A Summer Bird-Cage – Margaret Drabble
I’ve enjoyed some of Drabble’s novels, so I decided to check out her first one, which was written when she was twenty-three. The enthusiasm of an author with an assured future is evident (her family was well-established in Britain’s cultural hierarchy, she had her English degree from Oxford, and her older sister is the novelist A.S. Byatt). She displays talent: her prose is smooth and clear, and the voice of the first-person narrator is engaging. Sarah is recently graduated from Oxford, she has a boring job with the BBC, her love interest is in America. She goes to parties where bright young things engage in bright young chatter, and she has conflicts and moods, but it’s all unsubstantial. The person Drabble turns to for a plot is Sarah’s older sister, the glamorous, self-assured and aloof Louise. The novel opens with Louise’s marriage to Stephen. Sarah can’t fathom what her sister sees in this pedantic bore; yet, because the sisters were never close, she’s merely an uninformed bystander. In a long chapter called “The Information,” which comes after the halfway point in the book, she has dinner with a friend and gets the whole scoop (their dialogue begins after they have minestrone and continues without a break for fifteen pages, which made me wonder when they had a chance to chew their food). Anyway, it seems that Louise is having an affair with a handsome and virile actor named John (who was Stephen’s best man at the wedding); this is causing unstable Stephen great pain. We find out where all this leads in the last chapter, called “The Collision.” Stephen catches Louise and John enjoying a bath together; Louise, who relates the scene to her sister (the only instance of semi-intimacy between the two), is very upset at how monstrously Stephen acts; he even kicks her out of the house. Can you imagine that? Louise, we must assume, is the most obtuse mortal walking the face of the earth. The novel ends with more news about her: she’s living with John, who wants to marry her, but she . . . Oh, who cares, it’s all silly and illogical, with no point in sight. This is a tyro effort. The older and wiser Drabble won’t create characters who have labels pinned on them (glamorous, virile, unstable) and she won’t base her plot entirely on secondhand accounts. Lastly, she won’t give someone the moniker of Sappho Hinchcliffe (you know, the actress).

The Spanish Farm – R. H. Mottram
This is a war novel in which war is relegated to the background. It’s set mostly in Flanders, some twenty kilometers behind the trenches. The troops who occupy the town are English (later Australian), and they abide by French law as to what they can and cannot do; they pay for their lodging and the food they eat. There are no battle scenes and no atrocities are committed, though the fact of war is made to seem both atrocious and a colossal waste. What we get is primarily a character study of Madeleine. This young woman’s purpose in life is to make her father’s farm profitable; she doesn’t care about anything else (except love). She’s somewhat hard-hearted; only once does she shed tears. She’s tenacious, and she uses her practical intelligence to get what she wants. Her beauty comes from the health and strength of her body; she’s like a splendid animal. She’s competent, unimaginative, possessive, calculating and proud. That’s Madeleine, and the plainness of the prose, its ordered simplicity, is unwaveringly in accord with what she is. Besides managing the farm and dealing with troops, her major preoccupation is the Baron’s son. Georges had taken her as if it was his right to take the daughter of his father’s gamekeeper. She was quite willing: “Careful, even grudging, when she gave she gave generously, no half measures.” But her giving is devoid of any romantic notions; instead there’s a maternal aspect to her sensuality. When the war breaks out Georges goes off to fight; in an effort to see him, she conspires to be sent to Paris, where she works in a government office. Before briefly reuniting with Georges she has an affair with an English lieutenant. Skene needs her, and she responds to that; but they have nothing in common. She considers him to be her good child, but her “spoiled, imperious one was what she needed.” The novel closes with the war over and Madeleine back at the farm. Only ghosts remain: Georges dead, both of her brothers dead, her father an apparition. She accesses her losses with bitterness, and then turns stoically to the work at hand. How (and why) could Mottram capture so completely the sensibilities of Madeleine? I felt there must be some connection between the two. A bit of research revealed that the author served in France from 1914 to 1918. I’m convinced that Mottram was Lieutenant Skene. Skene is the only other character whose mind we’re in; he knew Madeleine at the farm; later he spent a week with her at a hotel in Paris (a respite from the “obliteration of his individuality in the dark mud of Flemish trenches”); she had given her body to him as one bestows a gift. When Skene stops by the farm after the war Mottram has her think that he “was just one of the things the War, the cursed War, had brought on her, and now it, and they, were going. Good riddance.” But Mottram couldn’t rid her from his thoughts and emotions. Thus this deeply felt and artfully executed novel. It’s the first of a trilogy. I have absolutely no desire to read more. I’ll leave Madeleine forever as she is at the end of this book.

