Balzac by a Hair!

Our next book will be Honoré de Balzac's Eugénie Grandet. Let's plan to begin the discussion April 1st, before everyone gets busy with Passover or Easter or taxes or the cruelest month or whatever.

 I look forward to the book--I've hardly read any Balzac--and to hearing what you have to say. Thanks to all who voted. Don't forget, anyone can participate.

Let's discuss discussions

Here's something else to consider. We seem to have fallen out of the habit of discussing the books in the forum. Do we want to revive that practice with the next book? Should we start taking our talks over to a, say, private group at Facebook?

Any other suggestions?

Our Next Book

Susan asked me to propose some titles for the next Slaves read-a-long, and I’m happy to oblige.

I chose books I haven’t read in a genre I don’t know well but want to know better: short 19^th Century novels. (Here’s hoping Rohan hasn’t read them all…) These books are all about 200 pages and represent five different European languages. Like almost all novels of the period, it seems, they are primarily about the predicament of women at the time.

Vote for your choice in the comments, let’s say by Valentine’s Day. We’ll aim to discuss the book starting April 1^st, no foolin’.

Honoré de Balzac—Eugénie Grandet (1833)

“Who is going to marry Eugénie Grandet?” That’s the question at the heart of this novel, one of the first in the sprawling canvas of Balzac’s Comédie humaine. Eugénie’s father, a wealthy miser, has his own answer to the question. But when Eugénie’s orphaned and penniless cousin arrives, she counters with a different one, such that the father’s cunning is matched against the daughter’s determination.

Anne Bronte—Agnes Grey (1847)

Agnes Grey eagerly takes up her post as governess, only to be disabused of that confidence by her unmanageable charges. The novel promises to be about work, though romance is present too, when Agnes meets the local curate.

Theodor Fontane—Irretrievable (1892) (Also translated into English as No Way Back)

Set in Holstein about thirty years before its date of publication when the area still belonged to Denmark, Irretrievable tells the story of a mismatched couple who have been married for 23 years—Count Helmuth Holk is fun loving; his wife Christine is solemn. The two slowly drift apart, a movement exacerbated when the Count is called away to the court. As the copy of one of two recent editions into English puts it, the couple “find themselves in a situation which is nothing they ever wished for but from which they cannot go back.”

Benito Pérez Galdós—Tristana (1892)

Don Lope pays off a friend’s debts, at the same time assuming responsibility for the friend’s orphaned daughter, Tristana. He takes her into his home—and into his bed. Tristana accepts the arrangement willingly enough, at least until she meets a handsome young painter. Soon she surpasses the Don in defiance of convention.

Ivan Turgenev—Home of the Gentry (1859)

“Another’s heart is like a dark forest,” we learn in this novel about a man named Lavretsky who returns to his native Russia after his marriage falls to pieces in Europe. Unsure what to do with himself, Lavretsky visits the estate of his widowed cousin and her two small children. Regret, indecision, and, as the passage about the wilderness of the heart suggests, heartbreak ensue.

The Vet's Daughter

Well, that was quite a journey. This 1959 novel by Barbara Comyns starts off seeming like one kind of book, but as it goes on the story gets more and more odd until the oddness is the center of the story. A far-too-realistic novel about a neglected and abused young woman becomes a story of magic, a fairy tale gone awry when her escape route becomes her prison. Maybe, in the end, it’s all one story after all.

Seventeen-year-old Alice lives in a poor South London neighborhood with her father and mother and a menagerie of animals that come and go, sometimes going home and sometimes to the vivisectionist. At his best, her father is cold, but he can also be openly cruel and demanding. Both Alice and her mother seem terrified of displeasing him. When her mother is ill, she pleads with Alice not to tell him that she’d been lying down to rest.

When Alice’s mother dies, Alice’s situation becomes more desperate. She reaches out to one of his colleagues, a man who appear to be in love with her but whom she does not love in return, and he gives her a way out as a companion to his mother, a woman engulfed in grief and living in a partially burned home under the care of terrible couple who take pleasure in treating her poorly.

Alice, meanwhile, discovers an unexpected source of freedom. She realizes that she can float in the air. But just as she’s starting to learn to control and enjoy this ability, it becomes its own prison, with disastrous results.

In trying to work out what this book is actually about, I keep coming back to the fact that her father is a veterinarian, and the women in his home are treated no better than the animals in his care. The fate of the animals in his care seems completely subject to human will, and Alice’s fate is completely subject to the will of others.

At one point in the book, a parrot who lives in Alice’s house because the owners pay the vet to keep it is consigned to a downstairs lavatory because its chatter annoys Rosa, Alice’s father’s new girlfriend. Banished by its real owners, it is then banished again by its caretakers. Alice and the parrot are alike, right down to having their most notable skill become their biggest source of trouble.

Every bit of Alice’s life, even the good parts, is governed by someone else. She has to follow her father’s rules to the letter. The few bits of freedom she has are those he allows or those she sneaks. Her only way to get help is through another man. One man she meets attempts to rape her, and another woos her only to abandon her without a word. She never gets to make a proper choice for herself. She doesn’t have much more freedom than a pet, but she has a human mind.

All of the woman are pets, to some degree. Some are treated well, but hardly any of them get to make their own choices. All are at the mercy of the men who care for them. They may attempt to intercede for one another, but the success of those attempts are still subject to the choices of men.

But how does the turn toward the supernatural fit in with this idea? Maybe Alice’s ability is a way of showing that freedom cannot come through ordinary means. Women’s earthly talents are no good in this universe, so perhaps they need an unearthly talent. Yet, for Alice, that talent is also a prison, turning her into an organ grinder’s monkey. Literally breaking the law of gravity isn’t enough to free her.

 Review also posted at Shelf Love.

Thoughts on The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns

"She can't do that, can she?" I asked myself when I reached the last page of Barbara Comyns' 1959 novel The Vet's Daughter. "She can't have a first person past tense narration and then kill off the narrator on the last page! I mean, obviously, she can, but isn't it stooping kind of low?"

Then I looked back a few pages, spotted a one-sentence flashforward whose significance I'd failed to note previously, and all was forgiven. I love dead narrators. Alice Rowland has been playing this card--that she's talking to us from beyond the grave--close to the vest.

Many things are played close to the vest in The Vet's Daughter, leaving the reader at the end not quite sure how we're supposed to interpret certain events, or even certain characters. For example, the novel opens with a description of a "man with small eyes and a ginger moustache" who walks along the street with Alice while she "was thinking of something else. . . . He told me his wife belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, and I said I was sorry because that is what he seemed to need me to say and I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would have most likely worn knee-caps." This man is not seen or mentioned again until the final pages of the book. Clearly Comyns intends the ginger man to serve more purpose than arouse Alice's pity--but what? I can't worry it out.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This is the story of Alice Rowland, 17-year-old daughter of an abusive London veterinarian who is more apt to send an unwanted puppy to the vivisectionist for a pound than to put it down humanely as he is supposed to. He's broken Alice's mother's front teeth with a kick in the face, and even worse, her spirit. He mostly ignores Alice since she disappointed him by being born a girl, but she's still frightened of him. Their house is grotesque--dark, smelly, decorated with the rug of a Great Dane's skin and a monkey's jaw, filled with animals in cages that Alice is required to take care of.

One night shortly before Alice's mother, who is dying of cancer, is euthanized against her will by Alice's father, Alice listens to her mother reminisce once again of growing up  on a farm in the mountains of Wales: "Dark brown moss grew in the mere by the farm; and once I saw a little child floating on the surface. She was dead, but I wasn't afraid because she looked so pure floating there, with her eyes open and her blue pinafore gently moving. It was Flora, a little girl who had been missing for three days. . . "

The morning that Alice is told her mother has died, she sees a Jacob's ladder that the sun has made across the floor of her mother's bedroom.

After the funeral, Alice's father goes missing for three weeks. He returns with a barmaid --the strumpet from the Trumpet-- Rosa Fisher (a fisher of men?), who he euphemistically tells Alice will be their housekeeper. Rosa quickly assumes an evil stepmother-like role in Alice's life. One afternoon while fixing their lunch in a steamy hot kitchen Alice imagines--or so she thinks at first--that she is floating above water in the mountains. "This wonderful water world didn't last long because a mist came, and gradually it wasn't there, and something was hurting my head. Somehow I'd managed to fall on the kitchen floor, and knocked my head on a coal scuttle. Coal had got in my hair, but otherwise everything was as it had been before I'd seen the water garden--just boiling beef and steam, and heard Rosa's and Father's voices coming through the wall."

