Leaven of Malice – Robertson Davies (1954)

This week is Robertson Davies reading week hosted by Lori at The Emerald City. Robertson Davies is one of Canada’s most distinguished writers. Leaven of Malice is the second book in his Salterton trilogy; I read the first book Tempest Tost two years ago, and really wished I hadn’t left it so long between books.

The story centres around the local newspaper, the Salterton Evening Bellman, the family of Professor Vambrace, young Solly Bridgetower and his mother, members of the congregation of St. Nicholas’ Cathedral and the Dean of that cathedral.

On the 31^st of October a notice appears in the Bellman announcing the engagement of Pearl Vambrace and Solly Bridgetower, a marriage which is due to take place at the cathedral on November 31^st. Not only does the Dean of the cathedral know nothing about it but neither do Pearl Vambrace, her family or Solly Bridgetower. What might at first appear to be a rather bizarre, but ultimately harmless practical joke – spirals out of control.

Gloster Ridley is the editor of the newspaper where the notice appears and is immediately under pressure. A quiet man whose daily routine never varies much and who is helped at home by Mrs Edith Little, whose habit of going through the newspaper everyday correcting errors has earned her the name Constant Reader in Ridley’s mind. Ridley is already anxious about trying to ease out the ageing Mr Shillito from the newspaper, at first, he doesn’t fully understand the seriousness of the engagement notice.

Everyone it seems has an opinion about the engagement notice and it is discussed by Edith her sister and brother in law and their lodger Mr Higgin. Edith is possessed of a rather spoilt little boy who she tries to woo Gloster Ridley with by showing him what a wonderful mother she is. Other inhabitants of Salterton are drawn into the rather comic drama, including the Dean of the cathedral who is perturbed one night to discover his organist Mr Cobbler and a bunch of students singing and dancing in the cathedral at a time when the place should have been shut up. Following this, Mr Cobbler is named as a possible culprit to putting the notice in the paper. The Dean is a man who has his critics, so there are those who would love to see his organist disgraced.

“But in every church there are people who, for reasons which seem sufficient to them, do not approve of their pastor and seek to harry him and bully him into some condition pleasing to themselves. The democracy which the Reformation brought into the Christian Church rages in their bosoms like a fire; they would deny that they regard their clergyman as their spiritual hired hand, whom they boss and oversee for his own good, but that is certainly the impression they give to observers.” 

Since Solly and Pearl were thrown together two years earlier when they were acting in The Tempest, Pearl’s father Professor Vambrace has developed a ferocious antipathy for Solly’s late father, a fellow professor whose single vote denied Professor Vambrace the position of Dean of Arts. He sees the coupling of his daughter’s name with that of the son of his late enemy as a terrible insult – and surely proof that someone is out to get him. Despite the fact that Pearl is twenty-two and doesn’t want any fuss, the Professor’s fury is out of all proportion and he decides to sue the paper for libel.  

Poor Pearl is horribly embarrassed – she believes as people begin to congratulate her, that a denial of any such relationship will make her appear ridiculous, she worries no one will ever want to marry her. Solly Bridgetower, still hopelessly besotted with Griselda Webster – who has now gone abroad – finds himself too much of a gentleman to issue an outright denial. Thus, the two miserable young people are thrust together again, finding themselves attending the same dreadful party where everyone thinks they are engaged. When Solly drops Pearl off they run straight into her father who is returning from acting rather strangely outside Gloster Ridley’s house, an incident unfortunately witnessed by neighbours and talked about for days afterwards.

“‘Get out of it!’ roared the Professor. ‘Get out of it or I’ll pick you out of it like a maggot out of a nut!’ And with these words he brought his stick down on the roof of the Morris with such force that he dented it badly and smashed his treasured blackthorn to splinters.

‘Daddy’ said Pearl, ‘please try to understand and be a little bit quiet. Everybody will hear you.’

‘What do I care who hears me? I understand that you sneaked out of my house tonight like a kitchen maid, to meet this whelp, to whom you have got yourself clandestinely engaged.’”

Soon, what should have been an incident few people weren’t even aware had happened, is, it seems known about by just about everyone. Pearl and Solly find themselves meeting up more often to discuss the situation, as Pearl is reduced to being like a child again in the face of her father’s ridiculous anger. Professor Vambrace, meanwhile is consulting lawyers, and other people are gossiping about Pearl’s difficult relationship with her absurd father.

Robertson Davies writes brilliantly about the peculiar foibles of these townspeople, the newspaper business and gossip. There is humour and humanity in Davies’ storytelling, coupled with a poignant understanding for people and the little things that matter to them.

I have now downloaded the third book in this trilogy to my kindle, and I shall endeavour to read it rather sooner than later. I have had Robertson Davies’ famous Deptford Trilogy recommended to me too, so there’s another three books to seek out at some point.

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Table Two – Marjorie Wilenski (1942)

Recently Dean Street press added another pile of neglected women’s middlebrow fiction to their catalogue, all the titles set around the WW2 period, they all sound right up my alley. Table Two was Marjorie Wilenski’s only novel – set during WW2 in a London office of translators working for a fictional ministry. A very sharply observed bunch of characters, Wilenski recreates the atmosphere of an office in wartime brilliantly, little traditions and petty jealousies set against a backdrop of air raids.

“That summer was the finest summer that anyone could remember in England. The sun shone all day, day after day, and it seemed that there never would be rain. Everyone said all the time “What lovely weather, if only we were able to enjoy it.” For in England everyone feels that they must enjoy a fine day because in ordimry summers more than one fine day at a time is so rare. But nobody was able to enjoy that wonderful series of fine days because it was the summer of 1940 and nearly everyone was working all day and often all night in offices or factories or A.F.S. or A.R.P.,and there were no week-ends and no summer holidays. So in the daytime all the glorious sunshine was wasted and at night the rooms were stifling behind the blackout curtains.”