The View in Winter - Ronald Blythe

The topic of this book – old age – is one people generally try to avoid. But the elderly pose problems that most families and all societies have to cope with; there’s also the fact that, in today’s world, an ever-increasing number of us will be blessed or cursed with a long life. So the subject must be addressed, and Blythe does this, thoroughly. Although some handle old age well, he finds loneliness, isolation, and a feeling of not belonging and not mattering endemic. Many of the elderly are fear-plagued – not of death, which most face with acceptance, but of losing control of their lives (a crippling fall, a fading of the mind); they fear losing their independence and becoming a burden to others. These various negative aspects are raised by the author in his introduction and commentaries, but what we get from the old people who are interviewed is a cheerful, plucky attitude, or resignation, or muted memories. And I wondered, Where’s the passion? Why doesn’t anybody express regret, anger, frustration, bitterness? Since Blythe restricted himself to the residents of one English village, it’s possible that those he spoke with were under a pressure the old commonly feel: that they must “behave.” The liveliest section is one in which young people talk about their attitudes toward the elderly; this blunt, honest, diverse dialogue has a vitality absent from the rest of the book. Even Blythe’s tone is intellectually detached. He’s insightful, unflinching and, at times, harsh. But the very complexity of his subject makes the book diffuse and scattered. Blythe wrote Winter when he was fifty-eight. I can’t help but compare it to Akenfield, which came ten years earlier. In that book people in a village spoke primarily about their jobs, and there was passion aplenty. In this look at the end of life it’s apathy that prevails.

The Garrick Year - Margaret Drabble

The following sentence, which comes halfway through this book, marks the point at which I abandoned it: “I lay there and wondered what frightful depths of need the chance words of a man whom I did not know and had no reason to like had revealed in me; and I saw then clearly what later became confused; that I was about to be chained, in a fashion so arbitrary that it frightened me, to a passion so accidental that it confirmed nothing but my own inadequacy and inability to grow.” A lot of probing, right? The critical problem is that I didn’t know the woman who was thinking these thoughts; little had been revealed about her by her words and actions. She makes a lot of claims; one of them is a deep love for her daughter, but Drabble doesn’t include one single sustained scene between the two. Even Nell’s physical appearance is sketchy; she’s supposed to be beautiful, but in my mind’s eye she remained featureless and shapeless. A book is an inanimate object, but its main character can’t be.

Brittania Mews - Margery Sharp

For 120 pages this was a good novel. We first get to know Adelaide as a ten-year-old; then the narrative skips a dozen years. What follows is her romance with her art instructor; she pursues marriage to this feckless fellow in a headstrong way. She gets what she wants, with disastrous results. The dissolution of her love – and her dreams – is handled well, as is the hardening of her nature. But in the next hundred pages my sympathy and involvement slowly eroded. The slum in which Adelaide is forced to live was never convincing; that didn’t bother me when I was involved in the dynamics of her marriage, but after Henry’s exit the stereotypical garishness of the Mews and its denizens led me to conclude that Sharp had no firsthand knowledge of that world (though she writes with authority about the moneyed class). Gilbert – the second man in her life – is abruptly introduced (he’s thrown out of a bar, drunk); they immediately form a platonic soul mate relationship. He’s easily reformed by Adelaide – far too easily. Sharp stopped trying to lay a solid groundwork. Her husband, with all his faults, was a real person; Gilbert merely serves a role. Events – such as the success of the Puppet Theatre – are predictable and improbable. As Part Four begins thirty years have passed. Young people with names like Dodo and Sonia Trent take center stage, while Adelaide has stiffened into a cardboard prop. At this point I had enough. Sharp attempted something major – a sprawling generational novel – but it was beyond her range. She was a sprinter attempting to run a marathon. As she labored through the years she lost her energy and the book turned slack and vacuous.

