me, Trapido’s strong suit is charm, and Temples of Delight provided several hours of delicious reading.

Griffiths manages two unusual achievements in  Dying Fall. The first is transferring her cast of characters to a new setting. Ruth, Nelson, and the Druid Cathbad are usually found in Norfolk. But in Dying Fall, they head north to Lancashire. All of them. Ruth goes on a semi-academic quest, Nelson and his wife Michelle go on a family vacation. Yes, of course they meet up. Sometimes mystery series rooted in a certain locale lose energy when they’re uprooted (as in Craig Johnson taking his protagonist Walt Longmire to Philadelphia). Not the case here, though. Ruth and her entourage work just fine off their home turf.

Imagine an amusement park filled with people wearing Simon Cowell masks…

Which brings me to the second achievement: in this novel Griffiths delicately and successfully bridges mayhem and humor. Here, for instance, we’re in the head of Maureen, Nelson’s redoubtable Irish Catholic mother, in church.

Now, Maureen prays angrily for her favourite child. Please, God, let him see the error of his arrogant ways. Keep him safe, Lord, and let him realise his many blessings. At the sign of peace she holds Michelle’s hand tightly. Though she doesn’t know why, she suddenly feels very protective towards her daughter-in-law.

‘Peace be with you, my darling,’ she says huskily.

‘Thank you,’ says Michelle, who can never remember what she’s meant to say in return.

In fact there’s quite a bit of material about belief systems in Dying Fall. Readers of Griffiths‘ previous books will be familiar with the slightly loopy quality of Cathbad the Druid, who was originally Michael Malone. (He verges on New Age-annoying, but his sincerity and kindness, as well as his devotion to Ruth and Kate, make him sympathetic.) Then in addition to Maureen Nelson’s Catholicism we encounter a skeleton that may be King Arthur’s, which is of great interest to a group of white supremacists operating around a small Lancashire university. That, obviously, is where Ruth and Nelson’s mystery-solving capacities come in handy. But Griffiths also alludes to a contemporary faith in celebrity. The climactic scene of the novel takes place in an amusement park where, for some obscure reason, many of the visitors are wearing masks with the likeness of Simon Cowell on them. It’s as nightmarish as any of the more conventionally creepy scenes in this satisfying book.

Kenya Railways today, courtesy The Daily Nation (Kenya’s national newspaper)

Here’s the premise. Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson was an Army officer on loan to the British East Africa Company, sent out to monitor the construction of a railroad bridge across the Tsavo River in what is now Kenya. Read his Wikipedia bio: this guy did a little bit of everything, though it made me queasy to think of him as a game warden. More on that in a jiffy. This book, published in 1907, is his somewhat discursive account of adventures with a pair of lions during the erection of the bridge. The railway line was built by the British in 1896-1901, running inland from the port of Mombasa all the way to Lake Victoria, using largely Indian laborers (“coolies”). The lions of the title disrupted the progress of the rail line by devouring dozens of members of the railway crew. It was Patterson who ultimately killed both lions, and the narrative backbone of this book is the man/beast struggle. But as in many travelogues, the structure is quite loose, with little pen portraits of various “characters” and descriptions of the several tribes Patterson came into contact with, as well as a lot of big-game bragging. Which is hard to read now, even if you try to think of it as quaint. Patterson killed a great many animals and writes about the process in detail, including tips on how to get your trophies back to England and where to have them stuffed. The skins of the titular lions were ultimately sold to the Field Museum in Chicago for $5,000.

Yet overall this is an entertaining, even a jolly read, probably owing to Patterson’s enthusiasm for his job and for Africa itself. It’s hard not to patronize him as an author, reading from our more anxious vantage point. But it’s equally hard not to be charmed by his perception of Africa as some kind of Eden. What makes this interesting is that he is Adam before the fall — this is the rare Africa narrative that’s almost free of nostalgia. Even Winston Churchill’s My African Journey (published six years earlier) focuses more clearly and more accurately on the sometimes disastrous impact that British colonial policy is going to have on eastern Africa.

Oh, and here’s a progress update: it is now illegal to kill game in Kenya. The railroad tracks Patterson worked on now divide the  the massive Kenyan national parks known as Tsavo East and Tsavo West. And trains still run on the meter-wide track, between Mombasa and Nairobi. Maximum speed is 30 m.p.h.

