Penelope Lively, “Moon Tiger”

Yes. Yes, I agree with all of you who have recommended Moon Tiger. Wonderful as Penelope Lively always is, this is probably her best book to date. (It won the Booker Prize in 1987.) I actually considered going right back to the beginning to read it all over again — Moon Tiger is one of those books that deals out information artfully. Not only does Lively keep the narrative tension going this way (i.e. exactly what IS going on between Claudia and her brother Gordon?) but also she often gives us scenes that alter the meaning of what has gone before. They’re like little explosions, altering the contours of what existed before, exposing what had previously been hidden.

British M3 Tank next to burned Panzer tank in No. Africa, June 1942. Courtesy Imperial War Museum

The novel begins with the elderly Claudia Hampton in a hospital bed, proclaiming that despite her advanced age and illness, she intends to write a history of the world. Pretty nervy — open your story with a character who’s trapped in a hospital bed? But Lively’s not a practitioner of the straightforward narrative, so before long we’re plunged into Claudia’s past, then her further past, then brought back to her present. We’re in her point of view, then in a third-person narrative, then in the point of view of another character. Sometimes even the dialogue overlaps between points of view, an approach that could be annoying but somehow isn’t. As for Claudia herself, she is unrepentantly uncongenial. Brilliant, stubborn, insensitive, beautiful, she has cut a swathe through mid-twentieth century highbrow England, first as a journalist based in Cairo during World War II, and later as a popular historian. She’s opinionated, impatient, and very, very interesting.

Claudia is drawn to conflict. Her longstanding relationship with Jasper, the father of her daughter Lisa, is often contentious. She’d just as soon have a loud argument as a peaceful discussion. Social convention and other people’s feelings bore her. Yet this is not one of those novels about characters whom the author despises or dislikes. Moon Tiger doesn’t even have the detachment of Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel. We readers are implicated in Claudia’s emotions and in the end, we are sympathetic. More, we share her thought process, which is fascinating. After all, Claudia is an historian, thinking about how narrative shapes history. The narrative of this novel is pleated and twisted like origami, to expose certain aspects of Claudia’s life to view, and to create a coherent outline. We are always aware of this process, never more so than when another voice is added at the end. But Lively is artful: she can draw attention to her materials and process while still immersing us in the illusion she creates.

A “Moon Tiger” is a form of insect repellent (to be found on eBay) — a green coil that you burn. There’s a Moon Tiger alight in one of the central scenes of the book. Atmosphere? Metaphor? Anybody want to tell me?

Margaret Mitchell, “Gone with the Wind”

Yes. It is still fabulous.

You’ll notice I’m assuming that you have read Gone with the Wind at some point, which may be a generational thing, but everyone has seen the movie, right? Sure, both book and movie are long, but with Hilary Mantel tearing up the best seller lists, I don’t see that length is a big objection. And, yes, Margaret Mitchell takes a patronizing view of blacks and her perspective on some aspects of post-Civil War Georgia politics is repugnant. But the plus side is that Gone with the Wind is a thrilling read, for all 1025 pages. You could look far and wide to find a better summer beach book, even if you think it’s old hat. From “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, though men seldom realized it…”  to “‘After all, tomorrow is another day,’” I was captivated.

Just in case you need a refresher: Scarlett is a headstrong Georgia belle whom we meet in April of 1861, as tiresome male war-mongering begins to interfere with her incessant flirtations. She is madly in love with Ashley Wilkes, a classic Southern gentleman of the bookish variety, fond of poetry and music, but the best horseman in the County. As war bears down on the South, Scarlett sees only her own tragedy when Ashley announces his engagement to his cousin Melanie Hamilton. In a private moment she declares her love for Ashley, who admits that he “cares” for her, but will marry Melanie nonetheless. This tender scene is unwillingly overheard by Rhett Butler, the bounder from Charleston, who is amused. In the first ten percent of the book, Mitchell has set up the conflicts that keep us turning the next 900 pages.

Of course Scarlett is the key to the whole thing. My goodness, what a piece of work she is — a monster-character along the lines of Angelica Deverell in Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel. Mitchell is very clear about Scarlett’s selfishness, obstinacy, limited intellectual gifts and poor judgment, but we remain fascinated. And not in a train-wreck way; somehow at the end of the book, when she meets a real defeat, we’re still rooting for her. I don’t remember where I read this but some writer recently pointed out that the great power of fiction is to make readers identify with the characters’ desires. We just can’t help it. So with a character like Scarlett who is all desire, we’re completely hooked.

