Books read in April

A Clutch Of Constables – Ngaio Marsh
Interesting premiss, but sadly lacking in any real tension which is a shame as that would have made it a first class novel rather than the run-of-the-mill example it turned out to be. But this is Marsh and even her also-ran efforts are well written and well constructed.


A Storm Of Wings – M John Harrison
The second novel set in and around Viriconium, a long life-time after the events of The Pastel City. There is a nod, here, to Wells and to Kneale with the insect-like aliens and their psychic effect, but viewed through Harrison’s inimitable lens.


Dorothy Richardson The Genius They Forgot – John Rosenberg
A concise biography of Dorothy Miller Richardson (and given the way she guarded her private life, it is remarkable there is as much material as there is) which displays how abysmally artists and writers can be treated in the UK. DRM and her husband Alan Odle were both amongst the best in their respective fields, yet they lived in abject poverty all their lives. Interwoven with the biography is a literary appreciation of DRM’s life work. As this is largely autobiographical it is interesting to compare the fiction with the fact. A desperately sad book, yet I couldn’t help feeling I wanted to know more.


Peter Pan – J M Barrie
The bittersweet tale of the boy who didn’t want to grow up. The final chapter gives me shivers every time I read it. And the whole book delivers on so many levels it is always worth a re-read.


When In Rome – Ngaio Marsh
Efficient, but ultimately there is the feeling this was written to fit an intriguing location rather than because the story came first.


Tied Up In Tinsel – Ngaio Marsh
Perhaps reading the books in quick succession makes them easier to ‘read’. The particular tricks of the author are easier to spot. However, the book is well-written, the puzzle is genuine and well thought out if under-developed.


Black As He’s Painted – Ngaio Marsh
Marsh hits form here with an intriguing thriller/whodunnit. She sticks well within the bounds expected of her genre, but nonetheless manages (with its setting and its nod to the after effects of colonialism) to convey a whole other novel lurking just beneath the surface.


50 Literature Ideas You Really Need To Know – John Sutherland
Part of a series of ‘50 Ideas...’ this would probably be a useful teaching tool for A level students – each chapter the basis for discussion. It starts well and clearly, if with a somewhat random approach. And it never clearly makes its mind up about whether it is a primer on literary criticism, analysis, and theory or whether it is about the creative processes involved in writing.

It is also a book that suffers all the problems associated with writing to someone else’s formula. Despite starting strongly, Sutherland clearly ran out of ideas or steam before he got to the fifty. He seems to have packed the end with some pretty trite observations on modern trends that are, perhaps, intended to make the book up to date whereas they just make it look silly.

It further suffers from the fact that the author cannot keep his opinions (offered as snide little asides) to himself; and sometimes it is difficult to know whether they are his opinions or those of the theorists he is discussing. Clarity here is essential and it fades the further you get into the book, as if perhaps the author didn’t quite understand his later topics.

All in all an entertaining read, but if you want something with depth, clarity, and a clear structure, this is not the book to go to.


The Letter Killers Club – Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
It is a real joy to discover an author for one’s self, especially one who wrote work that is so in tune with the kind of thing one likes best. Heartbreaking as well to learn of his life of rejection (hardly surprising in Stalinist Russia) and of how his life ended. At least he had good friends who preserved his work and saw to its eventual publication. And thus, the world of letters is a better place.

This novella grew out of an incident in Krzhizhanovsky’s early life. Living in poverty in Moscow he received word of his mother’s death. The only way he could afford to travel the hundreds of miles back home was to sell his only possessions – his books. Having gone through a period of my own when nearly all my books were sold, I can begin (but only begin) to imagine what that meant.

In the novella, this is the starting point. It tells of someone who has to sell their books and who then, on trying and failing to recall the contents of the books, populates their shelves with imaginary tomes. This, in turn, provides the material for many successful books of their own – something that had previously eluded them. Later in life, however, this author has become convinced that committing things to paper destroys the purity of their conceptions and starts a secret society where authors meet to speak their ideas to the air and fill a set of empty shelves so that their ideas remain pure and untainted by the interpretations of others.

