Undisputed Classic 12

Classic on Your TBR Longest. I bought a stack of her novels in the 1990s in used bookstores (remember those?). Only in the last couple of years have I gotten around to reading them. As the Albanian peasant expression goes, “Slowly, slowly. Little by little.”

Manservant and Maidservant – Ivy Compton-Burnett

This story was published in 1947 and is set in the 1890s. The elements of a late Victorian novel are rural setting, big English family, comic miser, in a large house with servants and chasms between the classes. Modern is the author's focus on words and their dreadful power.

Tyrant Horace Lamb bludgeons his household with words. He nitpicks about vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. The result is both family members and servants have learned to keep silent or speak only in the most precise and literal way possible. When poor relation Mortimer Lamb teases the butler Bullivant for causing the fireplace to smoke by jamming a dead jackdaw in the chimney, Bullivant replies, “So far am I, sir, from being connected with the presence of the fowl, that I was not confident, when I took matters into my own hands, of any outcome. I merely hoped that my intervention might lead to some result.”

Horace is such a monster of a skinflint that he enforces economies that literally torture his children. When his elder daughter complains the room was too cold to sit in, Horace hectors her with “Why need you sit? Why did you not stand, walk, run? How often have I told you that exercise is the thing when the blood is congealed or sluggish? You can surely get up and move about? Had anyone tied you to a chair?” 

It's no wonder the children feel embattled and guilty for being burdens. Eleven-year-old Marcus rebukes Horace with home truths:

We are afraid of you. You know we are.... Your being different for a little while has not altered all that went before. Nothing can alter it. You did not let us have anything; you would not let us be ourselves. If it had not been for Mother, we would rather have been dead. It was feeling like that so often, that made us think dying an ordinary thing. We had often wished to die ourselves....

Hey, this is how kids talk in ICB novels. Like the Barbie movie comments on the experience of girls and women in odd dialogue and too-bright colors, ICB creates a highly artificial world to give her take on dysfunctional family life in what we tentatively and laughingly call reality. She knows that despite her lack of exposition, convoluted grammar, and epigrammatic campy dialogue, the hardcore reader will figure her method out. ICB does not want readers to identify easy points of reference in her novels and complacently predict what’s coming. She wants us off balance and alert. She doesn’t want us to distract ourselves by identifying with the characters. Though she likes aphorisms that tell it like it is, she eschews lessons, trusting that we are already enlightened enough to have a bead on ‘ought to’s’ like “Know thyself so as not to become a tyrant.” 

No prescriptions, just descriptions of how members of unhappy families will drive each other crazy. Mortimer wonders if they are all tied to Horace because he is his own worst enemy, especially pitying the pathological thrift. Horace’s wife Charlotte answers that his state of mind makes him the enemy of everybody. They are both right. Miser Horace’s egotism damages everybody and prevents him from finding peace of mind. 

ICB’s uncanny ability to make Horace’s lack of freedom and authenticity funny may well have been one of the reasons why this novel was the only best-seller of her numerous novels in both the UK and USA. Unaware of his own rigidity of thought and action, insufferable Horace is a hilarious figure. An inflexible paper-tiger. Dragged along on the ropes and pulleys, wires and belts of his own narrow thinking habits. Cranks are funny. 

But they do damage.

Other Reviews of ICB Novels: click the title to go to the review

·        Pastors and Masters (1925) ·        Brothers and Sisters (1929) ·        Men and Wives (1931) ·        More Women Than Men (1933) ·        A House and Its Head (1935)

·        Daughters and Sons (1937) ·        A Family and a Fortune (1939) ·        Parents and Children (1941) ·        Elders and Betters (1944)

 

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Reading Those Classics #10

Classic Prizewinner. Macaulay's final novel was published in 1956. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The book's opening sentence is: "Take my camel, dear", said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

The Towers of Trebizond - Rose Macauley

Young and immature, I once regarded Peter DeVries’ Blood of the Lamb as unique: a comic novel that treated religion seriously. But after 50 years of reading with some pretentions to taste, I have learned that “one of a kind” is rare.

This novel begins as a comedy. Narrator Laurie accompanies her Anglican Aunt Dot and the narrow Father Chantry-Pigg to Turkey so that they may bring the Anglican word to the Turks and thus improve the lot of Muslim women. Though religious down to her backbone, Laurie, like many middle-aged moderns after World War II, doubts her convictions. Like DeVries in his partly autobiographical novel, McCauley approaches matters and people of faith in a mildly satirical but never sour spirit.