Goya’s “Vendimia” — Soames owns a copy and thinks the girl resembles Fleur

Are you confused about what I just read? I’m confused and I’ve got the book on my desk. The cover says The Forsyte Saga Volume 2. The three novels in it are The White Monkey; The Silver Spoon; and Swan Song.  I think some of my confusion stems from the fact that the individual novels of the original trilogy are better known; people have heard of The Man of Property. But by the time you get around to The White Monkey, you’re not reading a stand-alone volume. You’re in it for the long haul. And the long haul is deeply, deeply satisfying.

For one thing, it’s got more narrative tension than the original trilogy. Soames is still the central character but the defining relationship is really between him and his headstrong daughter Fleur whom he loves with all his heart. As Soames personifies the nineteenth century, Fleur personifies the twentieth. She is the pretty, capricious, quicksilver woman who cannot find contentment. As Soames says toward the end of the novel — speaking about his other passion, painting –

‘I remember the first shows in London of those post-impressionists and early Cubist chaps. But they ran riot with the war, catching at things they couldn’t get.’

He stopped. It was exactly what she — !”

What Fleur wanted that she couldn’t get was her cousin Jon, who is also the son of Soames’ first wife Irene. My, that is complicated. It’s not incest, really, but given the intense bad feeling between Soames and Irene and consequently the rest of the Forsyte family, the Fleur/Jon romance is doomed. Which is of course a lovely plot for a novelist and Galsworthy spins this out over his three volumes, allowing plenty of time for the ramifications to develop. On the rebound from her first romantic episodes with Jon, Fleur marries Michael Mont, an appealing  young politician who knows that he is her second choice. Michael’s age, aristocratic connections, and parliamentary career give the novelist scope to dramatize many of the cultural questions of the day, from World War I to the General Strike to slum clearance.

But we always come back to Soames and Fleur. He knows — as does the reader — that she’s spoiled. He knows he’s partly at fault. Inarticulate as always, he does his best to protect her from her mistakes, as any parent would, and as no parent actually can. Fittingly, Soames dies protecting Fleur from yet another of her destructive impulses. And though it’s a perfectly appropriate ending to this volume, I still want more Forsytes. Maybe the best story-telling is always addictive?

I do remember, though, that many of the writers who engaged in this kind of fractured story-telling — like Dickinson –are  very skilled, and that each time the fictional rug is jerked from beneath your feet, there’s a small shock. In those days Dickinson seemed especially interested in the way new information can solve old puzzles, so you can see how the technique works well in suspense fiction. The Last House Party isn’t even strictly a murder mystery, though there is a death: it focuses on a baffling episode of a molested child. That bit takes place in an English country house in the 1930s, during the gathering of a clique of proto-Fascists. (Think Cliveden set.) The present-day narrative includes letters that drop the reader into the African desert in World War II, as well as details of running Snailwood House as a contemporary Stately Home. I have to admit that I am not even entirely sure I know what happened: Dickinson’s exposition is so very oblique that I may have missed a few key points.

The same is true of Death of a Unicorn, but in that case it’s because the central ugly behavior involves post-World War II currency controls. The narrator is Lady Margaret Millett, heiress to another big English country house.  In the contemporary segments, she’s the iron-willed chatelaine and author of immensely popular historical romances, but the roots of the story are in the London Season long ago. Wonderful social history, of course — reminiscent of both Julian Fellowes’ Past Imperfect and of The Pursuit of Love, especially in the way it de-glamorizes the aristocracy at play. So if you wanted a faintly jaundiced view of the state of English debutantes from roughly 1935 to 1970, you could read Mitford, Dickinson, Fellowes in that order. Now there’s a project for a rainy day!

The sleeve was, as is well known, Balenciaga’s obsession: everyone connected with the house remembers anguished cries of la manga and the awful sound of the master ripping one out at the last moment.

“The sleeve was a mania with him and always a problem,” Florette said. “In those days the buyers came by ship and their orders had to be ready to leave with them, not on the next ship. Once I had a huge delivery and I saw he was taking apart the sleeves of a dress I had to ship that night. I said, Monsieur Balenciaga, you can’t do this, they have to be there at six p.m. He said, they can’t leave like this, and kept on working. I finally started to cry and he said I was bad-tempered — et en plus elle a un mauvais caractère – and kept right on pinning.”

Maybe The Master of Us All is the literary equivalent of one of those wonderful fashion documentaries like The September Issue or Valentino: The Last Emperor. It offers the insider’s view, the unscripted moments. Missing, of course, are color and motion, but what you do get with a book is the ability to control the pace of your experience. And I found that valuable with The Master of Us All: there are so many delicious moments that I wanted to linger over or return to. Like the fact that when Christian Dior died, “his otherwise hard-headed business manager told Japanese television that it was because God needed Dior to dress His angels.” (It was Dior who dubbed Balenciaga “the master of us all.”) Not wholly relevant, but too good to leave out, I guess.