The stories told at the club are philosophical, surreal, and exceedingly rich. Yet this is Russia in the 1920s. What, on the surface, appears to be a slightly offbeat conceit has much darker under currents. The notion that one must gather in secret to share thoughts, that one dare not commit them to public scrutiny, that the club itself begins to mirror the external world... all this and more is both a comment on the construction of fiction and its place in the world as well as casting a sharp eye on the political environment in which the novella was written.

The translation is well made and what we know of Krzhizhanovsky through his life is apparent in the writing. He was clearly widely read and had a unique eye with which to view the world. And although he is at times biting in his criticism of the world in which he lived, it never becomes polemical. He makes the stories serve his purpose.

I loved this so much I have just ordered another volume of his work and look forward to the day that his other writings appear in English. If you like modernist writing, if you like sharp writing, if you like to see how a writer can be subversive, how surrealism works, if you want a great example of outright good writing, you could do a lot worse than this.


Tous Des Monstres! – Jacques Tardi
An old adversary returns in another beautifully drawn adventure. Post WWI Paris is lovingly recreated and populated with the usual cast of bizarre characters (including clowns ) and a whole host of monsters. Adèle now sports a suitably ‘20s hairstyle and is still as lovably acid as ever.


Le Mystère Des Profondeurs – Jacques Tardi
More favourite characters return along with a female assassin who turns out to be... Well, I’m not giving that away. Monsters and criminals still infest a Paris unremittingly bleak beneath rainy skies.  


Poetics – Aristotle
A classic, in so many ways. Aristotle analyses tragedy and throws in a side dish on epic poetry. The result is a concise account of the elements of plot, character, and presentation and how they are best combined with other aspects to create the best drama. Although the text is short (less than fifty pages in my edition), Aristotle’s analysis is key to the understanding of literature. It introduces key ideas (such as mimesis and katharsis) that have informed literature ever since. And although many of the ideas have since been deliberately overturned, inverted, and subverted, one can only really understand that in light of the Poetics.


The Shape Of Things To Come – H G Wells
Wells’s classic history of the future. Presented as a history book published in 2106, HG blends reality and fiction with ease and to great effect. As people never tire of pointing out, Wells got a lot of the detail wrong (although if you look at it, he wasn’t that far out, and a damned site more accurate than a lot of predictions from the period). What he got frighteningly right are the underlying trends and causes. Even in the first section of this book that deals with events in Wells’s immediate past, he cuts through all the crap and goes right to the heart of the matter. His description of the First World War is chilling; his analysis of the outcome of the Treaty of Versailles spot on. He told the world what would happen. True, he wasn’t alone, but it’s no wonder his last years were bitter ones.

There are other aspects of the book that are less easy to decipher, although one suspects there is very little but Wells shining through. And it is a flawed lamp. He never really got to grips with the idea that social equality should include women. His views on eugenics, although common at the time, are nonetheless difficult for a modern audience. Which is why it is important to know something (if not a lot) about the times in which the book was written, about the arguments that raged, and how ultimately they were used to bury the essential message of socialism (just as a tasty bit of scandal today is leapt on by politicians and press alike to divert the public’s eye from the more fundamental problems of society).

As for the press, everyone should read Wells’s analysis of the role of the press. Goodness alone knows what he would make of it today. Wrap his corpse in copper wire and you could light a city at the rate he must be turning in his grave.

I have read this a number of times, now, and in common with reading Ruskin and Morris, Shaw and the Webbs, Nesbit and all the others associated with the birth of British socialism through politics, science, and the arts, it makes me mourn for the way in which was systematically destroyed from without and within by all the greedy hypocrites that ever lay claim to socialist principles.  