Alice hasn't realized it, but her mother's reflections and death have inspired her to begin levitating. For most of the book, I was prone to read these instances metaphorically, as they happen after times of great psychological distress for Alice. Yet Comyns has Alice read ghost stories and Alice mentions how happy her mother's ghost must be when she leaves home to be a companion on an island for Henry Peebles' mother (Peebles is a kind man who cares for Alice, although she does not particularly want to marry him).  There's no denying that there's something supernatural going on here, especially once you accept the story's being told from beyond the grave.

And after Alice's father decides to exploit her talent, once she has returned home following Mrs. Peebles' suicide, to have her "rise up before all the people on the Common" it becomes clear that Comyns is turning Alice into a Christ figure, parodying the Christ story, since, as a character explains, the beauty in Alice's case is she isn't religious: Alice is given wine to drink and thinks it must be blood; she smells sour bread and cockroaches; she is kept prisoner; she exclaims, "Please God, don't let that happen to me. Father don't make me do this thing. I don't want to be peculiar and different. I want to be an ordinary person. I'll marry Henry Peebles and go away and you needn't see me any more--but don't make me do this terrible thing."

Alice's ordeal is not removed. Alice, in despair and humiliation, is brought in a bride's white dress, in a hearse-like carriage, to rise up and then come "down amongst the people." Trampled by a frightened crowd milling about in circles, she dies. Unlike the man with the ginger mustache, who dies with a terrified expression on his face, at the moment Alice's life is finished, she states, "[F]or the first time in my life I was not afraid."

And now I'm left with the thought: is the man with the small eyes and the ginger mustache a stand-in for the reader? A small-eyed someone Comyns and her characters briefly walk beside while thinking of something else?

The Vet's Daughter--Barbara Comyns

Barbara Comyns’s strange little book The Vet’s Daughter (1959) is narrated by Alice Rowlands, a seventeen-year-old girl who temporarily escapes the desperate circumstances of her home life when she takes a position as companion to an old woman, the mother of one her father’s colleagues. This woman, a Mrs. Peebles, is so sunk into depression or anxiety or ennui or something that she earns Alice’s description of her as “so sadly vague and harmless.”

Mrs. Peebles has survived a house fire, the death of her husband, and even a suicide attempt. A man delivering bread to the house discovered her “limply hanging in the green barn among the apples, and he had the presence of mind to cut her down with a pair of sheers and untie the dreadful rope around her neck.” This passage puts me in mind of the suicide Mr. Valpy, whose death in Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical fragment “A Sketch of the Past” gets fused in the mind of the young Virginia with the image of an apple tree in the garden. More pertinently, it offers a fine sense of Comyns’s calm way with horrible things. Some of that measured quality attaches to the narrator too, though equally characteristic is the gallows sprightliness evident in the sentence that comes right after the description of that macabre discovery: “Sometimes, when I looked at her there appeared to be a sinister brown stain round her neck, and I couldn’t help wondering if her eyes had always been so prominent.” This is funny, but not arch or knowing; mostly it’s discomfiting. Alice’s sentiments here seem almost naïve, but she is neither guileless nor foolish, even though she is almost always at the mercy of others.

Of all the unsettling, even startling things that happen to Alice in The Vet’s Daughter, why is it that the detail I remember most is so benign? Alice’s time with Mrs. Peebles comes to an abrupt end when the old woman—distraught that the couple who have kept house for her, a nasty pair straight out of a Roald Dahl story, have absconded with the silverware—is found drowned, presumably having finally succeeded in killing herself.

A kind policeman questions Alice and, as she has nowhere else to go, takes her in for the night. His house—unlike all the other filthy, dilapidated houses in the book—is “red-bricked and very clean.” (I picture it like the policeman’s house in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, all bachelor ship-shape.) And there’s an unexpected grace note: “Homing pigeons that had failed to return were in a box beside the fire, waiting to be claimed.”

Maybe the reason this image stays with me so strongly is that it’s one of the few homey, domestic, and even hopeful moments in the book. True, these birds are failures, homing pigeons that never made it home. In their dispossession they are rather like Alice. But they seem to have ended up well. Imprisoned, perhaps, or packaged at least, yes, but well looked after, all cozy beside the fire. And surely someone will want them: they are waiting to be claimed, after all. It’s unclear anyone wants Alice, for anything other than abusive or mercenary reasons, except perhaps Mrs. Peebles’s son Henry, Alice’s father’s colleague, the man who arranged for her to look after his mother and who cares a great deal for her even though she can’t bring herself to return the feeling. (In the end, he proves unable or unwilling to save Alice.) The pigeons in their box remind us of so many unhappy animals in the book, especially those in Alice’s father’s care—a term we can only use ironically, since he sells the ones he doesn’t like to a vivisectionist. That’s to say nothing of the ones he has used to furnish his house: a rug from a Great Dane’s skin, a monkey’s skull that sits on the mantelpiece, “a horse’s hoof without a horse joined to it” to prop open the door to his study. The house is full of piteous and frantic mewling and screeching and barking—as well as, before long, the tortured cries of Alice’s mother, who dies from a painful, undiagnosed illness.

Whatever their fate, then, the pigeons don’t suffer as these other animals do. Maybe I held on to the image’s intimation of a happier future—the moment someone finally claims the birds—as a corrective to my uneasy suspicion that Alice has had something to do with Mrs. Peeples’s death. And I don’t just mean that in the childish sense of the omnipotence of thoughts: Mrs. Peeples disappears on an afternoon when Alice has fled the house, unable to take the woman’s presence any more (“She became repulsive to me, like some old brown flower”) and the girl feels guilty for having felt that way. I mean it more literally: in the possibility that Alice has done her companion in.

That suspicion might be a way to understand the strange paragraphs—suddenly and unusually narrated in present tense—that describe Alice’s search for Mrs. Peeples. Here’s the first one:

Clank, clank my feet on the stairs; clank, clank on the landing. All the doors are open. One of Mrs. Peeples’s black shoes is caught in the ironwork and abandoned. Through the open doors are rooms with open windows, and it is like a zoo with the animals let loose and escaped. No one is there. “Mrs. Peeples, where are you?” Where are you? Not upstairs or below, or in the garden where you never went. Where are you? For a long time I look for her, even in the green shed, but she isn’t there hanging from the roof with the rope cutting into her brown neck.

The garden where you never went. It’s as if Alice knows she is already dead. The odd syntax of the final sentence, which paints the picture of the death it claims to disavow, doesn’t make the scene any less creepy. And why is Alice saying to herself (“Where are you?”) what she has already said out loud? In the end, I don’t think Alice has really killed Mrs. Peeples. Instead it’s as though she’s in a fugue state here, which is a pretty good description of the whole atmosphere of this strange little novel.

*

So who is this Barbara Comyns and where did she come from? The US edition includes a short introduction by Comyns, reprinted from a British reprint from the 1980s. (It is the fate of writers like Comyns always to be reprinted, always to be rediscovered.) Comyns gives us a rather helter-skelter autobiography. We learn of a violent father who went through the family fortune, an invalid mother who suddenly, unaccountably went deaf, a series of unlikely governesses. Her childhood seems to have been both privileged and hardscrabble. Later came art school and two marriages and a whole series of odd jobs, in advertising and in real estate, as an artist’s model and a refurbisher of cars. Throughout she kept writing, though with only middling success, it seems.

It’s heartening anyone published her at all, so odd is her prose (at least based on this book). I remember once in graduate school, having recently discovered Henry Green, another unusual English writer of the mid twentieth century, telling one of my advisors that I wanted to include him in my dissertation. She was generally speaking encouraging of my project (as well as unusually well read for an academic). But talking with her made me nervous and prone to prattle on. I remember saying to her, rather grandiosely, that Green wasn’t like anyone else, it was as if he’d dropped to earth from the moon, to which she tartly responded that no one dropped from the moon, that he wasn’t so unusual as all that, that he had his context like anyone else. I think now that this is true. And reading Comyns I was reminded of a number of other wonderful, more or less minor British writers from about the same time. There’s something of Jean Rhys in Comyns’s portrayal of the hopelessness felt by young women (though Alice, and perhaps even her deaf friend Lucy, who flits intriguingly along the margins of the novel, is more resourceful than Rhys’s protagonists). I caught echoes of Richard Hughes’s hallucinatory portrayal of childhood in A High Wind in Jamaica (1929) and of Rebecca West’s matter-of-fact inclusion of supernatural elements in her amazing The Fountain Overflows (1957). (It’s probably no accident that these last two titles, like The Vet’s Daughter, are published by NYRB Classics.)  Sometimes Comyns reminded me of Penelope Fitzgerald, in the obliquity of both her narrative structure and her own biography. (Fitzgerald kept herself and her family afloat by taking all sorts of odd jobs, too.) I even caught an anticipatory hint of early Ian McEwan—The Vet’s Daughter is like a less macabre Cement Garden (1978). And those are just the writers I know: I’ve a hunch, that Comyns might be like Ivy Compton-Burnett and Muriel Spark, though I haven’t actually read them yet.