In the office of the Ministry for Foreign Intelligence is an office of women translators – there are two tables of nine translators, and the never the twain (for what reason nobody knows) shall meet. The women of table two, bicker and fuss, trying constantly to out manoeuvre one another, while completely ignoring their colleagues on the other side of the room, who might as well not exist. These women are mostly middle aged – or approaching it – they are plain or disappointed by life.  

Among them is a fresh air fanatic, a former lady’s companion who simply delights in bad news, regaling her colleagues daily with the latest casualty figures, an honourable, an inept supervisor who relies on her very capable deputy, a chatterbox and a woman who appears to masquerade as a child. Wilenski’s two main characters are sharply contrasted. Elsie Pearne is clever and efficient she has worked hard her whole life in various offices of business at home and abroad. She is though horribly embittered and considers herself far to good to be among these women, most of whom she considers idiots. Anne Shepley-Rice, a cheerful, pretty young woman, her once affluent family fell on hard times and then her mother died. Anne arrives in the middle of an air raid to take up her position in the translators’ office at table two – sitting right next to Elsie – who decides to make a friend of Anne, jealously attaching herself to Anne and spiriting her away at lunchtime each day. Anne is a young woman with no experience of the world of work she takes Elsie at face value, not recognising the bitterness in Elsie – finding her a bit of a funny old thing.

Anne and Elsie’s home lives are contrasted too, although neither of them has much money, Anne has known a better standard of living, and no doubt has the right accent, she is clearly a lady, though this is merely implied. There is a privilege about her which Anne is not even aware of. She is living in the house of a former servant of her mother’s, she is looked after just as she might have been in former times, the landlady looking out for her, fussing over her. When the air raids start, she has a comfortable spot in the cellar, a few feet from someone who cares what happens to her. Elsie is alone in the world, when the air raid siren sounds, she shelters in a cramped little shelter with her landlady and the landlady’s children.

 A new deputy is soon to be appointed in the office when the current one leaves, and Elsie is desperate to be appointed. Elsie loves to talk of her plans to Anne in whom she finds a sympathetic ear, mistaking her natural kindness and sympathy for a close friendship that doesn’t really exist.

One day Anne runs into an old family friend, Sebastian, the son of a wealthy family Anne had known growing up. Initially Anne tries not to get too close to Sebastian, worried her new impoverished status means she is unfit to be as close to him as she would like. It is clear that Sebastian has no such qualms, every time there is an air raid he is in agonies until he finds out that Anne is all right.

In some respects, Anne is just a little bland as a character, and she is far too willing to allow a man to sweep her up and take her off to the country for a rest – still that’s a minor quibble. It is certainly Elsie who steals the show – a really interesting character full of flaws, there are moments when she appears just a little too bleak, but she gets all the best lines.

“”It’s awful to think that there are nine of us here to-day at this table and in six months’ time we may all be dead,” said Miss Purbeck. “There were thousands killed last night, so the bus conductor told me.”

“You certainly are our little ray of sunshine,” said Elsie scornfully.”

As bombs rain down on London with greater frequency, Elsie has decided that maybe she could invite Anne to live with her, and so is brought up short to find herself lunching with Anne, Sebastian and a friend. A toe-curling scene follows in which Elsie drinks too much and speaks very insultingly to Sebastian’s friend.

In some ways not a huge amount happens in this story – but it is in the brilliant portraits of Anne and Elsie’s colleagues that make this so good. Many of the little arguments and petty personalities could quite easily I’m sure be found in almost any office today, possibly in any workplace, the gossipy busybody, trying to find out what’s going on, the importance of morning coffee, the appalled delight when someone gets into serious trouble, I’m sure the author must have taken some of these from life. Elsie could so easily have been just a monstrous creation, but Wilenski stops just short of that – and in her backstory we see something of what made Elsie so bitter.

While this isn’t a perfect novel, it is perfectly entertaining and those who enjoy a novel with a war time setting will like it I am sure, the details of everyday wartime life are particularly good as are the portraits of middle aged, professional women. Table Two is another great addition to the Furrowed Middlebrow series.

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National Provincial – Lettice Cooper (1938)

One of the books on my original #20booksofsummer pile was National Provincial. It’s novel I had set aside for LT’s All Virago All August (Persephone books also count) it is one of the most recent reissues from Persephone books. At just over 600 pages I was also waiting for my summer holidays to read it.

Ever since I first read South Riding by Winifred Holtby I have been searching for another novel with similar themes. National Provincial ticked all the boxes I wanted it to. A novel of Northern politics, social class and subtle feminism, I loved it. It definitely embraces many of the themes explored two years before by Winifred Holtby and also by Elizabeth Gaskell almost a century earlier. There is a large cast of characters and several story strands – I could probably write far, far too much about them all.

In the mid-1930s the (fictional) city of Aire in the West Riding of Yorkshire, people are divided very much along political and social class lines. The middle classes are staunchly Conservative and have been for years, some families more liberal than others. The working classes have always been Labour. Not everything has stayed the same, some men like factory boss Ward brought up in poverty have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and now own the works that employ many of the local workers. That peculiar brand of British snobbery denotes who is socially acceptable and who isn’t – to some families at least, new money just doesn’t cut it.