Kipling’s Science Fiction – Rudyard Kipling
A collection of nine short stories. The definition of science fiction is stretched a bit here. Some of these are what I would term ‘wonder tales’, but that is by-the-by. I bought this principally to have ‘With The Night Mail’ and ‘As Easy As A. B. C.’ together in a single volume. These two tales set in the same future world are, ostensibly about a utopian future when the world is largely at peace under the aegis of a benign dictatorship – a company called the Aerial Board of Control. In the first story we are treated to a report of the mail being taken across the Atlantic by airship. Yet the subtext, combined with all the extra bits (which purport to be from the same magazine in which the report appeared – advertisements, notices, answers to letters, and the like) sketch a different picture; one that is given in more detail in the sequel. In essence it tells us that there are no single, simple solutions; that there will always be malcontents; that this may, in fact, be healthy.

On a different point, it is a shame this volume had no information on when the stories were published or any background to their composition or reception. It is also a shame that the text was clearly not proofread before going to print. It is riddled with the sort of errors one would expect of a text that has been scanned and converted electronically. It doesn’t take long to go through a text of this length. To neglect such a thing is unprofessional and makes me wary of buying any other books from the same publisher (despite them having some very interesting titles).  

Other books read in first quarter of 2012

January
Maigret Mystified – Georges Simenon
A psychological study of a closed society of strangers – people living in the same building, yet so different. Fine character studies, superb atmosphere.

The Underground Man – Ross Macdonald
Macdonald at his best with a meditation on the loss of innocence underlying an excellently convoluted plot.

Sleeping Beauty – Ross Macdonald
Another indictment of a system that puts money before people, creating a machine that churns everyone up and spits them out.

The Blue Hammer – Ross Macdonald
The last Lew Archer book and whilst it contains the usual complex plot and thoughtful examination of the modern world, it also sees a certain respite for an increasingly tired and disillusioned Archer.

Large Type Killer – Richard Williams
Based on a Jack Trevor Story idea (which he later developed as ‘Man Pinches Bottom’) and which he, in truth, probably mostly wrote, this is a Sexton Blake story about a series of innocent events that lead to a man being hunted as a child killer.

Enter A Murderer – Ngaio Marsh
There are some, I know, who regard the outcome as a bit of a cheat. I’m not one of them. And this second outing also begins to put a little flesh on the bones of the main characters.

The Nursing Home Murder – Ngaio Marsh
A classic, simple tale. Well constructed with more development of the central characters.

The Madman Of Bergerac – Georges Simenon
Maigret solves a series of murders from a bed whilst convalescing from a gunshot wound. Bad tempered at the lack of co-operation, he nonetheless works out what has been happening. Somewhat controversial in the eyes of some who claim it is anti-Semitic. Whilst it does deal with the question of Jewish refugees, the ire is directed solely at those who exploit them.

Vintage Murder – Ngaio Marsh
Marsh moves the scene to her native New Zealand with another mystery set in a theatre. The increasing ability of the author as a writer is readily apparent. More show. Less tell. The only annoying this that this is a uniform edition of the works. One would have thought the publisher would have spent just a few quid having someone proof the texts to get rid of appalling typos (I gave up counting after fifty).

Artists In Crime – Ngaio Marsh
Inspector Alleyn falls for Agatha Troy. All very civilized against a backdrop of horrible murder.

Deadlock – Dorothy Richardson
Miriam Henderson discovers the joy of writing and nearly discovers the joy of love.

The Two Of Them – Joanna Russ
Irene escapes the patriarchy of 1950s America to find herself freeing a young girl from the even more oppressive patriarchy of a distant planet, only to find that her actions condemn her in the eyes of her own (male) partner. Beautiful writing. Thought provoking.

Death At The President’s Lodging – Michael Innes
Largely enjoyable if somewhat contrived whodunit. Pleasingly well written and the first of many by the same author (who is not above poking fun at himself from the outset).

February
Death In A White Tie – Ngaio Marsh
Absolute classic whodunit in high society which whilst not a social critique does not hide the fact that some, even then, regarded ‘the season’ as little more than a meat market.

Overture To Death – Ngaio Marsh
Fine variation on the vindictive old lady theme. The characters are a tad clichéd, but the storyline was in part responsible as it demanded certain stock characters. Still good to read something of the period with flashes of ‘modern’ thought.

