Pastoral - Nevil Shute
I turn to Nevil Shute’s novels like I would to comfort food. And it’s not junk that I’m consuming – all of the six books I’ve read by him are quality work (with On the Beach being his best). His approach, in both prose and the presentation of plot and characters, is workmanlike; you always understand exactly where you stand. And even when he’s writing about machinery he makes it engrossing. His two themes are hardship and romantic love. In Pastoral the hardship is war. Peter Marshall is a bomber pilot, conducting nighttime raids on Germany. He falls in love with a section officer who relays the radio messages between planes and ground. Peter’s feelings for Gervase intensify a conflict in him. Though he’s a loyal Brit, he’s flown fifty-eight missions, and he doesn’t want to complete the two he has left; he wants to live and love. But the path of love is not a smooth one – he commits to Gervase quickly, she’s reluctant. Too quickly, too reluctant? It seemed so to me. And there’s a touch of sentimentality near the end that I found discordant. Sentimentality is a flaw Shute sometimes fell prey to, but it’s one I can forgive because it stems from his feelings for his characters. When needed, he can write with steady resolve: the two long sections in which he describes bombing missions are masterfully done. What always matters with Shute, even in his lesser attempts, is that he understood the human heart. One scene embodies the reason why so many readers have turned to him. Gervase knows that Peter and his three man crew enjoy fishing, so she pays a visit to an old lady who owns an estate that has a lake stocked with trout. She asks for permission to allow the men to fish there. After a long conversation permission is granted. When Gervase returns to the base someone who doesn’t know she’s already made her visit says, “I wouldn’t go out there, if I were you.” And then he tells her why. The way Shute constructs the scene the reason he warns her off comes as a surprise, and it has a lingering impact.

The Photograph – Penelope Lively
The novel opens with a man finding a photograph in which his deceased wife is holding hands with the husband of her sister. He concludes that an affair had been taking place, and he initiates a search into the infidelity. We go into his mind and that of the sister and her husband. The voices of all three are distinct and strong; we get to know these people. But Kath, the deceased woman, is a shadowy presence; we see her only through the limited perceptions of those others. And we’re never told, until the end, how she died. When it’s revealed I didn’t feel cheated, or that I was being teased (I had a pretty firm idea as to how, one which I believe Lively intended me to have). What matters is why Kath died. But the book is constructed in such a way that it’s those other three who I was involved with and who I understood. A skilled writer like Lively could have found a way for Kath to emerge and speak for herself, but she chose not to. The only insight comes in one of the closing chapters when Mary Packard, a character who had been close to Kath for many years, finally makes an appearance. Mary tells of the Kath she knew, and passes judgment on three people who were dazzled by her beauty but who left the person inside emotionally abandoned. That’s the Why of Kath’s death, though it comes late and indirectly. In opposition to Kath, Lively describes Mary as “one of those rare and perhaps blessed souls who are able to make their way through life without the need to be shored up by companionship, or dependents, or love.” The seventy-year-old author seems to be offering up a formula not for conventional happiness but for immunity from the pain others can inflict on the needy.

Carry On, Jeeves – P. G. Wodehouse
Many upper crust Brits consider Wodehouse to be the greatest comic writer of the century. That would be the early twentieth century, when idle young men could live luxuriously off stipends from wealthy aunts or uncles. This volume has ten stories about Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves. Bertie is a carefree soul who wakes late from a “rather cheery little evening” of fun and games and a quantity of alcoholic drinks and who will spend the next evening in the same manner. He avoids anything that takes much effort or will tax his brain (this includes cultural pursuits). In the ten stories in this volume he or a friend (with names like Corky and Bicky) get into some predicament, and the ever resourceful Jeeves rescues them. Often this involves a disentanglement from a serious relationship with a woman. Bertie has an inventive way with words. When he first meets Jeeves he’s suffering from a hangover, and Jeeves mixes a concoction for him to drink: “For a moment I felt as if somebody had touched off a bomb in the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right.” He hires Jeeves on the spot. For Evelyn Waugh Wodehouse “has made a world for us to live in and delight in.” I was merely diverted for a while, until the air of frivolity grew stale and the spindly plots seemed repetitive and silly. To please me humor must have substance; these stories are all froth, and halfway though the eighth one I called it quits. Wodehouse was staggeringly productive – he published over ninety books. Also of note is that this quintessentially English writer lived most of his life in the United States; he became an American citizen at age seventy-four. He was knighted just before his death at the age of ninety-three.