“She looked out of the window at the sliding panorama of streets, warehouses, chimneys, slag-heaps, railway sidings and colliery shafts. She was too familiar with such scenes to be struck by their ugliness, but she saw with a fresh eye their beauties, the subdued harmonies of grey and brown, all taut perfection of springing line in crane and chimney, all softened to-day in a sunlight thickened by smoke to a haze of gold. The industrial North, one of the battlefields of that sporadic war of which so many people were still unaware, seeing each battle separately and with surprise in terms of their own emotional or social colouring. But you could not look at anything separately nowadays, and there was not  much surprise left to anyone who had been on a newspaper.”

Into this sprawling mass of Yorkshire urban life comes Mary, returning from her successful journalistic career in London, where she had lived happily alongside other independent young women. With her sister Doris about to marry a well-known local cricket star, Mary must take on the mantle of caring for their mother Emily who is ill with Rheumatoid Arthritis. She is due to take up a position on the Yorkshire Guardian, though we sense it’s a far inferior position to the one she had in London. Her job means she has to attend lots of local society events, bringing her into contact with local families like the Wards and Hardings. She falls in love with a married man from another class.

Mary’s Aunt Grace and Uncle John Allworthy are life-long supporters of the Labour movement, in his late sixties, John is still the Union man at Ward’s. Grace herself is an old campaigner, she has stood by her husband – also a labour councillor, throughout their marriage, their beliefs and aspirations the same. As young boys, Allworthy and Ward had started out in the machine shops together, now Ward is a wealthy man, with a large house, where he’s brought up his two children in comfort, a world away from the slums he grew up in. Ward is a man who has dedicated his whole life to the making of money. His children pull against him, making friends with people Ward doesn’t like. Marjorie the eldest thinks along traditional Conservative lines, like her father – though she is keen to befriend Mary, against her father’s wishes. Ward’s son Lesley; just started at the university, awkward and unhappy, meets a group of left-wing academics, his eyes wide open he is led inexorably toward extremism.

Two old genteel families are the Marsdens and the Hardings. William Marsden lost his sons in WW1 and is an older, sadder man because of it. Lionel Harding is his brother-in-law, politically something of a liberal, he still represents the traditional Conservative class. His adult sons Stephen and Robert are sensibly married, his daughter Claire, no longer the girl her father thinks, is struggling with her mental health. Stephen is married to Joy, a cool proud beauty; the daughter of an old, traditional family, she is ashamed that Stephen must now work for Ward. They have two little boys. Robert is married to Beryl who longs for a baby. In the political upheavals that are coming to the West Riding both Stephen and Robert will have reason to question their allegiances.

All over Aire people are thinking differently, questioning living conditions and wanting better for their families. Olive works at Wards in one of the machine rooms, she loves her job, the banter with the other girls, the money in her pocket. When her family is rehoused on the new housing estate, Olive’s simple, working class snobbery goes into overdrive. She wants a new suite for the sitting room, expects her family to live more graciously, looks down on her brother’s girlfriend because she is in service to the Robert Hardings. Olive is engaged to Tom Sutton, an idealistic rabble rouser in the Ward factory, once he called John Allworthy Uncle John, sitting by his fire talking long into the night. Now Tom sets himself against John, calling an unofficial strike. 

“Tom bent to his cloth again, a snake of suspicion stirring in his heart. He suspected both of them, but whereas his suspicion of Mr Harding, the gentleman, the class enemy, the master, was automatic and almost perfunctory, his suspicion of John Allworthy, the workman, the Trade Union man, the stalwart of the Divisional Labour Party, was a vivid and uncomfortable emotion.”

The novel is set against a backdrop of World politics, Mussolini marching into Abyssinia, Hitler taking over the Rhineland, people feeling like the League of Nations have let them down. Mosley’s Blackshirts are on the rise – though everyone says England just doesn’t do Fascism. Some Labour supporters are listing toward Communism while others are frankly bored by all the divisions and politics. It’s a thoroughly absorbing and fascinating portrayal.

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Educated – Tara Westover (2018)

My book group chose Educated by Tara Westover for our August read. I wasn’t sure it was the kind of thing I was in the mood for. I needn’t have worried – it’s enormously compulsive and was a great book group choice. We met last Wednesday, we all found things that made us so angry, and there were sections some of the group found very uncomfortable to read. It definitely gave us quite a lot to talk about.

“There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquillity born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence. Gene was formed by this alpine hypnosis, this hushing of human drama.”

Tara Westover grew up in Idaho, in sight of stunning mountains known as the princess, told all government agencies were her enemies, that the end of days was coming and had to be prepared for. Hospitals and schools were all part of the conspiracy and the family kept away from them. Apart from church attendance the family lived quite apart from their neighbours. Her life was entirely different to that of most little girls born in mid-1980s America. Until she was nine years old, she didn’t even exist, her birth had never been registered later she was issued with a retrospective birth certificate.

“I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.”

Tara; the youngest of seven children was destined however, to prove herself to be phenomenally focused, determined and a real survivor. The landscape in which she grew up in, was one that it would prove difficult to extricate herself from.  

Their community was a Mormon community. However, Tara’s father had taken some of the tenets of their religion to another level. The family home was a little way out of the small local town, incorporating a scrapyard, from where her father made his living. The Westover family were nothing like the other Mormon families in the area, who lived pretty much like other American families. Tara and the three siblings closest to her in age were home schooled – though what Tara’s mother saw as education was somewhat limited. The children could read and do basic maths, and there was one science book in the house for them to learn from. At some level I think (my book group agreed) Tara’s mother must have sensed something of her daughter’s natural intelligence. When Tara was still quite young her mother appeared to have some concern for her daughter’s learning – however she never built on that concern, and Tara was allowed to grow up in appalling ignorance of the world and its history.