Death At The Bar – Ngaio Marsh
Ingenious and impossible to describe without giving the game away. So kudos to the author for managing a whole book without actually doing that.

Surfeit Of Lampreys – Ngaio Marsh
A mix of procedural and whodunit with some nice character portraits thrown in. Alleyn and Fox take something of a back seat in terms of development.

Death And The Dancing Footman – Ngaio Marsh
A wonderful whodunit with clichéd elements gently spoofed whilst presenting a solid puzzle that centres round the vivid image of the footman dancing in the hall to a tune on the radio.

Colour Scheme – Ngaio Marsh
Another mystery set in New Zealand, this time with Alleyn on special service during the Second World War.

Earwig And The Witch – Diana Wynne Jones
Her last book (unless others surface). Written for younger readers, amusing and wonderfully illustrated, this is about how Earwig is fostered and begins to learn to be a witch.

Died In The Wool – Ngaio Marsh
Another New Zealand set mystery centred on an isolated sheep station where the owner disappears and turns up weeks later packed in bale of wool. A regular whodunit with a colouring of espionage.

Final Curtain – Ngaio Marsh
Theatrical portraits abound. And having had some small experience of the professional theatre, they aren’t as exaggerated as one may, at first, think.

Swing, Brother, Swing – Ngaio Marsh
Not only did she come up with some great titles, but she was excellent, as this book proves, at creating monstrous characters. Not out-and-out evil, but those egomaniacs who annoy you with their blatant idiocy, the ones you know will never listen to reason.

Revolving Lights – Dorothy Richardson
Exquisitely written novel in the pilgrimage series. Miriam Henderson experiences the dark uncertainties of a disintegrating relationship (the tension and distress conveyed with perfect insight), and the contrasting joy of a holiday away from London.

Opening Night – Ngaio Marsh
Another theatre-set murder; another book featuring a young woman newly arrived in London from New Zealand. Yet these repetitions in no way distract from the story. Indeed, the very theatricality of Marsh’s work is evident here. She uses a repertory system of ‘characters’ and, like a good actor, makes them her own.

Spinsters In Jeopardy – Ngaio Marsh
Not a whodunit. Not an especially good thriller, either. More like an attempt to introduce us to the Alleyn’s horribly precocious child in an adventure that has little logic but which is, nonetheless, entertaining.

March
Scales Of Justice – Ngaio Marsh
A little disappointing in its reinforcement of a type. Although the set-up is intriguing, the characterization is a little thin and, for once, contains no sense of gentle parody.

The Trap – Dorothy Richardson
The eighth book of the sequence and Richardson’s maturity as a writer is much in evidence. She handles each episode with consummate ease, weaving a strong thread through so many apparently disparate aspects of Miriam Henderson’s life. Some of the oddities of style that vex some commentators (the movement between third and first person, the use real people and their alter egos) seems to me to be quite logical – the author is engaged with this work and appears quite naturally within it. After all, one of the main concerns is about the difficulty of putting anything to words that adequately convey ones ideas and experiences. Richardson has a found a way of doing this.

Nemesis – Lindsey Davis
Whilst all the ingredients are there, this turned out to be a very flat cake indeed. No tension, no sense of peril, no horror, and the ‘mystery’ is so obvious that I spent most of the book thinking it must be a massive red herring.

Off With His Head – Ngaio Marsh
Back on form with this foray into the deadly side of folk dance. Wonderful characters (Dame Alice and Dulcie are vividly sketched) and an intriguing mystery.

Singing In The Shrouds – Ngaio Marsh
As much thriller as mystery, another top form novel. Set on a boat with a small group of characters, it’s a race against time to discover which (if any) is a psychopathic killer who murders every ten days.

False Scent – Ngaio Marsh
After the highs of the previous two, this settles back to a more comfortable level. A return to theatre folk (some of whom really do behave like that, believe me; I’ve been on the wrong end of it), but a well-crafted novel nonetheless.