Mitchell also does a great job managing the various levels of conflict in the novel. The Scarlett/Ashley/Rhett triangle separates and re-forms repeatedly as Scarlett marries, first out of pique, and second out of practicality. The war, of course, keeps the tension high, especially as Union troops approach Atlanta. But there’s also consistent confrontation between the Old South and the New, which Mitchell sees in rueful, elegiac terms. The cultivation and aesthetic charms of the old South, along with its essential values of hospitality, loyalty and gentility, are embodied in Ashley’s wife Melanie, who shows courage under pressure and kindness to all. She dies, of course, leaving the world to Scarlett, with her relentless energy and drive. Rhett has just delivered his deathless line — “‘My dear, I don’t give a damn” — but Scarlett is indomitable, and maybe that’s why we follow her through the book with fascination and a tinge of envy.

Elizabeth Taylor, “A View of the Harbour”

Elizabeth Taylor is one of the few writers whose books I will choose blindly. If she wrote a novel and I haven’t read it, I don’t even bother to see what it’s about. Or “about,” because with Taylor there’s always a great deal seething away below the surface. A View of the Harbour, for instance, is one of the more ostensibly quiet of her novels. The structure is apparently casual: the omniscient narrator rambles from one resident to another of the seaside village of Newby, examining the little community and its surroundings in a clear, dispassionate light.

Cadgwith Cove, probably more picturesque than Taylor’s Newby.

The outlander is Bertram Hemingway, a retired naval officer who fancies himself an artist and has come to Newby to paint. His function for Taylor, of course, is to be the outsider who misunderstands or the outsider who notices afresh, and provides insight. The two genteel families are the Cazabons and their next-door neighbor, Tory Foyle. Tory is an unstable element in this setting, a beautiful young divorcee with a young son and a propensity for fecklessness. Beth Cazabon, the novelist who lives next door, has always been Tory’s staid, predictable sidekick. But, this being an Elizabeth Taylor novel, Beth Cazabon has her own unruly qualities. In Angela Thirkell’s hands, she would merely be the frumpy neighbor with the peculiar daughters, but Beth, as Tory points out, has a wild and reliable source of satisfaction in her writing. “‘She is about the only happy person I know,’” Tory tells Robert Cazabon. “‘Don’t you see how she is to be envied? Nothing people do can ever break her.’”

And why is Tory discussing Robert’s wife with him, on these intimate terms? Well might you ask: this relationship is another un-Thirkell development. So is the coarse but vital Mrs. Bracey, fat, crippled and malicious, who makes life grim for her daughters Maisie and Iris. Then the widowed Lily Wilson, proprietress of a pathetic Wax Museum, seems on the verge of slipping into alcoholism or a kind of informal prostitution or possibly both. In fact A View of the Harbour resembles Stella Gibbons’ classic Cold Comfort Farm, with its relish of peculiarities. Taylor, though, avoids Gibbons‘ satiric tone, so we participate in Lily Wilson’s desperation and Mrs. Bracey’s will to dominate.

And what happens in the novel? Oh, life and death. The war is recently over, Newby is poor and shabby. Summer comes and the tourists don’t. Bertram doesn’t paint. Maisie flirts with her mother’s lodger, a fisherman, and Mrs. Bracey kicks him out of the house. The Cazabons’ daft daughter Prudence feeds disgusting messes to her two elegant Siamese cats, Yvette and Guilbert. Tory buys frivolous hats. A yacht skims the water of the bay, white sails looking irrelevant in their beauty. Hats, cats, boats, hearts, they’re all equally important.

Elizabeth Taylor, “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont”

The cover of the Virago edition of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont shows Rupert Friend wearing a modish blue muffler, with his head tossed back as he roars with laughter, and Joan Plowright (also mufflered, though hers is pink) in profile, looking robust and contemporary. It’s a still from the 2006 film of the book, and you can’t blame the publishers for using it, but as I read, the image got further and further from the book’s action. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is Elizabeth Taylor’s foray into Barbara Pym land and there’s very little in the way of full-throated laughter. In fact it’s hard to know how it could have been made into a film without being made either cutesy or sentimental.

There is certainly humor in the novel: Taylor’s sharp observations can be very funny. But by the end, this is an unflinching look at the loneliness and humiliation of old age  that tallies in many particulars with Penelope Lively’s How It All Began. The difference is that Laura Palfrey, the heroine — yes, I think we can call her a heroine — of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a woman of a different era from Charlotte Rainsford of How It All Began. Like Charlotte, she’s a widow with a middle-aged daughter. We glean that she spent a great deal of time abroad as a Foreign Service wife. Stoicism and patience are her strengths. She certainly needs them at the Claremont, a dreary London hotel where she takes up residence. We get to know a core of other long-term boarders  and at first we might be in E.F. Benson territory, with the bibulous Mrs. Burton, the mousy Mrs. Post, the wicked Mrs. Arbuthnot on her crutches and ludicrous Mr. Osmond with his perpetual letters to the newspapers. Taylor isn’t above poking fun at them — even Mrs. Palfrey is described amusingly: “She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.”