For years there was no TV or telephone in the house – later Tara’s father Gene, allowed them – he seemed to change his own rules as it suited him. Tara’s mother became an unqualified midwife (in the same way wise village women did in England during the middle ages) and soon began to mix her own home remedies for the frequent accidents that happened in the scrapyard. Tara’s older brothers were always limping home sporting one gruesome injury after another, their father never very concerned by the battle scars his children wore. Whatever the accident was, no matter how serious, doctors and hospitals were never consulted.

As Tara grew older, she was expected to work alongside her father and brothers in the scrapyard. Her father began to get more extreme in his views, her brother Shawn more and more violent, and Tara’s clothing and behaviour is scrutinised and commented upon, she becomes afraid of falling below the required standard. As Tara becomes a teenager, she is allowed to take part in some local dramatics, when it is discovered she can sing – here she makes her first friend. It is the first small change. Her brother’s violence is shocking, and hard to read about, and Tara survives it by excusing it to herself – she sees his girlfriends enduring the same treatment, and her parents doing and saying nothing.

When she is sixteen, Tara decided that she wanted to learn, and set out on the long, difficult journey that was her education. Having never finished or in fact started high school – she manages to win a place at BYU by passing ACT exams – though her challenges are only just beginning. Showing the most extraordinary determination Tara finally embarks on her education – one that will take her from BYU to Cambridge University and Harvard. During these years and in her visits home she begins to question her memories of home and the things that happened there – and whether she will ever really be able to maintain her relationship with her family.

“But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”

Educated is a fascinating memoir, not only in the depiction of the Westover family – but in the story of how Tara changes. From her first awkward beginnings; a teenager unused to the company of other girls, who knew nothing of world history, and who felt her own ignorance daily, still terrified of doctors – to the woman who would leave Cambridge with a PhD.

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Butterflies in November – Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (2004)

Translated from Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon

My latest read for #Witmonth comes from Iceland a country I am rather fascinated by as it’s a place I visited in 2017. I now really want to visit again. While reading I was googling pictures of the incredible landscape.

(It’s yet another book that I’m not counting for #20booksofsummer as I am trying to get the last four from my original list read now.)

At the heart of Butterflies in November is a free spirited woman, whose life it set on an entirely new course, thanks to an Icelandic road trip and deaf-mute four year old. It’s a charming novel full of colourful characters, long empty roads and self-discovery.

On the day that our unnamed narrator is dumped by both her lover and her husband, she runs over a goose and kills it. It’s not the best of days, she’s a thirty-something woman, a proof-reader who delivers her finished work to her clients by hand. Suddenly she is on her own, moving into a new apartment with her estranged husband dropping round every five minutes. What she wants is to get right away, far away – and she starts dreaming of a tropical get-a-way. However, her plans are thwarted when her best friend, expecting twins is hospitalised for the last three months of her pregnancy. The friend already has a four year old son – Tumi, a deaf child who communicates with a mixture of sign language and sounds difficult to decipher.

“The only thing mothers have in common with each other is the fact that they slept with a man while they were ovulating without the appropriate protection”

When Tumi’s mum asks our narrator to take care of him while she is hospitalised, she is suddenly thrust into a maternal role she is not very comfortable with. With no real idea how to care for a young child, much less one with Tumi’s needs – she can’t sign – there’s a difficult start for both of them. Tumi chooses some numbers for a big lottery draw and they win. Needing a break, and having charge of Tumi for three months, our narrator decides to put some distance between herself, her ex-husband and his new partner.

“You bid your husband farewell forever with a vigorous handshake and then meet him the next morning buying sesame seed bread rolls in the local bakery, queuing in the bank at lunchtime, swimming in the pool in the afternoon, or at the registry office later in the week, and then, the weekend after that, at the theatre with his new significant other – always inevitably bumping into each other.”

So, setting aside her previous tropical plans, she and Tumi set off on a trip across Iceland with a glove box stuffed with lottery winnings. Her destination a summer cottage over on the East coast near to where she grew up, a prefabricated cottage with no electricity she won in another competition (I wish I had such luck). More unusually (for Icelanders) is that she and Tumi set out in November.

Along the way our narrator encounters long, lonely roads, storms and the haunting rugged landscape of the Icelandic Ring Road. Tumi sits quietly in the back, and initially it is easy to forget he is there. She and Tumi have various overnight stops along the way, and as they travel and get to know one another better, they also meet a handsome falconer, an Estonian choir, stop at a cucumber farm and little Tumi comes away with a kitten. As the unlikely duo travel an understanding between them begins to develop, the author depicts their changing relationship beautifully. We can feel out narrator’s focus start to shift, she makes mistakes but has more understanding for Tumi than she realises.

“It’s difficult to gauge distances in the dark; there are no landmarks here. If there were anyone else around I’d ask for directions. I can see through the rear-view mirror that Tumi is tired and feel such an overwhelming responsibility, it’s worse than being alone – I’m responsible for another person’s happiness. The area is incredibly black. No echo of life disturbs the silence of this wilderness.”

Throughout the novel in italicised sections we get flashbacks to our narrator’s past – things that help us understand what has brought her to where she is – and her attitudes to relationships and motherhood.

I really enjoyed this novel – I loved the setting especially, and Tumi is a delightful little character. My only grumble comes right at the end of the novel, which seems to end rather abruptly. I actually thought there was about 40 pages to go – when it all ended – and there were instead a lot of recipes (food mentioned in the book) that follow. I was quite taken aback – I reread the last two or three pages and yes, it works and hangs together – but still feels very abrupt.