The Watchful Gods and Other Stories - Walter Van Tilburg Clark 
The Watchful Gods is a short novel. A boy wakes up on his twelfth birthday; he very much wants a rifle. He gets his wish and immediately goes hunting; after he kills a rabbit he feels remorse. Buck comes across as a normal boy in his interactions with his family and his fantasies about a girl, but he’s quite out of the ordinary. He has a strong spiritual/mystical side; he feels the presence of gods who are directly involved in his life. Some are good, some are malevolent (there’s also an indifferent god presiding over all). And there are sprites – spirits of happiness. By killing the rabbit, Buck believes that he has sided with the malevolent god; he tries to right the wrong he’s committed in an elaborate burial ceremony. Buck’s spirituality is linked to nature, for which he has great affinity; large portions of the novella are made up of descriptions of the natural world. Clark had something to say, but he layered so much onto his character and situation that they got buried under too many words (along with any point he wanted to make). Not helping matters is an indeterminate ending. In the stories Clark also had a larger purpose in mind; most are good, and one unobtrusively rises to greatness. “The Indian Well” opens with a long description of nature, but here the words relate to living creatures – road runners, lizards, coyotes, rabbits, antelope. And then man. A man and his mule arrive at the spring; they’re the latest in a long line of travelers, stretching back to time immemorial. Clark describes the ordinary events and the drama of this lone man’s stay. After a year he leaves (this time more alone than when he came); at his departure “the disturbed life of the spring resumed.” This story evokes the great and harsh cycle of existence, and man’s uneasy place in it. 

Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett 
There’s a grimy feel to this novel, and that’s its main virtue. Hammett’s unembellished prose efficiently captures the disreputable denizens of Poisonville. Dinah Brand stands out, fascinating and formidable; I almost kept reading just to get more of this tough dame. Almost. I quit the book at the halfway point, after a couple of ridiculous shootouts. Actually, my doubts began early on, when the nameless private eye states that he knows who murdered a guy. Huh? I had no clue who did it (things had gotten complicated quick). It turns out to be a character who appears for only two pages and who’s presented (by the author) as the most unlikely suspect of all. This isn’t playing fair with the reader. Then a boxer knocks out an opponent who’s supposed to win (the fix is on) and immediately gets a knife in the neck. This knife is thrown from somewhere in the back of a crowded arena. I’m supposed to swallow this nonsense? The real crime that needs solving is why the Library of America devoted two volumes to the work of Hammett. 

The Radiant Way - Margaret Drabble 
I consumed this book like comfort food – and it wasn’t junk but carefully-prepared dishes like smoked salmon with morel sauce. It gave me a warm feeling of comradery, which is the strength of TV series featuring an enduring set of friends (though this novel’s three female characters are too discerning to waste their time watching sitcoms on the telly). Alix is the most grounded; Esther is otherworldly and enigmatic; Liz vacillates between contentment and turmoil. The novel opens with a New Year’s Eve party given by Liz and her husband at their posh Harley Street home; as 1980 is rung in Liz learns that her husband is leaving her for another woman. What follows covers a span of five years; the women’s lives are altered in many ways, some good, some bad. England itself (there’s a strong element of social commentary) is greatly changed, much for the worse. This is an ambitious, complex, intelligent book. It’s also a messy melange. But I have no desire to go into its faults. For nearly four hundred densely-packed pages it kept alive in me those feelings of comfort and comradery, and feelings sweep aside criticism. I thought Drabble might be going seriously off course in the book’s last fourth, but she righted the ship and sailed it into its berth – to the very place where it belonged. * 