So Comyns might not be sui generis. But I don’t think I was entirely wrong in thinking (wishing?) that Henry Green, or Barbara Comyns, or any similar writer, the ones that slink through the supposedly dull and genteel world of twentieth century British fiction like feral cats, is an alien, weird figure. However romantic or idealized, that way of thinking might keep us alive to the wonder of such writers. And in literary historical terms it can help us see that realism only ostensibly triumphed in the fiction of the period. In reality, a perverse, fantastic, Gothic strain runs throughout it. I’m thinking, in addition to those I’ve already mentioned, of writers as seemingly different as Elizabeth Bowen, Doris Lessing, and Daphne du Maurier. (Importantly, I suspect, the weirdness that disrupts these novels almost always manifests itself in depictions of children.)

In The Vet’s Daughter the clearest example of this strangeness—the oddest, most unsettling thing in this odd, unsettling book—is Alice’s sudden ability to levitate, or, as she prefers to call it, to float. One night Alice finds herself rising out of her bed and she knows she isn’t dreaming because she hits her head on a sconce that is still cracked in the morning. She is as surprised by this turn of events as we are. But the novel takes it in stride. It quickly becomes clear that we aren’t to take the floating as a hallucination on her part or a metaphor on the novel’s (her way of rising above the unhappy events of her life, say). Alice’s ability is both ordinary (when she cautiously asks Mrs. Peeples if she has ever heard of anything like it the woman says she believes it used to be quite common) and extraordinary (it fills everyone who sees it with horror, even disgust). I like that the novel doesn’t try to explain it away, or use it as a way to redeem or transform Alice’s mostly grim and unhappy life. Indeed, it’s not long before someone—her father, the very man who hatefully said he hoped he would never see her again—tries to profit from Alice’s ability. He arranges a public demonstration, doubtless the first step on a tour that, Alice sees all too clearly, will make her into a freak show exhibit.

In a marvelously ambivalent ending, though, these plans are foiled. Alice’s appearance in the air above Clapham Common causes a riot in which three people, including Alice herself, are killed. The first person narration comes abruptly to an end, her fate given to us through a newspaper report. The bitter irony of the book’s end fits with its way of ruthlessly undermining anything nice or good that happens to Alice: a boy she falls for, who teaches her to skate, throws her over; Henry, Mrs. Peebles’s kind son, doesn’t come when she calls him in her hour of greatest need.

Perhaps surprisingly, given what I’ve said, The Vet’s Daughter isn’t unrelievedly bleak, but it’s hardly easy going. You can see why I needed to hold on to those pigeons, and to think of them as rescued. But the book whetted my interest in Comyns’s other books, even though I’ll need to take a deep breath first.

"Definitely Floating": Barbara Comyns, The Vet's Daughter

And then in the night it happened again and I was floating, definitely floating. The moonlight was streaming whitely through the window, and I could see the curtains gently flapping in the night wind. I'd left my bed, and except for a sheet, the clothes lay scattered on the floor. I gently floated about the room. Sometimes I went very close to the ceiling, but I wouldn't touch it in case it made me fall to the ground.

What a strange, and strangely compelling, novel The Vet's Daughter is! It seems like a grimly realistic story at first, with its details about the sordid life of eponymous Alice, her coarse, brutal father, and her sad mother, doubled up with a pain that only makes her husband despise her the more: "For Christ's sake, woman, send for a doctor; and, if he can't put you right, keep out of my sight!" It continues in what seems like a straightforward enough way, with her mother's decline and death, and then the arrival of Rosa, the wicked would-be stepmother. It's an unrelentingly dark story with a gothic atmosphere only rendered stranger by the constant presence of the vet's patients:

At night I was all alone in the house. Although I slept with my head under the bedclothes, I could hear awful creakings on the stairs, and sometimes I thought I could hear whisperings by my bed. I asked Mrs. Churchill if she would stay and keep me company; but she said her husband didn't like her to be out at night, and she had 'our Vera's' boy staying with her while his mother was in hospital. One night the dogs started barking and yelping and I thought something terrible really had happened. I lay in bed shivering, too afraid to go and see if the house were on fire, or if burglars were creeping through the pantry window. In the morning I found the cage that contained the old cock with the diseased eye had fallen to the ground, and the bird was dead and heavy.

 Things only get stranger, and grimmer, as the novel goes on -- and then just when you wonder whether Alice has hit rock bottom, she rises -- quite literally -- to the top:

In the night I was awake and floating. As I went up, the blankets fell to the floor. I could feel nothing below me -- and nothing above until I came near the ceiling and it was hard to breathe there. I thought, 'I mustn't break the glass globe.' I felt it carefully with my hands, and something very light fell in them, and it was the broken mantle. I kept very still up there because I was afraid of breaking other things in that small crowded room; but quite soon, it seemed, I was gently coming down again. I folded my hands over my chest and kept very straight, and floated down to the couch where I'd been lying. I was not afraid, but very calm and peaceful. In the morning I knew it wasn't a dream because the blankets were still on the floor and I saw the gas mantle was broken and the chalky powder was still on my hands.

It's possible to move past this moment and assume that, Alice's own conviction (and the physical evidence) notwithstanding, it was a dream . . . except that it keeps happening: she keeps "floating" above the dreary circumstances that she seems so powerless to change, above the disappointments that follow so bitterly one after another, above the people who fail her or leave her or just don't love her. Her levitation brings no levity to the novel, though it is darkly comical. For instance, when she asks her one ally, her admirer Henry Peebles, "if it was unusual for people to sometimes rise into the air when they were resting in their beds -- particularly in strange beds" he is understandably "very slow in understanding what I meant"; when she decides to show her false lover Nicholas that she "can do things others can't do" he watches her rise, horrified, and then "in a scared and awful whisper" tells her to "Stop it, stop it, I say!"

Alice can rise above her life but not leave it behind; it seems only fitting that the last indignity she suffers is having her gift used against her, and poetic justice that her final fall should precipitate destruction. The novel has the tautness of a fairy tale and the patness of an allegory. Though it ends up not being a realist novel, though, it's very specific about Alice's oppression and her psychic suffering: its critique is perhaps more resonant and devastating because it resorts to fantasy rather than offering restitution or resolution.

The Vet's Daughter is the first Comyns novel I've read and it definitely makes me want to read more (I've got Our Spoons Came from Woolworths and Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead in my Virago collection). Her prose is not elaborate or florid but her turns of phrase are remarkably satisfying and often surprising. The very first line of The Vet's Daughter is actually a good example: "A man with small eyes and a ginger moustache came and spoke to me when I was thinking of something else." Aren't you immediately curious, both about the man's business with her and about what she was thinking when he interrupted? I see that the other two novels also have brilliant, irresistible starts: "The ducks swam through the drawing-room window," begins Who Was Changed, while Our Spoons opens "I told Helen my story and she went home and cried." The Vet's Daughter also shows that Comyns can do vivid, tactile description, full of the kinds of little details that make a scene particular, and also scenes full of dramatic action, fear, and pathos -- such as the terrible attempted rape, after which Alice -- bruised and bleeding, stands in the street and thinks "There is no hope for me -- no hope at all."

The Vet's Daughter is at once compact and suggestive: it is dense with details that feel meaningful, and meaningfully connected, but whose meaning is not immediately transparent. Why, for instance, is Alice's father a vet? I don't mean literally, in terms of the plot, of course: is there something about his meticulous care for animals (his skill as a vet is often mentioned) that helps us understand Alice's place in the world? Why does Alice call Henry "Blinkers"? What doesn't he see? How does his mother's life or death reflect Alice's situation? What exactly is Nicholas's role -- if he even exists? Does any of it happen the way Alice says it does, in fact? I found myself thinking that it would teach very well: it's eerie and fast-paced enough to catch students' attention and puzzling enough to keep it.