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The Harsh Voice – Rebecca West (1935)

The Harsh voice is a collection of four short novels (four long short stories is probably more accurate) that each deal with corrupting influence of money and hate. The title coming from a poem by Richard Wynne Errington.

“Speaks the harsh voice

We hear when money talks, or hate,

Then comes the softest answer.”

First published in 1935 the stories straddle the period dominated by the Wall Street crash of 1929. Rebecca West had travelled to America several times, and in these four brilliant pieces – three of which are set in the US – she perfectly recreates an American voice. Through these stories we see something of the America that Rebecca West experienced during the 1920s.

Life Sentence concerns both the corruption of money and the hate and misery that can come out of an unsuitable marriage. Corrie Dickson is a good natured young man when he marries his fiancé Josephine against his better judgement. Corrie had somewhat half-heartedly tried to break off the engagement, not counting on the iron will of the sweet little girl he was engaged to. Josie never really forgives him for what Corries later refers to as his attack of cold feet. Corries’s uncertainty on the eve of their wedding overshadows their whole marriage – and in time he begins to see his wife as two people, Josie the soft, lovable girl he fell in love with and Josephine an unforgiving, ambitious woman chasing money. She has become a strident, accusatory woman, who is about a lot more than mere motherhood or marriage.

“And as he knelt by the bed where she had cast herself, and whispered to her that he could not bear it if she would not turn her head that way, that something grew colder still and said, in time to his heartbeat. ‘This is a life sentence, this is a life sentence.’”

Josephine represents a new breed of American woman that was emerging during this period, confident businesswomen taking their place alongside men.

There is no conversation opens in Paris, Etienne de Sevenac a vain French aristocrat who prides himself on his youthful looks and success with women, relates to an unnamed friend how he fell foul of American businesswoman; Nancy Sarle. Etienne has lost – or is about to lose – everything. He’s never worked, relying on his inheritance to fund the lifestyle he enjoys so much. Etienne’s listener (we find out more about her later) is fascinated by Nancy Sarle. She travels to America, infiltrating the very society that will, eventually bring her face to face with this infamously, powerful businesswoman.

This story is particularly strong, it explores the nature of hate and revenge and more importantly the misconceptions between people. Nancy and Etienne are so different to one another – their concerns and experiences such that each was completely incapable of understanding the other. Rebecca West’s characterisation here – as in all four of these pieces is brilliant – the voices of her characters authentic and believably of the times.

The Salt of the Earth is the only story in this collection set in England, it would be hard to pick a favourite piece in The Harsh Voice, but this one might slightly have the edge for me. In this piece West introduces us to another wonderfully monstrous character in Alice Pemberton. Alice is the salt of the earth, an Englishwoman who likes to help everyone around her – her mother, her siblings, their spouses and children – she just wants to ensure they don’t continue to make the mistakes she sees them making. However, her help is destructive, she appears to be utterly unaware of the effect she has. Alice’s husband sees it all though, and so when Alice returns from a visit to her mother, he tries to talk to her about it.

Alice has been ill, and when she leaves her mother’s house to return home, her mother is so relieved to be rid of her, she can’t hide it – and no one at home is pleased to see her. Alice approaches home, thinking she will catch the servants out – but her mother has called ahead – knowing what would lie in store for the poor servants if anything is out of place.

“Of course the servants adored her. Well, so they might. She knew she had an almost perfect manner with subordinates, and she really took trouble over training them and thinking out devices for ridding them of their little faults. She would never need to part with her servants, if it was not for the curious vein of madness running through all women of that class, which invariably came out sooner or later in some wild attack of causeless rage.”

The reader suspects, what Alice’s fate will be, the clues are there from the start – but that just makes the story all the more compelling. West builds the suspense wonderfully in this story, and it was probably that along with its very Englishness which made me love it as much as I did.

The final story in this quartet is The Abiding Vision, a story about the destructive power of money, but also a story about love. Sam Hartley is a self-made man, he has risen from rough beginnings in Butte, Montana to Park Avenue in New York. His wife Lulah has been by his side throughout, but now as Sam has reached his peak of success in middle age, his beloved, kindly Lulah is looking and feeling her age. Sam takes a mistress, a chorus girl named Lily. For Lily, in the beginning at least, their arrangement is a business deal – and for Sam, still committed to his evenings with Lulah, and taking care of her, it’s exactly what he wants. Years pass, and Lulah becomes ill, and Sam is hit hard by the Wall Street crash.

These stories are brilliant, compulsively readable, portraying the America of the 1920s particularly well. One thing that troubled me; Rebecca West puts some rather unpleasant Antisemitism into the mouths and thoughts of a few of her characters. Thoughts prevalent at the time no doubt, though I couldn’t help but wonder whether this was something West was portraying as being authentic of these types of people at this time, or whether in it we see something of her own attitudes. I tend to assume the former.

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Thirteen Months of Sunrise – Rania Mamoun (2009)

Translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette

When I bought this little collection of stories, I did so because I wanted to learn something about a country that I don’t know much about. I also wasn’t aware just how small a collection it was. As it was, I read it in the car on the way home from Devon last Saturday.

Before I started reading Thirteen Months of Sunrise, I had to ask myself what I knew about Sudan – and the answer was not much. My impressions of the country coming almost entirely from BBC news reports. I found myself googling pictures of the cities in Sudan so I could at least have some realistic images of the places I was reading about.

Rania Mamoun is a Sudanese author, journalist and activist, Thirteen Months of Sunrise is her debut collection of stories, though she has previously published two novels in Arabic.