Funny is too easy, though. One day Mrs. Palfrey trips and falls outside the basement flat of the charming young Ludovic Myers, who takes her in and cleans her up and gives her a cup of tea. This, obviously, is the Rupert Friend part. The two form a desultory friendship and at the Claremont Ludovic is taken for Mrs. Palfrey’s grandson. Possession of an attractive young person does wonders for her status, and Taylor could have played this for laughs: the real and impostor grandsons, the jealous old ladies, the hand-knit sweater with the too-long sleeves, intended for Desmond (real) but given to Ludo (fake). Instead, with the lightest of touches, Taylor indicates Ludovic’s own loneliness and his own sense of honor and independence. It’s honest and touching, but far from heart-warming. Much more interesting than that.

Elizabeth Taylor, “Angel”

Why is it that we so enjoy reading about monstrous characters? In the early pages of Angel, I was thrilled/appalled by the behavior of fifteen-year-old Angelica Deverell — but definitely more thrilled. In fact I’d been anticipating reading Angel for quite some time. It’s probably Elizabeth Taylor’s best-known novel, owing in part to the 2007 film that starred Romola Garai (below). But Angel seems to stand out even among Taylor’s wonderful novels, on the strength of the title character and the remarkably steely narrative voice.

Angel loves her Persian kitties more than any human.

When we meet Angel, she is being raked over the coals by her English teacher because an essay she has written seems suddenly, suspiciously fluent. Plagiarism is suspected. “She doesn’t believe I wrote it, she thought, glancing with contempt at the flustered little woman…. Who does she think wrote it if I didn’t? Who does she think could?” Thus Angel begins and thus she goes on for the entire book — a character like this one doesn’t develop. She just exists, and lets life break around her like waves around a rock (a simile Angel herself might have used). Angel, it turns out, doesn’t read. Has no friends. Lives in a pokey industrial town, above a grocery store. And to rescue herself from the inevitable humiliation of life as a working-class teenage girl at the turn of the 20th century, she resorts to writing fiction.

Oh, yes — another life ruined by books. Or is it rescued? One of the remarkable features of Elizabeth Taylor’s narration here is her scrupulous attitude toward Angel. She neither judges nor explains. No Freudian theories, no evidence that her cowed mother mistreats her, no bids for sympathy, no efforts to make this character more attractive.

What Angel does have, besides a gift for purple prose, is unshakable faith in herself and an imagination that substitutes for empathy. Taylor describes this process early in the novel — it’s a question of Angel’s accumulating details to construct an alternative world:

… she dreamed through the lonely evenings, closing her eyes to create the darkness where Paradise House could take shape, embellished and enlarged day after day — with colonnades and cupolas, archways and flights of steps…. Acquisitively, from photographs and drawings in history  books, she added one detail after another. That will do for Paradise House, was an obsessive formula which became a daily habit. The white peacocks would do;… as would the cedar trees at school.”

And what’s really happening? Angel is learning “to deny her identity, slowly cosseting herself away from the truth. She was learning to triumph over reality, and the truth was beginning to leave her in peace.”

So guess what Angel becomes?  A novelist, what else? An immensely popular novelist, able eventually to craft her reality so that it reflects her fantasies: grand house, garish clothes, handsome artist husband. The drama that keeps us reading is generated throughout the book by Angel’s collisions with existence itself. Will she give way? Will she even notice that her books have stopped selling, that the peacocks are ill, that her husband is unfaithful? By the end, we rather want her to remain indomitable. Maybe that’s the precise point of the monstrous character: that she, unlike us, is impervious to life.

Elizabeth Taylor, “In a Summer Season”

In a Summer Season opens with Kate Heron waiting on the steps of her mother-in-law’s London house, trying not to be intimidated or annoyed. She has come for lunch; her hostess is apparently not yet out of bed; she disapproves of the all-white drawing room. Yet when Edwina comes downstairs Kate instantly feels like a country bumpkin.

Wrong period but elegant.

Mid-twentieth century, middlebrow, upper-middle-class English characters: I could leave it right there. Elizabeth Taylor’s eleven novels are published by Virago and both Angel and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont have been made into movies with appealing actors like Romola Garai, Rupert Friend, and Joan Plowright. When I tell  you that Elizabeth Taylor was a great friend of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s, that should complete the context.