Barbara Comyns's The Vet's Daughter

Barbara Comyns’s The Vet’s Daughter was not what I expected, but then, this is my third Comyns novel and none of them have been what I expected. Our Spoons Came From Woolworths was my first one, and it was an unsettling mix of a light, breezy tone and dark subject matter. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead remains my favorite Comyns so far; it’s very strange, opening with ducks swimming in and out of drawing room windows and staying on a similar off-beat note. The world of the book seems familiar, but it’s not, quite. The Vet’s Daughter is perhaps more like Our Spoons than Who Was Changed, but it’s darker in tone throughout. But it also veers off in some odd directions, especially in the second half.
It tells the story of Alice, the daughter of the title, who lives in London with her bitter, nasty father and her ailing mother. She’s trying to give her mother as much help as she can, but her mother is on her way out of this world, and now the daughter is going to be left to manage her father on her own as best as she can. She has a friend Lucy, but she can only see her occasionally, and Lucy is deaf, which makes communication difficult. The vet’s practice has sinister aspects to it; a vivisectionist stops by to pick up unwanted animals and many of the animals they keep suffer. There are few bright spots in Alice’s life. One is Mrs. Churchill, who is a companion to the family during and after Alice’s mother’s illness. She provides some needed stability.
Mr. Peebles is not exactly a bright spot in Alice’s life, but he’s a friend and one with some power to provide Alice with much-needed diversions. He is another veterinarian who has helped with the family vet practice, and it becomes clear early on that he is attracted to Alice. It seems as though he might provide an escape, but Alice does not return his feelings. She spends time with him but considers him only a friend, although marriage is always there as a possibility should she get desperate enough. She walks a line between honesty and deception, trying to get what pleasure she can out of his company without leading him on.
All this takes place in the gloomy setting of poverty-stricken London, but this is only the first half of the novel. In the second half Alice heads out toward the English coast to live with Mr. Peebles’s mother. She is a depressed woman living in a house that’s halfway burned to the ground, being cared for by a truly strange, scarily sinister couple, the Gowleys. Alice’s job is to be a companion. She is still isolated here, this time geographically isolated as well as emotionally so, but this job brings some new opportunities with it. Alice learns about the countryside and its ways, and she also learns about sexual desire, as she meets Nicholas, a young, attractive soldier who teaches her how to ice skate and seems to be attracted to her as well. This relationship puts her feelings toward Mr. Peebles in a new light; she knows now what real attraction can be and marriage Mr. Peebles takes on an even duller, bleaker aspect.
I think I’ll stop there with a discussion of the plot, except to say that levitation becomes an important plot point, and I’m trying to figure out what to make of this. Alice had a couple experiences with levitation during her sleep while in London, and it happens again out on the coast. She experiments a bit and discovers she can levitate at will, although it takes a lot of energy and focus. When her father finds out about her ability, it becomes another way he can exploit her, and her life closes in on her again. But what are we supposed to make of this? I first thought she was merely dreaming that she could levitate and that it was a metaphor for her desire for freedom or something like that. But then what I thought was a metaphor becomes real and she actually does have the ability to float up into the air. Of course, it is still a metaphor even though it’s “real” — her ability to levitate only sets her apart and leads to more suffering and despair. The thing that makes her special makes her miserable, and there is no chance for escape, ever.
I’m still not sure what I think of the book as a whole, and I’m looking forward to reading other people’s thoughts. I liked the first person narration; the story is told through Alice’s eyes in her forthright, no-nonsense tone. Alice is so young — only seventeen — and she hasn’t had the chance to do much in her life, but she has seen a lot of suffering. One of the first things she tells us is that “if [my mother] had been a dog, my father would have destroyed her.” She describes her father’s cruelties matter-of-factly and without dwelling on the darkness of it all, but there’s a sadness to the tone as well, as though she knows life isn’t ever going to offer much, in spite of her hopes. When Nicholas betrays her, she is not really surprised. But I’m not sure how to integrate the two parts of the book, particularly the very ending. The note the book ends on seems appropriate, but to get there by way of levitation? I’m curious what other people think of the value of bringing in this fantastical? supernatural? element.
But I definitely can conclude that Comyns is a writer I want to read in full. I love how she’s full of surprises and that her novels have so much variety. I love the darkness and twistedness of her worlds, and the way she look at that darkness straight on.

It's Unanimous! Our next pick: The Vet's Daughter

The voting is finished, and the choice is in: we'll be reading Barbara Comyns's novel The Vet's Daughter as our next pick. The discussion will begin on January 15th. Everyone is welcome to join in!

At long last, time for another book!

Rohan got the ball rolling on choosing another book, and I volunteered to come up with a list for us to vote on, so here goes! But first, an explanation: this group is open to absolutely anybody who wants to participate. You don't need to do anything to join us except to read the book and participate in the discussion in whatever way you want to. That could include something as simple as reading along and commenting on the posts here, or perhaps publishing a post on your own blog, or possibly publishing a post on this site. Leave a comment here if you'd like to publish a post on this blog, and we'll figure out how to get that done.

For this round, I thought about what books I'd like to discuss with you all the most, and for some reason books from the 1950s were coming to mind. So, here's a list of titles I think we might enjoy. Let's vote by next Wednesday, November 26th. Perhaps we could discuss the book on or around January 15th? I thought that date was far enough away to give us plenty of time to read and also enough after the holidays that they won't interfere. If anyone thinks another date would be better, though, just let me know.

So, vote for your choice in the comments!

• Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957): "Tempering memory with invention, McCarthy describes how, orphaned at six, she spent much of her childhood shuttled between two sets of grandparents and three religions—Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. One of four children, she suffered abuse at the hands of her great-aunt and uncle until she moved to Seattle to be raised by her maternal grandparents. Early on, McCarthy lets the reader in on her secret: The chapter you just read may not be wholly reliable—facts have been distilled through the hazy lens of time and distance."
•  Barbara Comyns, The Vet's Daughter (1959): "The Vet's Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and contempt. After his wife's death, the vet takes up with a crass, needling woman who tries to refashion Alice in her own image. And yet as Alice retreats ever deeper into a dream world, she discovers an extraordinary secret power of her own."
• James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953): "First published in 1953 when James Baldwin was nearly 30, Go Tell It on the Mountain is a young man's novel, as tightly coiled as a new spring, yet tempered by a maturing man's confidence and empathy. It's not a long book, and its action spans but a single day--yet the author packs in enough emotion, detail, and intimate revelation to make his story feel like a mid-20th-century epic. Using as a frame the spiritual and moral awakening of 14-year-old John Grimes during a Saturday night service in a Harlem storefront church, Baldwin lays bare the secrets of a tormented black family during the depression."
• Yukio Mishima, Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956): "Because of the boyhood trauma of seeing his mother make love to another man in the presence of his dying father, Mizoguchi becomes a hopeless stutterer. Taunted by his schoolmates, he feels utterly alone until he becomes an acolyte at a famous temple in Kyoto. He quickly becomes obsessed with the beauty of the temple. Even when tempted by a friend into exploring the geisha district, he cannot escape its image. In the novel's soaring climax, he tries desperately to free himself from his fixation."
• Ira Levin, A Kiss Before Dying (1953): "A Kiss Before Dying not only debuted the talent of best-selling novelist Ira Levin to rave reviews and an Edgar Award, it also set a new standard in the art of psychological suspense. It tells the shocking tale of a young man who will stop at nothing—not even murder—to get where he wants to go. For he has dreams, plans. He also has charm, good looks, intelligence. And he has a problem. Her name is Dorothy; she loves him, and she’s pregnant. The solution may demand desperate measures. But, then, he looks like the kind of guy who could get away with murder."

Hello? Is Anybody Out There?

What happened? One minute we were all enthusiastically discussing Jamaica Inn, and the next minute it was complete radio silence! It hardly seems possible, but almost a year has gone by since our last read.

I don't think any one of us made a conscious decision to let this group lapse. Probably we were all just caught up in other things and other conversations. But tonight I was thinking that, much as I enjoy following the diverse book discussions we're all still having on our own sites or on Twitter, I rather miss meeting up here once in a while to talk all together about a book we have in common.