“Thirteen is not a superstitious or unlucky number, it’s the number of months in a year in Ethiopia.

But that’s another story.”

There are ten stories in a collection that only runs to 70 pages, some are really very short indeed. What I found particularly fascinating was how over the course of all the stories a portrait of modern Sudan starts to emerge.

The collection opens with the title story, in which a young woman working in a computer shop meets an Ethiopian man. She fixes his computer and they start to get to know each other. They talk about Abyssinian culture and start spending more time together.

“We laughed a lot that day, and when he said, ‘I feel at home in this country,’ I was filled with joy that I’d managed to ease his sharp loneliness.”

In Passing, a young woman mourns her father – hears his voice asking why she never became a doctor. She remembers Eid, the day her father became ill. It’s a poignant reminder, should we need it, that whoever we are, wherever we may happen to live, the loss of a parent is always seismic, whatever it is that roots you to this earth is severely shaken.

“Your scent opens channels of memory, it invades me without warning, like armies of ants stinging me fiercely, chaotically: on my eyes, my skin, in my pores, my blood, even my ears, as they pick up the vibrations of your voice drawing closer. I’m flooded with memories: I feel the warmth of your embrace; the warmth of the bed where as a child I slept beside you instead of Mother; you coming home from your errands, me sticking to you like glue. Mother tried to separate me from you, but I didn’t listen. ‘He’s going on a trip tomorrow,’ she’d tell me, and I’d say: ‘But he’ll come back.’”

In Doors, a man leaves his home for a new job. The water isn’t on that morning, he hasn’t paid the bill, the bathroom door is riddled with holes, but nothing can spoil his good mood. A new job, things are looking up. I read on with a sinking feeling.

“He reached the businessman’s office on the second floor, and gazed at the beautiful door, solid and well made. It must be from a factory that makes doors and windows and other things, or maybe it’s imported, he thought to himself. At any rate, it definitely hadn’t come from a workshop in the nearby industrial zone.

A sleek, elegant plaque was affixed up high, engraved with the word DIRECTOR.

He felt the door, how cold it was, and took a deep breath. He grasped the handle and said to himself: I’ve done it; at last I’ve made it into the world.”

In A Woman Asleep on Her Bundle a woman wonders about the elderly woman who appears to have chosen to sleep on the ground near the mosque wall. She’s made a home of sorts under the neem tree, but other people in the neighbourhood said she used to own a house, has children and was tricked out of her money by ‘Madam Cash’. Some people call her a mad woman, the narrator wonders why she is all alone here, why does she keep running away from her family.

In other stories; a woman goes to a charity office day after day to beg for the money needed to help her dying son, children go hungry, a woman travels by bus from one city to another watching a fly on the window. They are stories of ordinary people, the destitute and the lost, in the midst of which we witness those things which make life so difficult for people in Sudan.

Rania Mamoun’s thought provoking collection explores isolation and estrangement within Sudanese urban life. Here is the deep love of a woman for her country and she writes about it with a complete understanding.

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A Nail, A Rose – Madeleine Bourdouxhe (1989)

Translated from French by Faith Evans.

With thanks to Pushkin Press for the review copy

It’s not very long since I last read Madeleine Bourdouxhe but this little collection from Pushkin Press was just so perfect for #Witmonth I couldn’t possibly hang on to it any longer. I love the cover image – what a fabulous attitude.

Seven of these eight stories have a woman right at the heart of them, just one story concerns a man. Taking place in Belgium and France just before or just after the Second World War, the period during which most of them were written these stories depict ordinary women. Women who are reflective, lonely or locked in unsatisfying relationships. Three of the stories were written much later as Faith Evans explains in her introduction. The occupation overshadows many of these beautiful stories – with two of the stories, the first and the last based quite heavily on Bourdouxhe’s own experiences.

In the title story; A Nail, A Rose Irene walks homeward through the icy and darkness, ruminating on her failed relationship. Suddenly, she is attacked by a man from behind, he is wielding a hammer somewhat half-heartedly. Irene engages the man in conversation – he helps her stem the bleeding, walks her home – he is oddly childlike in his eagerness to please.

“He got out his handkerchief and tried to clean her hair, to staunch the wound. She was standing up, her heart racing. A man was wiping blood from her hair – and although he was doing it gently, she was in pain. He was holding the torch on a level with their faces, and she could see his pale greyish skin and the lock of brown hair that fell on to his forehead. He’d pushed his cap back and his face looked young and very thin. It was the face of an archangel or a fool: that look could belong to either one or the other.”

From here the attacker seems to begin to romantically pursue Irene – who appears less alarmed by this behaviour than one might imagine. The whole story has a bizarreness that can only come from real life. It’s a fabulous opening to an excellent collection.

Five of the stories are titled with the names of their central characters; Anna, Louise, Leah, Clara, Blanche and René. Here we have housewives who dream about the possibility of another life; one of them Anna is fascinated by the woman across the road – who like Anna is living above a garage, serving petrol to travellers who come along, but the other woman has a fancy chignon in her hair. Leah is involved with strikers; Leah finds herself taking drastic action to help the strike achieve its desired ends. Louise is a maid who longs to escape the drudgery of her life, she spends her day looking forward to the evening when she will go out, have a drink and maybe speak to men. She dreams of being friends with her employer – Madame – and tries on Madam’s coat. René is a hairdresser – who has an odd slightly dreamlike, fantastical encounter with one of his clients.

Sous le pont Mirabeau is the longest story in the collection, published here for the first time in English. The illustrations which first accompanied it reproduced with it. It is a story, which like the opening story is based on events in Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s own life.