Laurie feels her estrangement from her church due to her long-term affair with a married man. Laurie observes, “Adultery is a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of meanness and selfishness and lying flow love and joy and peace beyond anything that can be imagined.”

Issues of faith and doubt aside, this novel also works as a travel narrative. We would expect the author of the amazing survey The Pleasure of Ruins to be skilled in describing the sights of Turkey and the Levant. Well worth reading.

John Cuddy #1

Blunt Darts - Jeremiah Healy

Widows we accept as part of the natural order of things. We’ve even seen widows who flower after their hubby settles into that big Barcalounger in the sky. But widowers, we fear they’ll do themselves wrong by jumping to the bottoms of bottles and taking up with nineteen-year-olds with ex-con boyfriends.  And unfortunate things do indeed happen to John Francis Cuddy, a Boston PI, after he loses his wife Beth to cancer.

Cuddy quit jogging and took up nightly drunks. He loses his job as an insurance investigator because he rejected signing off on a fake claim.  He goes on relief, tries to manage his drinking, and sets up as a PI. His first case is through the recommendation of Valerie, an old friend of Beth’s, who casts a romantic eye Cuddy’s way.

Cuddy often goes Beth’s grave and talks to her about what’s going on in his life and his cases. The graveyard chats weird-out the teenaged groundskeepers, which makes Cuddy observe, “Too young to know anything.  Especially anything about cemeteries.” 

In this mystery, Cuddy tells Beth about his search for a missing genius kid whose father, a hanging judge, doesn’t seem to care if his son is found.  The characters are original, with the heavy being particularly repulsive, just like they used to be in the pulps. The settings and situations are realistic without provoking too much anxiety.

This book was the first of a series of 14 novels. It was selected by The New York Times as one of the seven best mysteries of 1984. Critics and fans regard the Cuddy series as one of the better ones during the Eighties and Nineties. Fans of Robert Parker and Stephen Greenleaf would probably like this novel.

Reading Those Classics #9

Classic in Translation. This novel was first published in 1937 in German by the Austrian publisher E.P. Tal. Since then, the novel has been published in more than 30 languages. There is controversy as to who really wrote it.

Ali & Nino – Kurban Said

Author Said sets this Romeo and Juliet story in Baku, Azerbaijan just before and just after the Russian Revolution, about 1914 to 1920. Like many other spots in that region of the world, locals and foreigners alike consider Baku, an oil city on the Caspian Sea, as a bridge between modern Europe (e.g. Georgia) and traditional Asia (e.g. Persia and Turkey). Author Said causes character Professor Senin to urge his students: “Some scholars look on the area south of the Caucasian mountains as belonging to Asia, while others, in view of Transcaucasia's cultural evolution, believe that this country should be considered part of Europe. It can therefore be said, my children, that it is partly your responsibility as to whether our town should belong to progressive Europe or reactionary Asia.”

The Romeo character is Ali Khan Shirvanshir, son of an affluent Shiite Muslim family. Though his heart is full of traditional martial, folk and religious traditions, his head has been educated in a Russian boys college and has thus acquired ideas about modernity. The Juliet is Nino, a Georgian and therefore an Orthodox Christian. They've known each other since childhood and have loved each other a long time despite cultural differences and parental dithering about permitting their marriage.

Said wonderfully evokes not only Baku but also Dagestan, Karabakh, Georgia and Iran. In fact, the book can be seen as a travel narrative and ethnography of the Caucasus region reminding readers of John LeCarre’s portrayal of the Ingush in Our Game.

I can't recommend this wonderful novel highly enough for its examination of modernization, identity and ethnic and religious conflicts. Reading it will be time well spent. Keep the Kleenex handy too.

The Ides of Perry Mason 61

Intro: On the 15th of every month for years and years now, a review of a Gardner story, usually a Perry Mason, or an episode from the original TV series has been posted. But this month we depart from custom to examine a novel The Man wrote under a pen-name.

Turn on the Heat – Erle Stanley Gardner, writing as A.A. Fair

Published in 1940, Turn on the Heat is regarded as one of the best of the 30 stories that starred the PI team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam.

An untrustworthy client hires our protagonists to find a woman who disappeared around 20 years before. Another investigator who was poking into the case then gets murdered. Cool and Lam must find the missing woman, but throw sand into the eyes of the police to keep them from getting close to their client. The title, therefore, refers to law-school grad Lam creating confusion and distraction.

The plus is that the story gets tangled plenty fast as Cool and Lam scramble to avoid charges as accomplices after the fact. Lam tries to protect Cool by keeping her out of the loop, but as usual she blunders anyway into the thick of blackmail, assumed identities, and murder.