Irving Penn photo of his wife Lisa Fonssagrives in a Balenciaga dress, taken for Vogue in 1950. Courtesy National Gallery of Art

This little book is full of splendid nuggets like that. I got the sense that Mary Blume had been collecting material for years. Her primary source seems to have been Florette Chelot, Balenciaga’s head vendeuse, a position of enormous power (and earning power) in the heyday of couture. Blume was lucky enough to get to know Florette in the 1960s and to benefit from Florette’s generosity with discounted Balenciaga outfits. She stays out of the story until the end, though, preferring to showcase Florette, an appealing, good-natured but hard-headed woman who thought the world of Balenciaga.

If you’ve read this far, it’s because you you admire the clothes. There aren’t many glamorous photographs in the book — there are other books for that — mostly grainy black and white candids, with a slender insert of color. You’ll know also about Balenciaga’s famous reticence, dignity, and perfectionism. As Blume says, “Those who admire him want to know him better, aware that we cannot really know him at all. A paradox, and mighty unsatisfactory, but also a homage of sorts — to the art, the discretion, and even the contradictions of the man.”

No one loved Palewski for his looks

I do now have the facts about Palewski straight, though I don’t expect to remember them for very long. Much of The Horror of Love is devoted to his career in post-World War II French politics and I’m sorry to say I flipped through that business pretty quickly. It’s the kind of history I can only absorb through spy novels, apparently. Perhaps it would be accurate to indicate that Palewski was a kind of pilot-fish or consigliere to De Gaulle; the fellow who communicated the Great Man’s ideas to the wider public. I do remember that Palewski ended up as French Ambassador to Italy in the 1960s, blissfully inhabiting the Palazzo Farnese. One of the interests Palewski and Mitford shared was traditional, aristocratic European civilization. (Late in the book, after Gaston has married the Duchesse de Talleyrand-Perigord, he semi-apologizes to a friend for his social climbing by saying, “What do you want? I’ve always loved high ceilings.”)

Lisa Hilton has a good sense of the clever quotation or the picturesque detail, quoting some of the more entertaining or outrageous Mitford slang or behavior (to curse someone, the sisters would write a name on a piece of paper and put it in a drawer. I plan to try this soon). She is also a staunch Nancy partisan, which befits a biographer. She admires Nancy’s courage and wit, defending what might appear to contemporary readers as malice or coldness. Nancy’s method for handling setbacks was always to maintain her composure and make a joke, but this sometimes makes her look cruel. Hilton sees it otherwise.

Nancy, on the other hand, was lovely

Fair enough. There’s an elegance to the stiff upper lip. But I found Nancy’s intense nostalgia and distaste for the modern era snobbish and distasteful, while her anti-Americanism made me furious. I’ve enjoyed  her biographies of 18th century figures like Madame de Pompadour and Frederick the Great, but after reading The Horror of Love I have a lingering sense of Nancy pulling aside her New Look skirts so as not to be smirched by the populism of the 20th century. And Hilton’s portrayal of Gaston Palewski fades next to Nancy’s fictional version, Fabrice. In the end, the affair could be described in the French aphorism that Hilton quotes: en amour, il y a toujours l’un qui embrasse, et l’autre qui tend la joue. Nancy kissed, Gaston held out his cheek.

Cross-section of a Parisian apartment house by Edmond Texier, 1852

I got a big kick out of the structure of the novel. The link among the characters is the apartment block itself, placing Tigerlily’s Orchids in a tradition that goes back into the nineteenth century. For instance, Emile Zola’s Pot-Bouille (usually translated as Pot Luck) follows the entwined lives of a group of apartment dwellers. In Rendell’s hands the device feels like one of those clever cartoons exposing a cross-section of a multi-dwelling building and catching the inhabitants in private moments. For instance:

Claudia Livorno came through the swing doors, carrying a bottle of Verdicchio and walking gingerly because the step outside was icy and her heels were high. She rang the bell of Flat 1.

Olwen had nothing in Flat 6 to eat except bread and jam, so she ate that and, when she woke up from her long afternoon sleep, started on a newly opened bottle of gin… In the flat below hers, Marius Potter was sitting in an armchair that had belonged to his grandmother reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the second time.