I put out a tweet to that effect and Rebecca said she felt the same way, so we started wondering how the rest of the group feels. A quick post here seemed like the best way to find out. Is there interest in picking up again? If people had lost interest, or it had stopped being fun, are there factors we could address and improve on -- book choices, pacing, anything else? Or do people already feel pulled in too many directions, so that this group has become that one thing too many? Energy ebbs and flows for this kind of thing, and that's only natural. It just seemed worth checking whether we were done or just paused.

Jamaica Inn: A Guest Post

[I'm happy to share these thoughts from Dorian Stuber, a regular reader who wanted to join in our discussion of Jamaica Inn. I'm sure he'd welcome comments. -- Rohan]

I’ve never posted here before, but feel obligated since I voted for Jamaica Inn and the margin of victory was so narrow. I’ve enjoyed reading these posts; they’ve helped me pinpoint some of the things I like about the novel.

I like Teresa’s idea that the novel revises our ideas about the heroines of the Gothic literature from the period in which it is set. Certainly, I enjoyed the text’s deployment of elements I’m familiar with from certain 19th century texts (the Brontes, Hardy), if not from Romance literature, of which I have no real knowledge. As someone interested in 20^th-century British literature, I spent some time trying to figure out how to place Du Maurier amongst other literature from her own time. Is there anything modernist about this work, for example? Would it be useful to think of it as a Modernist take on the Gothic?

In the end, I think Jamaica Inn is too solidly aligned to the conventions of its genre (and I don’t say that as a criticism!) for that to be the case. But the ending is quite intriguingly open. In my edition (the Virago), at least, the penultimate page ends with Jem asking, “'Do you love me, Mary?’” To which she responds, rather ambiguously, “'I believe so, Jem.” I thought the book ended here, and was immediately reminded of the famously irresolute ending of Lawrence’s Women in Love (or The Fox or indeed any number of other Modernist works). But then I realized there were another few lines to go on the real last page, and the ending became a little less irresolute.  But I think the gender ambiguities that the text repeatedly offers us remain even with the ending we do get. Besides, Mary’s professed dream of farming by herself didn’t seem to me in any way conventionally gendered.

And yet it was just this professed dream of Mary’s that most puzzled me about the book. The thing that didn’t quite work for me was the disjunction between Mary’s repeatedly expressed longing for her lost home in Helston and the reality of the place as presented by the text. Helston may be more temperate than the moors, but it’s hardly gentle: think about the sickness that kills the county’s livestock, which Du Maurier describes so resonantly, at such length: “It was a sickness that came over everything and destroyed, much as a late frost will out of season, coming with the new moon and then departing, leaving no trace of its passage save the little trail of dead things in its path.” (This could be a description of the novel, except that sharp “little” couldn’t be said to apply to the things that happen at and around the inn.) The death of the livestock prefigures the death of Mary’s mother, which is itself presaged by the “eager” pleasure Mary’s neighbour takes in explaining to Mary and the doctor that the patient’s condition has worsened. The man who buys the farm after the mother’s death (admittedly a stranger from a nearby town) makes plans to change all the things he doesn’t like about the place; Mary, “an interloper in her own home,” can only watch “in dumb loathing.”  

I’m unconvinced, in other words, that Helston is quite so wonderful. And yet I also didn’t get the sense that the text was criticizing or making even gentle fun at Mary here. Mostly, the text presents Helston and Mary’s life before coming to the inn as a real lost paradise rather than, like all paradises, as one already lost. (And necessarily so, if there is to be a novel, that is, if Mary is to be catapulted into the events of the plot.) I rather hoped that the novel would more overtly suggest its, at least, if not its protagonist’s, awareness of the difference between memory and reality. One effect of that awareness would have been to give us a Mary who is naïve, blinded or misguided, at least in this regard, but I think that would only have made her more interesting, not less. Still, if the novel doesn’t overtly tell us that Helston is no more a place for Mary than Jamaica Inn, it is explicit that the era of the wreckers is fast coming to an end, with the advent of lighthouses, beacons, and the like. In that regard, there is a striking belief in progress, even modernity at the heart of this Gothic text.

-- Dorian Stuber

Jamaica Inn

It was a dark and rainy day when I settled down to read Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier, perfect weather for this romantic thriller about an orphan, a drunken innkeeper, a horse thief, and an attentive albino vicar.

When her mother died, the orphan, a young woman named Mary Yellan, moved north to Jamaica Inn to live with her aunt Patience. Before even arriving at the lonesome inn on the moors, Mary began to hear rumors about the inn’s evil reputation. It turns out that Mary’s uncle, Joss Merlyn, is both a drunk and a criminal. At first, Mary assumes that his only crime is smuggling, but soon she learns of the murderous nature of his crimes and wonders how she might convince her aunt to escape with her. Can the vicar she keeps meeting on the moors help her? And what about Joss’s brother, Jem, a confessed horse thief? What is Mary to do about her growing attraction to him? Is he more involved in Joss’s activities than he will admit?

This book is a great example of how a book can be entirely predictable, yet extremely suspenseful. It’s a pretty neat trick. So how does she manage it? The predictability of the book lies in its employment of a lot of tropes we’ve all become used to seeing in literature and film, some perhaps influenced by du Maurier. Jem the horse thief, for example, is presented as a rogue with a heart of gold, ready to give Mary gifts and attention but never forcing himself. It’s clear to the experienced reader that he’s a romantic lead long before Mary realizes it. But du Maurier holds back just enough information to keep readers in doubt as to the real nature of his relationship with his brother. He may be a romantic lead, but is he a good man? And how good must one be to be considered good, anyway? And how evil to be considered evil? Mary ponders this question when she learns of Joss’s smuggling:

Smuggling was dangerous; it was fraught with dishonesty; it was forbidden strictly by the law of the land; but was it evil? Mary could not decide.

This question underpins many of Mary’s decision-making processes. When is a dishonest action evil? Just about every character in this book is morally compromised in some way, but at what point do they cross the line?

When Joss eventually crosses the line for Mary, her way becomes clear:

Mary did not consider her uncle any more. She had lost her fear of him. There was only loathing left in heart, loathing and disgust. He had lost all hold on humanity. He was a beast that walked by night. Now that she had seen him drunk, and she knew him for what he was, he could not frighten her. Neither he nor the rest of his company. They were things of evil, rotting the countryside, and she would never rest until they were trodden underfoot, and cleared, and blotted out. Sentiment would not save them again.

Evil turns a human into something other than itself, into a thing that can and must be fought. And Mary, as a good person, has the strength of will to fight.

Mary herself is a sort of commentary on the prototypical Gothic heroine. du Maurier sets her novel in the early 1800s, the time of Ann Radcliffe and her many fainting heroines. Mary faints once, early in the book, and she despises herself for it. For the rest of the book, she’s the type to swear to give herself courage, jump off a porch roof, walk for miles in the cold, and offer to confront a dangerous man at gun point. She is fearless, we are told, and much like a boy.

This point, that Mary in all her boldness, is being boyish for standing up her herself fascinates me, though I disagree with it on principle. Mary is, in most respects, the kind of heroine many woman want to see in novels. She’s plucky and fierce and smart, and she claims to prefer farming to romance. She’s certain that, given the chance, she’d be able to run her own farm. But she’s sometimes doubtful of her own strength, especially when it comes to matters of the heart. When she kisses the rakish Jem, she’s not sorry to have done it, but she’s determined to be the master of her emotions and not let her heart drive her into dangerous ground. At one point, this dilemma about Jem is treated as a battle between her boyishness and her girlishness. What a woman would do, and what a man would do is a minor obsession of the narrative. But I think du Maurier is being slyly subversive here because, in the end, Mary makes the choice of both a man and a woman. She refuses, right up to the end, to be tied down by these categories.

Jamaica Inn reads like a good old-fashioned potboiler, but there’s a lot going on inside, once you scratch the surface. This is the fourth book by du Maurier that I’ve read, and with each book that I read, I love her more.

Cross-posted to Shelf Love

Jamaica Inn

What a wonderful thing that Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn was the most recent pick for the Slaves of Golconda reading group (in which everyone is welcome to participate!). I’d read du Maurier’s most famous novel, Rebecca, and liked it very much, but somehow I never got around to reading further in her work. But I loved Jamaica Inn and am inspired to read more du Maurier now. The novel surprised me. After reading Rebecca the plot twists and turns and the moodiness and sensationalism of it weren’t a surprise, but I expected it to be another novel that takes place in a big house amongst people with wealth. However, Jamaica Inn is very much a novel of the lower classes; it takes place among farms and tiny villages and its characters are smugglers and horse thieves.