“There were people everywhere, men, women and children, twenty or twenty five in a lorry, seven or eight in a vehicle meant for four. She was stretched out in the back of a lorry, her tiny baby on top of her, looking straight ahead with impatience in her eyes. She’d brought it upon herself, she thought, getting caught up in this escape – yet she wasn’t really fleeing or abandoning anything, she was merely responding to an appeal. The clarity of her memories guided her like a star.”

Set in 1940, it depicts the desperate flight of Belgians trying to get to France at the time of the occupation. A woman gives birth to a daughter just as the evacuation begins. She has no option, but to take her tiny daughter on the perilous journey, travelling in jeeps with soldiers, staying with kind-hearted strangers along the way.  It is an extraordinary reminder of the times, just what hardships people had to face in the midst of the fear and disruption of occupation. There was clearly much uncertainty and yet despite that, there is hope.

This is an excellent collection – I do hope there is more Madeleine Bourdouxhe novels and stories to be discovered and translated into English. If you’re yet to discover her short novels; La Femme des Gilles and Marie are both wonderful.

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Liar – Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (2018)

Translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston

My first read for this year’s Women in Translation month was Liar – chosen by my book group for September, I decided it was would be a perfect holiday read – it was.

Lies are tricky things – they have the habit of multiplying, taking on a life of their own – getting out of control. This novel explores the nature of lies and how quickly they can travel – what those lies might mean to the liar, and what the consequences could be.

“After all, more lies remain undiscovered than are revealed. Harmless little lies absorbed into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from the truth. Time kneads all of them into a single lump of dough, and does it matter what really happened and what didn’t?”

Summer is nearing its end and soon school will be starting again, it will be Nofar Shalev’s final year at school – a year before she will have to join the army. For now, Nofar spends seven hours a day working in an ice-cream parlour – wishing the hours away and mourning the fact her former best friend recently just threw her over, so she could hang around with the cool kids. Nofar is an average seventeen year old, she lacks confidence, worries about her appearance, never learning how to make the best of herself, overshadowed by a prettier younger sister. She has become almost invisible – and she thinks she knows how she appears to others, and this makes her feel even worse – (I wouldn’t be seventeen again for anything).

One day a fading TV reality star comes into the ice-cream parlour – he is rude and Nofar, not knowing who he is, unthinkingly corrects his grammar which enrages him further. Avishai Milner unleashes a torrent of abuse at Nofar – personal and nasty, playing into all the awful things poor Nofar already thinks about herself. Nofar is deeply distressed, and so when in the midst of her hysteria, Avishai follows her and merely touches her on the arm Nofar’s screams bring the whole neighbourhood running. Nofar is surrounded by kind people asking what happened – and so she tells a lie – and it’s a pretty big one.

The media frenzy that blows up around Nofar’s story takes everyone by surprise, particularly Nofar. Avishai Milner is arrested and remanded in custody, the press is positively salivating over the story. She thinks no one can ever know about the lie she told – but she is wrong. Two people know that she lied. One of them is a deaf-mute homeless man – who it turns out isn’t as deaf or as mute as everyone thinks, the other; Lavi Maimon, who had witnessed the whole thing from his bedroom window.

“Some plants must be watered once a day, others don’t have to be watered at all, the more they are left alone the more they thrive. That applies to lies as well; some must be reinforced by a constant stream of words, others are better off left alone, they will grow on their own.”

Like so many boys his age Lavi finds it almost impossible to express himself, like Nofar he lacks confidence. Having already noticed Nofar but been unable to speak to her, he now seizes the opportunity to get to know her – blackmailing her into spending time with him. However, Nofar finds she rather likes this awkward young man, his ‘blackmail’ becoming something of a nonsense as they each develop feelings for the other, each of them incapable of admitting how they feel. Lavi sees beyond Nofar’s lie – he likes her for who she is – if only he could tell her that.

Everything begins to get out of control as the mainstream media begin to talk of Nofar as a heroine, a role model for young girls and women speaking out against men. Nofar is invited on to TV shows, given new clothes invited to a glittering reception. The TV people do her makeup – cover up the pimples that worry her, making her look so different, Nofar barely recognises herself. At school, Nofar is a little less invisible and that is driving her popular sister crazy. All the time, the lie is getting bigger, becoming more impossible to recant.

Later, Nofar meets Raymonde – an elderly woman she is an unlikely friend for a seventeen year old. Raymonde has also told a lie – but her lie won’t hurt anyone – she just wants to keep the memory of her dearest friend Rivka alive a little longer.

“Raymonde knew that Rivka would have wanted someone to tell her story. The way an olive tree wants you to take all the fallen olives and make oil from them. So she took those olives from Rivka, added them to her own and pressed them together really well.”

In time, both Nofar and Raymonde will have to face up to their lies and their consequences.

Gundar-Goshen writes with great understanding, portraying the awkwardness and misery of teenagers who feel on the outside. She shows the complexity of different relationships and the power they hold; familial relationships, relationships with authority, our peers and ourselves.

Liar was my fifteenth book of my #20booksofsummer – another swap – this time swapped for Spring by Ali Smith – which I will probably still read fairly soon.

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Beneath the Visiting Moon – Romilly Cavan (1940)

The Furrowed Middlebrow series from Dean Street Press are turning out to be books that I can pretty much guarantee to love. There is another batch due out very soon and they look amazing. I was lucky enough to receive a couple of them in the post recently – and Beneath the Visiting Moon was one I decided I had to read almost straight away.