Hand In Glove – Ngaio Marsh
The usual repertory company is here with a set of characters one feels might have been better developed. The book is short and feels rushed, yet there is potential there for much more. A good read, however, and it does the job it set out to do.

Dead Water – Ngaio Marsh
At this point, Marsh seems to have found a new seam to mine. Whilst in some respects this is a fairly standard whodunit, the old repertory of characters has been given a shaking up, the young lovers fade into the background, and the whole thing has genuine elements of tragedy about it.

Death At The Dolphin – Ngaio Marsh
Back to the theatre, but with a twist. A story that revolves around a glove that would seem to have been made for Hamnet Shakespeare, and the fall out of events from when the glove first came into the hands of a wealthy recluse.

The Adventures Of Robina – Emma Tennant
A clever conceit to set an early eighteenth century novel in the mid twentieth century. That is, a female innocent abroad in the mid twentieth century written in the style of the early eighteenth. It is fast, funny, and bitingly satirical.

Le Secret De La Salamandre – Jacques Tardi
Comic book at its best. Excellent drawing, off the wall story (intersecting with other story strands by Tardi) and the bonus of realising my French is still up to it (with a little help from a dictionary).

Dawn’s Left Hand – Dorothy Richardson
On the confusions and uncertainties of personal relationships (particularly Miriam’s with Hypo). Whilst still philosophical, the novels are now becoming more concerned with the personal again (rather than the universal) and we see Miriam’s sensibility and understand of men and women in a far less hypothetical setting.

The Pastel City – M John Harrison
Harrison can put more story, ideas, and description in one page than most writers of fantasy can put into a over-long chapter. The richness and depth is astounding with the added layer that is a conscious examination and subtle subversion of the genre. If you want to know how fantasy should be written, this is the book for you.

The Manual Of Detection – Jedediah Berry
Curiously flat and lacking in tension, the interest in this book is invested in the world that is created. It has taken a number of commonplace elements and ideas and moulded them into a diverting and well-realised dreamscape. Certainly unusual, well-written, and well worth a read.

Le Noyé À Deux Têtes – Jacques Tardi
A continuation of the Adèle Blanc-sec series. Amusing, subversive, full of period detail (in both the images and the text) – popular culture in a form at which the French excel.

Journey To Paradise - Dorothy Richardson

You might think anyone whose life’s work was invested in a massive novel of 2110 pages (each of the thirteen chapters a novel in itself) would have problems with the shorter form. Yet Dorothy Richardson’s genius with words seems to have known few bounds. This collection of short fiction and autobiographical sketches demonstrates just how accomplished she was at reducing whole worlds to a few pages without losing anything in the process.

The works clearly have a commonality with the much longer Pilgrimage series. Indeed, they offer an insight into aspects of Dorothy Richardson’s life before the opening of her first novel. Childhood, from the very earliest memories that often recur in Pilgrimage are here explored in detail. Sitting in the garden as a very young child; visits to relatives; the bliss of holidays by the sea.

Each is a delicately and subtly cut jewel that reflects all forms of light and changes as the perspective alters. What is even more amazing is that one of the earliest exponents of modernist literature is, to my mind at least, the best. Perhaps that is the enthusiasm of discovery, but much as I love Virginia Woolf (who has always held top place), I fear she must move over and make place on the top step of the podium for Dorothy Richardson.

Sadly this, and much of her other short work (not to mention her non-fiction) is difficult to come by. All power to Virago for ensuring Pilgrimage is available. Perhaps they should get this volume back into print as well as the perfect introduction to the work of a still neglected writer.

Oberland - Dorothy Richardson

A marked change here in this ninth novel of the sequence. To begin with (and in common with the four following) this is much shorter. By way of compensation it is much more intense. That is partly the framework (a holiday in Switzerland) and the time scale (two weeks instead of many months or years); but is also the preoccupation of the novel. Rather than London life always on the edge of financial hardship and her relationships with the people around her and how that is part of her growing social and personal awareness; this book is quite literally a holiday.