The novel tells the story of Mary Yellan, a 23-year-old who has just lost her mother and now, to fulfill a promise, has gone to live with her Aunt Patience. The last time Mary met Patience, she was happy and full of life, but things have changed: Patience has married Joss Merlyn, a surly, violent man who now runs Jamaica Inn, a place strangely devoid of customers — and a place that, mysteriously, no one wants to talk about. As Mary settles in to Jamaica Inn, she becomes determined to get her aunt away from her husband and into a better situation, but she gets unwillingly caught up in her uncle’s doings — which she realizes are worse and worse the longer she lives there — and becomes more and more miserable.

There are two sources of hope for Mary, although neither is particularly hopeful. The first is Joss Merlyn’s brother, Jem, who cheerfully admits he is a horse thief but whose involvement in his brother’s darker doings is uncertain. He is a mysterious figure whom Mary doesn’t trust, but something continually draws her back to him. The other figure of hope, a more substantial one, is a local vicar, Francis Davey, who treats Mary kindly, but who is distant and almost otherworldly. Something about him doesn’t sit right with Mary. But she is on her own and needs to take help wherever she can find it.

The novel started off just a tad slowly for me, but once it gets going, the plotting is very well done — the novel is suspenseful and exciting. Okay, I could figure out roughly where things were going, but there were plenty of surprises and du Maurier kept me glued to the book. In addition to the plot, though, there is much to appreciate. The novel is set in Cornwall, which du Maurier evokes beautifully. The sea, the moors, the marshes, the country roads are all integral parts of the book. Mary is a champion walker, and I could feel the rain and the wind as I read about her exploratory rambles around Jamaica Inn.

Mary is a fascinating character, spirited and independent, as I imagine her Aunt Patience once was. She is often doing things that other characters think women shouldn’t do: taking those long walks unaccompanied, for example, often in circumstances that would frighten just about anyone. She frequently thinks that all she wants to do is live a man’s life, which is to say, she wants to work a farm independently, as a man would. She has no aspirations to marry, as she knows marriage can often lead to subjection and misery, as it did for her aunt. She knows how the world works and what she needs to do to keep herself safe.

She is not a complete loner (although, appealingly, she prefers people who know how to keep quiet when they should to those who will talk nervously through any situation); she has fond memories of living in her small village with her mother, knowing all the people who live around her and being able to count on them for help. She wants a community and to know her place within it, and she is not interested in social climbing; when offered the opportunity to live with a family from a higher class than hers, she rejects it, knowing it’s not her place.

On the one hand, Mary knows who she is and what she wants out of life, but, on the other, there is something appealing about excitement and newness, an appeal that is reflected in the wild landscape surrounding her. At times the rough winds of Cornwall are frightening and lonesome, but at others, they are exhilarating. Perhaps Mary isn’t so sure what she wants out of life after all.

Jamaica Inn is so different from Rebecca that I wonder what du Maurier’s other novels are like. I’m looking forward to finding out.

"Defying Man and Storm": Jamaica Inn

I’m no connoisseur of romantic suspense, but it’s hard to imagine it being done better than Jamaica Inn. Really, this book has it all: a grim, windswept, yet beautiful landscape; a grim, brooding, yet charismatic villain; a grim, twisted, yet convincing plot; Jamaica Inn itself, “a house that reeked of evil . . . a solitary landmark defying man and storm”; and, in Mary Yellan, a heroine bold and determined enough to survive them all. There’s also a deceptively colorless vicar, a dubiously trustworthy horse thief, and a whole supporting cast of rogues; there’s treachery, murder, and, of course, true love. If it sounds like the stuff of clichés, it is — and yet, amazingly, it really isn’t, because du Maurier is just that good.

The most terrifying part of the novel, for instance, is not a scene of rapidly unfolding action or immanent violence (though there are such scenes, and they are plenty suspenseful). Instead, it’s a story told over the kitchen table. “Did you never hear of wreckers before?” is the speaker’s chilling question, and the pictures his words paint haunt us as they will Mary, his unwilling audience:

‘When I’m drunk I see them in my dreams; I see their white-green faces staring at me, with their eyes eaten by fish; and some of them are torn, with the flesh hanging on their bones in ribbons, and some of them have seaweed in their hair. . . . Have you ever seen flies caught in a jar of treacle? I’ve seen men like that; stuck in the rigging like a swarm of flies. . . . Just like flies they are, spread out on the yards, little black dots of men. I’ve seen the ship break up beneath them, and the masts and the yards snap like thread, and there they’ll be flung into the sea, to swim for their lives. But when they reach the shore they’re dead men, Mary.’

He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and stared at her. ‘Dead men tell no tales, Mary,’ he said.

Mary can only hope that when she reaches the safety of her own bed, she can hide from what he has told her in the stark cold of the kitchen:

Here she could see the pale faces of drowned men, their arms above their heads; she could hear the scream of terror, and the cries; she could hear the mournful clamour of the bell-buoy as it swayed backwards and forwards in the sea.

It’s not just crime Mary comes face to face with that night, but evil. It’s embodied in Joss Merlyn, the landlord of Jamaica Inn, who is Mary’s uncle through his marriage to her Aunt Patience. Patience was a bright, happy young woman when she married Joss, but she is now a “poor, broken thing,” cowering and apologetic and fearful, but loyal, too, and loving, in her pathetic way. Joss is a wonderfully terrible figure of a man: huge, almost monstrous, but capable of an unexpected delicate grace that Mary finds more sinister than his overt cruelty. In her introduction, Sarah Dunant calls him “a Mr. Rochester without a Jane to redeem him,” which fits well enough, except that for all his faults, Mr. Rochester was never as bad as this! Patience must have married him “for his bright eyes,” Mary mockingly speculates, and it turns out that the power of sexual attraction to lure people off course is one of the novel’s central interests. Mary herself feels its pull (and understands Patience’s bad choice better) when she meets his younger brother Jem, who (to Mary’s dismay) almost charms away her suspicions:

He was too like his brother. His eyes, and his mouth, and his smile. That was the danger of it. She could see her uncle in his walk, in the turn of his head; and she knew why Aunt Patience had made a fool of herself ten years ago. It would be easy enough to fall in love with Jem Merlyn.

But Mary’s not looking for love. A farm girl, “bred to the soil,” she has no romantic ideas. At the same time, she understands the demands of the flesh:

Jem Merlyn was a man, and she was a woman, and whether it was his hands or his skin or his smile she did not know, but something inside her responded to him, and the very thought of him was an irritant and a stimulant at the same time. It nagged at her and would not let her be. She knew she would have to see him again.

I was fascinated by Mary’s frankness about her own desires: “Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all.” Her aunt’s abjection should be cautionary tale enough, you’d think, but even as Jem jokes “Beware of the dark stranger,” they kiss in the shadows.

Mary worries about giving “too much away,” about losing her independence and finding that her weakness for him makes “the four walls of Jamaica Inn more hateful than they were already.” The mixture of heady excitement and mistrust she feels for Jem adds, also, to the mysteries of the novel: how far is he involved in the murky activities of his brother? how much does he know about what happens at Jamaica Inn under cover of darkness? why does he ask Mary so many questions? Will her love for him save or destroy her? Du Maurier keeps her, and us, guessing as Mary struggles to figure out the answers and find her own way through the moral and physical dangers of her situation.

There are both predictable and implausible elements of the plot, but I forgave them both because they come with the territory and because du Maurier writes so well. When I wrote about Frenchman’s Creek I described her prose as “purple” (“royal purple, richest velvet,” to be precise). I expected more of the same here, despite having recently read The Scapegoat — which surprised me by being restrained and shadowy, not purple at all. I’m now adding du Maurier to my list of writers who impress by their versatility: she can clearly “do” the novel in different voices to suit her purposes. Jamaica Inn could easily have been full of cheap thrills, but for all its melodrama it never struck me as silly (whereas I called Frenchman’s Creek “ridiculous” — mind you, that was in 2010, so I may have been reading / judging differently). It’s not really a novel of character, and Joss especially borders on caricature, but (partly through Jem) he is humanized enough to be monstrous, but not a monster. I’m not so sure about the other chief villain, but at any rate he’s not a stock figure but has his own unique style of nastiness. For me, though, it was the scenery that made the novel truly memorable. The descriptions are vividly sensual without being florid, as here:

The drive was silent  then, for the most part, with no other sound but the steady clopping of the horse’s hoofs upon the road, and now and again an own hooted from the still trees. The rustle of hedgerow and the creeping country whispers were left behind when the trap came out upon the Bodmin road, and once again the dark moor stretched out on either side, lapping the road like a desert. The ribbon of the highway shone white under the moon. It wound and was lost in the fold of the further hill, bare and untrodden. There were no travellers but themselves upon the road tonight. On Christmas Eve, when Mary had ridden here, the wind had lashed venomously at the carriage wheels, and the rain hammered the windows: now the air was still cold and strangely still, and the moor itself lay placid and silver in the moonlight. The dark tors held their sleeping face to the sky, the granite features softened and smoothed by the light that bathed them. Theirs was a peaceful mood, and the old gods slept undisturbed.