Romilly Cavan was a new name to me – but Scott from Furrowed Middlebrow was able to fill in a little background. Beneath the Visiting Moon was her final novel – and it would seem as if at least one of her other novels is certainly not as good. Never mind, this one is excellent I am so pleased it is being brought back for a new audience.

Beneath the Visiting Moon is a little longer than some of the other Dean Street Press titles I have read – a fully satisfying novel that combines family life, romance and the trials of growing up. Scott recommended it particularly for fans of Guard your Daughters, and I can see why, although this novel isn’t as dark as Tutton’s brilliant novel, there are shadows, glimpsed fleetingly at a distance.

What we do have though is a genteelly impoverished family living in a large house in a typical English village – characters are wonderfully well drawn, their voices distinct. There is a large supporting cast of eccentric characters, in whom we can see some slightly darker elements hidden beneath the surface.

It is 1939, and beneath the cosy domestic surface there is the threat of impending war – a subject mentioned several times. Bracken; an American explorer and long-time friend of the Fontayne family, reminds us that the world might end soon.  Aristocratic Mrs Oxford cares very much that everyone should stay in their rightful place in society, and yet is cruelly dismissive of her own young orphaned granddaughter, a working class woman whose absurdly beautiful triplets win a beautiful baby competition, a gossipy seamstress and a couple of spiteful office girls. Cavan’s writing is very good, there is some wonderfully humorous dialogue and her descriptions are lovely too. Here her description of the village.

“The place often had a satisfactory depthless look, with light and shadow lying in neat lozenges of effectively thought-out patterns. Times when window boxes, slung casually from the second-story windows of houses that were shops on their ground floors and residences above, were not the mere artistic whims of nature-loving dwellers, but the very expression of a street made from a child’s single-minded design and carried out with the expert aid of scissors and paint-box and glue.”

As the novel opens the Fontayne children are peering over the banisters as yet another prospective buyer is shown into the flower room. Their widowed mother Elisabeth has been trying without success to sell the house, also called Fontayne – the children have little hopes of her success. The eldest is Sarah – at seventeen she is practically grown up, she is beautiful and restless, longing for change. Twins Philly and Christopher are nearly sixteen, and the youngest is Tom, nine years old with a rather delicious turn of phrase and the ability to pretty much run around as he pleases. The only one of them who goes away to school is Christopher – the others educated by a governess – who is never a presence in the novel – and one suspects not in their lives either.

When the siblings hear of the family of a composer renting a nearby property – the hatch a plan to call – and get them to buy their house. The result is that their mother – after just four meetings, decides to get engaged to Julian Jones. Their step-father to be has two children of his own, Peter at eighteen is already very grown up – admitting to a shockingly romantic liaison in America to Sarah, and Bronwen who at thirteen is just about to publish her first book.

“When Elisabeth unexpectedly came in, the scene was one of suspended yet vigorous animation. Enthralled, Bronwen turned the pages of an immaculate copy of her book and masticated sausage with solid but abstracted determination. Peter’s face advanced and retreated in an olive pallor behind a mug of beer. Tom groaned pensively, placidly, swiping at his food with misdirected and eccentric implements. Philly, her back to the evening sunlight, her pale brown hair threading out to a haze of gold, was lost over the mysteries of a knitting pattern that Mrs Moody had given her. Sarah ate in a dream, fork hovering between plate and mouth. Ernest lay stretched at his ease, nicely poised between Philly’s elbow and the loaf; occasionally he lifted a moist pink nose and sniffed delicately at the flowers that overwhelmed a thin vase rocking drunkenly on its foundations.”

The blending of these two families is politely uncomfortable. Poor Bronwen, who hates her own plumpness and envies her step-sisters’ their slim attractiveness, rather annoys everyone with talk of her publisher. The piano playing Peter rather goes his own way, while the slightly dizzy Elisabeth – happiest tinkering about in the garden, and Julian are clearly quite happy. Philly is happiest with her cat Ernest, she is less confident than Sarah, dreads having to dance with people, and finds herself having to sit for a dull local painter.

“Long-threatened calamity had come to be. Philly was sitting for her portrait to Mr Lupin. Outdoors; in tribute to the golden-child-of-the-morning subject. She sat in a pose of unnatural naturalness beneath a meagre sapling of an apple tree, the only one in Mr Lupin’s cottage yard-cum-garden. She leaned lightly back on her arms, her head raised. At least, the ‘lean’ had been light at first, but was now tearing the muscles in her forearms. If she could have kept silent, it might have been bearable, but Mr Lupin expected to keep up a running, not to say leaping, conversation.”

At a local dance, Sarah meet Sir Giles Merrick, a thirty something diplomat who has to dash off across Europe from time to time to deal with the unfolding crisis. Sarah is instantly smitten – and works very hard to throw herself in his way ever afterwards, writing little notes – that aren’t strictly necessary – and trying to persuade her mother to hold a weekend party. Giles is charming and very kind, but the reader is never sure whether this potential romance is a good idea. Eventually, Sarah decides to leave home, getting a rather menial office job in London – and finding that two pounds a week really isn’t enough to live on.

The novel ends in August 1939 – as Sarah turns eighteen – and the ballroom of Fontyane has been spruced up – and the longed for dance/weekend party finally takes place. There is an added poignancy to the novel ending then – just weeks before the outbreak of war – we can’t help but wonder what the future has in store for these characters. First published in 1940 the author must have been wondering the same thing.

This lovely novel was a wonderful companion during a fairly slow reading week, characters who are a pleasure to spend time with.

This was my 13th book in #20booksofsummer, swapped for Girl, Woman other.

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