But I’d be denying myself considerable fun, because Taylor has a great many quirky gifts. For instance she’s a splendid eavesdropper with excellent comic timing. Listen to sixteen-year-old Louisa, in an awkward farewell to the village curate (who is, yes, going over to Rome!):

‘Are you very short-sighted?’ she asked, for everything about him was important to her.

‘I have unilateral amblyopia,’  he said.

Kind of a conversation-stopper, no? Then there’s the way Louisa says her prayers, “as if dictating to an inexperienced secretary.” Even so, the funny bits sell Taylor short because there’s considerable emotional truth wrapped up here as well. Eventually — Taylor doles out the information gradually — we learn that Kate’s second husband Dermot is some ten years younger than she. The money is Kate’s; Dermot doesn’t actually work. (When the book opens, he is growing mushrooms for a living.) Dermot, it transpires, is an incipient alcoholic, and the chapter that makes this plain is one of the best characterizations of alcoholism I’ve ever read, from the grandiosity to the shame. The household also includes a cook, Kate’s 22-year-old son, and the dread spinster aunt Ethel who plays the cello and writes endless letters to her chum Gertrude, with whom she was imprisoned as a suffragette. There isn’t so much a plot as there are incidents, including one sorting jumble at the parish house.

That last sentence was a test. If you know what “jumble” is, In a Summer Season is for you.

Elizabeth Taylor, “A Game of Hide and Seek”

I read Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian back in January as part of the highly enjoyable Virago Reading Week. As if it weren’t enough fun to read splendid books and read other people’s reviews of them, Rachel of Book Snob and Carolyn of A Few of My Favourite Books had prizes to distribute and I was lucky enough to receive A Game of Hide and Seek. I was thrilled — and that was before I read it.

Palladian plays with the Jane Eyre tradition, with a mousy governess and handsome widower in a decaying country house. A Game of Hide and Seek alludes to Madame Bovary, and there is a moment when poor Emma is mentioned explicitly. Harriet is the restless wife, married to dull solicitor Charles (Charles!) Jephcott in a nameless English provincial town in the 1950s. Her Léon/Rodolphe is Vesey, a childhood friend, but here the Bovary resemblance is reversed. It is Vesey rather than Harriet who has learned about life from unsavory books (“Wells and Tchekov, Kipling and Edgar Allan Poe”). Briefly, Vesey and Harriet flirt as teenagers, and when they meet again as adults, the sexual spark re-awakens. Vesey can’t resist twitching the thread of attraction and Harriet can’t resist… well, him. For Vesey is a bad boy, skinny and dark-haired — think the young Bryan Ferry, perhaps. He is neglected by his parents and prone to drama: “In his mother’s room one day he put on her jewellery, sniffed at her scent, varnished his nails, read a book on birth control, took six aspirins, then lay down like Chatterton on the window-seat, his hands drooping to the floor.  When the housekeeper returned, he had half-opened his eyes. ‘I am doing away with myself,’ he had said. ‘I have supped my full of horrors.’”

Harriet’s appeal is more muted. She is loyal, shy, not obviously talented, the kind of girl for whom Something must be Found until she marries. When life separates her from Vesey, domesticity is her only option. And she tries, she really does: “When she married Charles, she had seemed to wed also a social order. A convert to it, and to provincial life, and keeping house, she had pursued it fanatically… No one had entertained more methodically, or better bolstered up social interplay.”

Among Vesey's transgressions: gray suede shoes

The tension in the novel twines around this mismatched pair, naturally. But in retrospect I also find fascinating Taylor’s focus on the various mothers, the good, the bad, the indifferent, and the fates of their children. Something in the air at the time (1951) when the book was first published? In any event I greatly enjoyed Harriet’s mother-in-law Julia Jephcott. An aging actress, she exists to needle her awkward son Charles and to entertain the readers: “Mad, raffish, unselfconscious, she had the beautiful and calm air of one who has all her life acknowledged compliments… She seemed to be lovely still to herself, as if no amount of looking into mirrors could ruin her illusion.” Well, with a mother like that, no wonder he yearns after serious little Harriet.

Despite the simplicity of her premise, Taylor keeps us guessing, both with the stop-and-go pacing and with the unexpected but deeply-felt emotional development of her characters. Some of the book is very funny — in particular a scene involving an arcane beauty ritual carried out by novices. Yet the scene that stays with me is Harriet and Vesey walking through a damp park at twilight, holding hands and yearning.

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.