Two weeks in Switzerland away from all her concerns (although there is, as always, an underlying hint of all those things never spoken of) amongst people she has never before met and enjoying freedoms that were perhaps just a little bit daring for the time. A young woman alone tobogganing on the Swiss mountains, sitting on the hotel stairs discussing socialism with two young men... Most of all, however, are the vivid descriptions of the place. Miriam’s life in London, whilst full of life, beautifully conveys what living in a large city is like. There is a mild sense of claustrophobia in a world where the predominant colour is grey and all struggles are worthy. None of this is mentioned directly, yet the sense of it is always there, set against her youthful episode in Germany and here, thrown into shadowy relief by the electrifying beauty of the Bernese Oberland.

As a piece of sustained description alone (the precise capturing of the stuffy, overheated air within the hotel is remarkable) this would be a novel to recommend. Yet it does so much more than that on a very subtle level. Miriam, out of her normal environment, must confront her prejudices, defend her beliefs, and accommodate herself to unusual circumstances. And she flowers. There is still something of the petulant child about her at the beginning; something of the teenager who took that first journey abroad to earn her living. By the end, she seems to have become serene. Her thoughts flow in the same direction and much more smoothly (perhaps indicating that they run a great deal more deeply as well).

Yet for all her personal development we are not allowed to forget the world beyond, about Miriam’s concerns. These are brought back into sharp focus at the very end of the book with the simple but highly effective incident of the young man showing his sister a hole in his glove and telling her she must mend it.

To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

What can I say about this that has not already been said? (When did that ever stop me?) Save to say that, as always, I have trouble getting started. The first section of Part One always seems to me to be much longer than it really is. Perhaps an indication of the extreme compression involved in the writing. There is so much to take on board at the beginning of the work that It makes the rest seem daunting, when in fact when has once found one’s balance, so to speak, the rest flows like... well... thought.

The best part of the book as far as I am concerned is the short, middle section. Ten years in fifteen pages and the sense of change and decay in an otherwise unchanging universe are conveyed with all the intensity of a poem – a nocturne in which the bursts of light are not stars or comets, but the falling of shells and the shock of sudden death.

That it is, for me, the best part of the book does not detract from the context in which it sits. Rather it enhances the preceding and following sections, providing a different perspective on the scene; perhaps even the perspective of the scene itself – a meditation on how the places we live view the passing of time. A triumphant work.

A Man Lay Dead - Ngaio Marsh

The first of Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn mysteries. As a book written partly to entertain herself and partly to see if she could do it, it is quite remarkable. Focussed, smooth, and well paced with an intriguing storyline, it is an excellent first attempt. In retrospect (I have read a number of her books before, including this, though never in order) it is clear this is a first book.

Characterization is sketchy and often so subtle (if at all there) as to make some characters indistinguishable from others, whilst others still are mere ciphers (e.g., the Russian sub-plot). The story is also a little light in places. But in the end, what we have a thoroughly diverting tale that does not rely on a gimmicky detective. It is clearly written without a word wasted, spiced with a dry wit, and full of all the indications that here was a writer who would become a queen of the genre.

Interim - Dorothy Richardson

The fifth of Richardson’s Pilgrimage series and I can only say these are works of genius. Engaging, witty, written with great simplicity and still finding room to experiment with form and style. Miriam Henderson’s development is so subtly told, that you are carried along, unaware of much change until you glance back and read, again, the fragile uncertainty of the know-it-all teenager of the first book.

Whilst Miriam still struggles with some of her pre-occupations (especially that of adequately conveying her inner life to others – which must make these not only the first stream of consciousness novels, but amongst the first meta-narratives), she has matured. Still uncertain about much that goes on around her, she is independent and living a life that quietly questions many of the male-centred and dominated establishments of the day.

To have sustained such a detailed and endlessly fascinating psychological study of a single character with such style and maturity; to write so well and explore the way in which words can convey the inner life of a person; to conjure up a picture of society with all its quirks, prejudices, and possibilities; to chart the progress of new ways of thinking; and still not be feted alongside the likes of Woolf, Joyce, and other modernists, suggests to me that there is something sadly awry in the world of literature.