As you can tell, I enjoyed the novel thoroughly. I'm eager to see what the rest of you have to say about it!

(cross-posted to Novel Readings)

Our Next Book: Jamaica Inn

What a close vote! It was nearly a three-way tie between Jamaica Inn, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and The Murderess, but Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier just edged out the others with one more vote.

Discussion will commence around January 15.

Voting Time!

It's been a while since our last discussion, so what shall we read next? I've been invited to offer up some choices. The weather's getting colder here in the DC area, and cold weather always puts me in the mood for a good crime or suspense story. So I've put together a selection of different types of novels that involve some sort of mystery or crime. I hope something here appeals to you all!

Let's vote by November 11, and have our discussion after the holidays, around January 15.

Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco
It begins with a body. On a clear day in winter, the battered corpse of Crispin Salvador is pulled from the Hudson River—taken from the world is the controversial lion of Philippine literature. Gone, too, is the only manuscript of his final book, a work meant to rescue him from obscurity by exposing the crimes of the Filipino ruling families. Miguel, his student and only remaining friend, sets out for Manila to investigate. Winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize. 

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier
After the death of her mother, Mary Yellan travels to Jamaica Inn on the wild British moors to live with her Aunt Patience. The coachman warns her of the strange happenings there, but Mary is committed to remain at Jamaica Inn. Suddenly, her life is in the hands of strangers: her uncle, Joss Merlyn, whose crude ways repel her; Aunt Patience, who seems mentally unstable and perpetually frightened; and the enigmatic Francis Davey. But most importantly, Mary meets Jem Merlyn, Joss's younger brother, whose kisses make her heart race. Caught up in the danger at this inn of evil repute, Mary must survive murder, mystery, storms, and smugglers before she can build a life with Jem.

The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis
The Murderess is a bone-chilling tale of crime and punishment with the dark beauty of a backwoods ballad. Set on the dirt-poor Aegean island of Skiathos, it is the story of Hadoula, an old woman living on the margins of society and at the outer limits of respectability. She knows women's secrets and she knows the misery of their lives, and as the book begins, she is trying to stop her new-born granddaughter from crying so that her daughter can at last get a little sleep. She rocks the baby and rocks her and then the terrible truth hits her: there's nothing worse than being born a woman, and there's something that she, Hadoula, can do about that.

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
‘Everyone agreed that the day was just right for the picnic to Hanging Rock - a shimmering summer morning warm and still, with cicadas shrilling...’ St Valentine’s Day, in the midst of the hot summer of 1900, a party of schoolgirls went on a picnic to Hanging Rock. Some were never to return... An Australian classic, the disappearance of three girls and a schoolteacher at Hanging Rock has captivated and intrigued audiences for generations.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.
 

Excellent Women (reposted from 2007)

I would have loved to reread Excellent Women with the rest of the group, but I wasn't able to in time. I did, however, read the novel back in 2007, and I posted on it then. So I thought I'd repost my thoughts here. Here's what I wrote back then:

I thoroughly enjoyed Barbara Pym’s 1952 novel Excellent Women. It tells the story of Mildred Lathbury, a woman in her 30s whose life is taken up with part-time work helping “impoverished gentlewomen,” attending services and volunteering at the church, and maintaining friendships with the vicar and his sister. She also finds herself endlessly caught up in other people’s business:

I suppose an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties, must expect to find herself involved or interested in other people’s business, and if she is also a clergyman’s daughter then one might really say that there is no hope for her.

She is one of the “excellent women” of the novel’s title, women who aren’t wrapped up in families of their own and so have time to — and are expected to — devote themselves to taking care of others.
As the novel opens, a new couple is moving into the flat above Mildred’s; they are Helena and Rocky, and Mildred does not know what to make of them. Helena is an anthropologist and not terribly interested in her marriage; she spends her time with fellow-anthropologist Everard, working on writing up their field notes. She is a terrible housekeeper, a fact that disturbs and intrigues Mildred. Rocky is utterly charming and perhaps a trifle fake; Mildred quickly falls for him, but also wonders, as she does, whether Rocky really means to charm her, or whether he simply can’t help but make women fall in love with him.

Helena and Rocky disrupt Mildred’s quiet life. She is quickly doing things she has never done before, such as attending lectures in anthropology and mediating marital squabbles. Her life is further disrupted when the vicar — her close friend and up to now a confirmed bachelor — begins a flirtation and gets engaged.
The novel is told in the first person, which Pym uses very cleverly to capture Mildred’s thoughtful, intelligent voice, but also to make clear to the reader her naivete and lack of experience; Helena, for example, hints that the vicar might be gay, but this passes right over Mildred’s head. And yet Mildred knows she hasn’t experienced much — she’s very aware of her limitations, painfully aware at times. She does her best, wading into the deeper waters recent experience has led her to, but she also longs for things to be the way they once were, quiet and comfortable.

As much as she is aware of her lack of experience, however, Mildred has a strong sense of identity; she knows who she is, what her social role is, and how she wants to live. As an “excellent woman,” she accepts that many people expect her to help them out — why shouldn’t she, after all? What else does she have to do? She tries to be useful, but also to keep from being used — and here she fails now and then, as each of the main characters takes advantage of her at one point or another. It’s frustrating at times to watch Mildred trying and frequently failing to maintain the balance between taking care of others and taking care of herself.

For me, the pleasure of reading this novel lies in Mildred’s astute understanding of her small world; she knows it’s a small world, but what’s important is that it’s hers and she wants to enjoy it. She’s capable of viewing it with a critical, satirical eye, but also of loving it. She strikes me as courageous — both in accepting her life as it is and in remaining open to the ways it can possibly change.

Excellent Women

Mildred Lathbury fills her days working at a part-time job at an agency that assists older unmarried women, helping out at the church, and, almost despite herself, getting wrapped up in other people’s personal crises. She is both connected and disconnected to her neighbors in 1950s London. She knows all about their lives, but what do they know of hers? Mildred tells her own story in Barbara Pym’s lively and intelligent novel Excellent Women. 
 
Early in the novel, Mildred says that “an unmarried woman over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties, must expect to find herself involved or interested in other people’s business.” Lacking troubles of her own to attend to, Mildred becomes a sounding board for everyone else. Her new neighbors, the Napiers, take advantage of Mildred’s sympathetic demeanor, coming to her at every step of the way as they deal with their own discontentments and worries about their marriage. Mildred, being an “excellent woman,” is willing to help, but her presence in the relationship is merely that, a presence—someone to transmit messages or to keep an eye on things when the movers come. Her own feelings about it aren’t part of the conversation, and although she is wise enough to know that her feelings might be unwise, she does have feelings.

People count on Mildred, but are they building strong connections to her as a person? When Mildred helps her friend Winifred sort donations for the church jumble sale, the two of them discuss the old framed photos being donated to the sale. Winifred is appalled that anyone would donate of photo of a relation, but Mildred is more matter-of-fact, noting that they had probably been stored away for years and the donors probably didn’t even knew who the people in the photos were. Yet, matter-of-fact as she is about it, she sees her own future in those photographs:

I could see very well what [Winifred] meant, for unmarried women with no ties could very well become unwanted. I should feel it even more than Winifred, for who was there to really grieve for me when I was gone? Dora, the Malorys, one or two people in my old village might be sorry, but I was not really first in anybody’s life. I could so very easily be replaced.