Death of a Doxy - Rex Stout 
Archie takes center stage, and he’s as lively and engaging as ever. My problem with this Nero Wolfe outing is that the murderer’s identity is based entirely on an alias he uses in an extortion note. Does the name Milton Thales mean anything to you? It didn’t to me, but to Nero Wolfe it pointed directly to one person. If this character hadn’t chosen that particular name there wouldn’t be a scrap of evidence against him. That’s flimsy. A mystery should present a preponderance of evidence that enables the attentive reader to identify the bad guy. Stout usually does this, but not here. Also, in the three Wolfe mysteries I’ve previously read the guilty party commits suicide; in this one he’s murdered, though the police rule his death to be a suicide. Case closed.

The Middle Ground - Margaret Drabble
Kate is appealing, complex and quirky; she not only came alive, she was someone I wanted as a friend. She interacts with a wonderful (and varied) cast. The book has a pleasing density, and though not every character or situation or idea was fully developed, it didn’t matter; loose ends are allowed, because they’re part of life. That’s what Drabble captures – life in both its light and dark shades, with its humor and sadness. She had the right character to pin everything onto, and she went at her story with verve and style and skill. *

Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock
This is an inside joke, a send-off of a type of literature; not being acquainted with the literature (or manner of thought) being parodied, much was lost on me. In fact, I often felt lost. Peacock didn’t help matters by using esoteric vocabulary as a humorous device. Still, I got enough of the gist of things to be somewhat entertained. And the oddity of the characters was amusing. The book was mercifully short, under a hundred pages; I don’t believe I could have stayed with it for much longer.

The Farmers’ Daughters - William Carlos Williams
Most of these stories involve Williams’ practice as a doctor among the poor immigrants of urban New Jersey, so illness and its treatment is a main element. The “ugliness” that’s depicted (with a no-nonsense bluntness) is merely a part of life. What’s inside people – their character – is what matters. Williams comes across as intelligent and tough, sane and solid. He uses a jumpy, shorthand style of prose; actually, he states that the stories weren’t done with much care – he would “bang out” one in a break in his busy medical practice. Most aren’t really stories – they’re sketches or fragments. The much-anthologized “The Use of Force” is the standout success; it rises up from the subconscious, and I wonder if Williams knew that he was writing about a sexual assault.

And Quiet Flows the Don - Mikhail Sholokov (Russian)
This book could have been great. For the first third, when it concentrated on the lives of the Cossacks, the characterizations had intensity, were exotic and fascinating. Shokolov intertwined nature with human life, creating an epic quality. The love affair between Gregor and Aksinia was compelling, primal. Gregor was presented as a person who, at times, aroused condemnation; yet he’s so human, and his virtues come unheralded to the reader’s senses, that we enter into an understanding. Then Shokolov (and I believe this was due to the Communist regime he published under, another black mark of Stalin’s legacy) moved into war, revolution, etc. The book turned into a polemic, a history lesson, with a cast of new, wooden characters. I read on – mainly because I hoped for a return, at the end, to the people and the world I had cared so much about. It never happened.

Jerusalem the Golden - Margaret Drabble
Clara isn’t engaged in a religious pursuit; she wants to be part of the golden world of London sophisticates. She’s calculating and manipulative in achieving her goal, but when you understand someone – and Drabble succeeds in making Clara and her motivations comprehensible – you’re inclined to be forgiving. An interesting work, invigorating in its intelligence, but I finished it with the unsatisfying feeling that Clara’s story was meant to be continued.

Quartet - Jean Rhys
Books can’t be monochromatic; this one is unrelievedly gray. The main character had a fragile appeal, but her constant state of misery (about which she does nothing) and her incomprehensible love for Heidler caused me to lose interest in her plight (if a character loves someone, the author must give the reader a reason for it). In this book Rhys strikes arty poses intended to convey the futility of it all.

The Man Who Was Thursday - G. K. Chesterton
I felt hoodwinked by a lot of nice stage effects into reading a religious tract that disguised itself as a boy’s adventure story. I resent the time I spent on it.