As an unmarried woman of a certain age myself, this sentiment is quite familiar to me, and I appreciated that Pym could have Mildred express this feeling about her state without making her seem self-pitying or hysterical or unbalanced. Mildred is realistic about her position. She’s not unhappy exactly, but she sees and understands the downsides about her life, even as she’s not entirely sure she wants to change it. One of the characters observes that some people have a knack for finding a mate, which means that widows are likely to marry again. The unspoken converse of this is that others, like Mildred, don’t have the knack. Flip the idea around even further, and you can see that the Mildreds of the world have the knack for being alone.

I think Mildred’s knack for singlehood turns up in her friendship with the anthropologist Everard Bone. She meets Everard through her neighbors with the emotional fraught marriage. (As it happens, Mrs Napier’s interest in Everard is one of the reasons for the conflict.) She runs into him at midday Lenten services at church, and he lingers on the street near her office, waiting for an opportunity to ask her to lunch or to have dinner at his house. To many, Everard’s purpose might seem obvious, but Mildred assumes he’s looking for something other than her company. Intervention with Mrs Napier, help cooking a cut of meat, something other than her companionship for itself. Anything else would involve signals she cannot, or will not (which is it?), pick up on. Or perhaps she knows her own experience well enough to know exactly what it is that Everard doesn’t want.

As the book drew to a close, I kept wondering where this ambiguous courtship was leading. And at the risk of spoiling the ending, I’ll say that I was impressed with how well Pym maintained the ambiguous nature of the relationship, right up to the ending and beyond. You can turn that final conversation around and upside down and still not be sure what Everard was after or what Mildred herself wanted.

Representations of single women in media often give me trouble, not because they all get everything wrong or because they’re all mean-spirited but often because they focus on one aspect of the experience: the freedom or the loneliness. Or they dwell on the desire for a mate and make finding one a goal. This book captures so much more. It gets at how singleness (like any life situation) can be happy and miserable. It doesn’t revel in the joy or make simple pleasures bigger than they are, and it doesn’t wallow in the misery or turn sadness into grand tragedy. In some ways, it’s a hard book for me to talk about, because parts of it hit close to the bone. But it’s not a heavy or depressing book at all. It’s wise and funny and real in ways that few books are. It was also my first experience reading Barbara Pym, and I loved it as much as I thought I would. I’m glad the Slaves of Golconda reading group finally pushed me to read it.


Cross-posted at Shelf Love

Barbara Messud, The Excellent Women Upstairs

She's an ordinary woman leading a quiet life - no thrills, no romance, few expectations, just her work, her friends, and the comforting knowledge that everyone relies on her common sense. In a crisis, she can be counted on to make tea. All this changes when the new couple comes on the scene. The wife is an energetic professional in a whirl of commitments and contacts; the husband is a suave charmer. As she is drawn into their circle, our heroine finds herself both energized and resentful. What, exactly, is her role? What does she mean to these new people? What has happened to her life since they came -- and what will happen when they leave?

As my mash-up title suggests, this is the basic plot outline of two very different novels: Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs and Barbara Pym's Excellent Women (1952). I read The Woman Upstairs a month or so ago and though I found it a page-turner, I ended up not liking it very much. It's not that I minded the "unlikable" narrator: as I said in my piece on Olivia Manning (apparently quite an unlikable woman herself), "the chief obligation of a writer, . . . as of a character, is not that she be nice but that she be interesting." The problem I ultimately had with Messud's Nora was that I did not find her very interesting: she was too much up in my face all the time about how angry she was, and so the novel gave me no sense of discovery about her. The novel was a page-turner because I wondered what would happen and why exactly she was in such a rage. But the answers to both questions were rather disappointing. Nora's anger especially seemed confused -- which is fine for her as a character (she has no obligation to be crystal clear about her own emotional state, and anger does tend to mess things up) but not for the novel, which to me seemed to be trying to make a broader political and feminist case for anger out of one woman's very personal neuroses and bad judgment.

But it was the artlessness of Nora's narration that I found particularly tedious after a while: there's no revelation to it, no subtlety compared to, for instance, Villette, which was the Brontë novel I kept thinking of as I read The Woman Upstairs. The explicit inter-text for Messud's novel is Jane Eyre, which is a pretty angry novel, to be sure. But Jane's retrospective narration adds a controlling layer of meaning, and Jane is more admirably assertive than Nora in pursuit of her own selfulfilment. That's the Victorianist in me coming out, perhaps, but I got quite irritated at Nora's complaining: stop moping (or ranting, which is just a louder version of the same thing) and get on with your life! Villette, in turn, is a much darker, twistier novel about the differences between calm surfaces and tormented desires, about repression and resentment and bitterness. And Lucy Snowe (cold, like her name, and coy, and judgmental, and yes, angry) makes us figure her out -- and she doesn't make it easy! There's a readerly excitement in working out just who Lucy is and what she's feeling that for me has no equivalent in The Woman Upstairs. For all its cleverness (and there are lots of smart things about it), Messud's novel ultimately seemed kind of obvious (the big surprise at the end - who didn't see that coming the minute they knew about Sirena's cameras?).

I think this is why I liked Excellent Women so much better. It's so understated that a lot of it nearly slips past unnoticed, but as a result, while it lacks the driving forward momentum of The Woman Upstairs, its rewards are both more subtle and more surprising. We almost don't know that Mildred is ever angry at the way those around her treat her as an accessory to their lives or assume they know what she needs or (most annoying of all) whom she loves. "Perhaps," she observes dryly at one point, "I really enjoyed other people's lives more than my own," but over the course of the novel we can't help but realize how tired she is of being one of the "excellent women" -- the women who are always depended on but are somehow never part of the action on their own behalf - "excellent women whom one respects and esteems" but never truly sees. "I always think of you as being so very balanced and sensible," says her friend William, "such an excellent woman." "It was not the excellent women who got married," Mildred reflects a bit later, "but people like Allegra Gray, who was not good at sewing, and Helena Napier, who left all the washing up."

It's Helena and her smoothly flirtatious husband Rocky who play the Shahids' role in Excellent Women. "Things were much simpler before they came," Mildred thinks. They stir things up, but in doing so they bring things to the surface that might have been better off left undisturbed. When they go, she'll still have her old occupations, but the Napiers are more blunt than the Shahids ever are to Nora about how her options look to them:

'What will you do after we've gone?' Helena asked.

'Well, she had a life before we came,' Rocky reminded her. 'Very much so - what is known as a full life, with clergymen and jumble sales and church services and good works.'

'I thought that was the kind of life led by women who didn't have a full life in the accepted sense,' said Helena.

'Oh, she'll marry,' said Rocky confidently. They were talking about me as if I wasn't there.

'Everard might take her to hear a paper at the Learned Society,' suggested Helena. 'That would widen her outlook.'

'Yes, it might,' I said humbly from my narrowness.

Right there we see the genius of Excellent Women in microcosm: if you weren't already enraged on Mildred's behalf at the complacent condescension of her supposed friends, that moment of self-deprecating bitterness ought to do the trick.  She doesn't have to yell at us about how angry she is, but we don't have to be in her company long to understand that there's a lot going on in her head that isn't "excellent" at all.

Unlike Helena, Mildred spends a lot of time washing up - often, Helena's dishes. After one particularly dramatic incident at the Napiers', she finds herself in their flat, "with the idea of making some order out of the confusion there" -- but also, really, to get some time to herself. The scene beautifully literalizes her discomfort and frustration at the life she's living:

 No sink has ever been built high enough for a reasonably tall person and my back was soon aching with the effort of washing up, especially as yesterday's greasy dishes needed a lot of scrubbing to get them clean. My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the 'stream of consciousness' type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.

She feels "resentful and bitter towards Helena and Rocky" but she also admits "nobody had compelled me to wash these dishes or tidy this kitchen. It was the fussy spinster in me." They aren't altogether wrong, that is, in their assumptions about her, and yet (as her struggles through the novel with her hair, make-up, and clothing tell us) there's nothing inevitable about the woman she is or is becoming. At the end of the novel she finds herself trapped once again in a part she doesn't want to play but can't seem to escape.

Messud's novel suggests that anger is a necessary stage on the way to freedom, and in some ways its ending is triumphant: Nora has broken free of the Shahids' spell and perhaps (though her narrative doesn't convince me of this) gained some self-knowledge in the process. She is certainly fired up to do ... something. There's something infinitely sadder (if also, perversely, funnier) about Mildred's conclusion, but I ended up a lot with a lot more invested in her fate, and feeling a lot more admiring of the art with which she was drawn.

Cross-posted to Novel Readings.