Another positive is that in the Cool and Lam novels, more than the Perry Mason novels, Gardner examines the rough side of local politics: bent cops, crooked politicians, co-opted news reporters, mean gangsters, and cowed citizens. As in the Mason novels, the killing takes second to the complex criminal scheme that goes sideways and leads up to the killing.

The negative is that being elaborate, plot and incident may be hard to follow and at least some of the time make demands on memory.

The young woman in trouble swoons for Lam, inevitably. Bertha Cool’s dependence on Lam to keep them out jail contrasts with her assertiveness, toughness, and unwarranted confidence.

Well-worth reading.  For the last 80 years discerning readers have rightly claimed that the Cool and Lam stories are funnier, grittier, and sexier than the Mason novels.

 

Undisputed Classic 11

Classic by a POC Author. Chester Himes is best-known as the author of the noir crime novels set in Harlem starring two black police detectives Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. The short novels are marked by bizarre violent incidents, wild plot turns, and sardonic humor about blacks and whites. Himes was a truth-teller.

A Case of Rape - Chester Himes

When Chester Himes went to France in 1953 he did not kid himself that Europe would be a haven from the prejudice, stress and violence directed at black people in the USA. He knew he would meet haters as racist as in the US. Based in Paris, he wrote novels in English which were translated into French and sold like crazy.

This novel is about four African-American men from the USA who are accused, tried and convicted of raping and killing an American woman in a room in a Paris residential hotel. The writing style is like a case study, and sprinkled with Himes’ cutting remarks and extraordinary claims. He writes of a Belgian dentist who is a monstrous husband as

that type of European . . . imbued with an ingrown, refined evil of generations of decadence, an evil distilled from all the dark superstitions of Christian expedience and aged in the slowly rotting bien faite culture of a blase and jaded city. It was ... an evil that had been in existence for so long, it had attained another status, termed by [white] Americans as continental.

Anybody who has been introduced to a Western or Scandinavian European and then been looked at by stone cold eyes as if one were a bug will know, trust me, that Himes is not being unjust.

Similar to A Captive Mind, Himes gives fascinating mini-biographies of his characters. Here is an expatriate reaction to Paris.

What Scott disliked most about Paris was what it did to dreamers who gravitated there. It was not the manner in which it destroyed the young and foolish dreams placed hourly on the altar. It was the manner of destroying the capacity for dreaming 

All meanings were changed or distorted, or perhaps they were given their true definition and shape, which was equally destroyed. Love became sexuality, aspirations became ambition. Achievement was limited to a single day, culminating in bed - yours or someone else's - where everything Parisian was reputedly made. One traded in a dream of happiness for a night of love.

Himes examines the racist and sexist formulations that haunt us all. Himes does not let anybody off the hook, including the reader. Himes welds risky circumstances with the inauthenticity and irresponsibility of the characters, only human and thus hardly paragons of intellectual or emotional integrity. Supposedly, Himes wrote this as a synopsis for a larger work but it is still a compelling, uncomfortable read.

Inspector Cockrill #2

Green for Danger - Christianna Brand

Christianna Brand presses a lot of buttons. The setting of this 1944 mystery is an English military hospital, so readers with a history of surgery will gulp at the prospect of murder in the OR. The stress of wartime has frazzled characters already overworked and miserable over deprivations of food and heat. As if medical murder and home front fatigue were not enough, we have the Blitz: sirens screaming, bombers droning overhead, crammed shelters, bombs falling and wreaking havoc, the bravery of the English. This novel is worth reading for the atmosphere alone.

But it’s also a refined puzzle of a whodunit. A mail carrier dies on the operating table of a military hospital. The death is ruled an accident but the head nurse, in a drunken tirade, claims that it was murder and that she has hidden the evidence. She's found stabbed to death. Suspects can be narrowed down to six, three doctors and three nursing staff. Romantic feelings and the accompanying jealousy are tedious at the beginning but they turn out to be crucial to the unfolding of story.

Inspective Cockrill, who will call to mind Fat Andy Dalziel in Reginald Hill’s novels, gets on the case only to find that he knows but can’t prove whodunit. How to force a confession? By putting them all under pressure. The suspects are all well-drawn personalities. Brand makes us see that the characters like and respect each other enough to tolerate faults – and that makes the reveal all the more painful.

It’s so well-written. Brand describes people and places vividly. The characterization, dialogue and twists are convincing as are the solution and motivation. The action scenes are exciting. It’s understandable that a film version was made in 1946, starring Alastair Sim as Cockrill and Trevor Howard. Directed by Sidney Gilliat, it is regarded by mystery fans and film historians as one of the greatest screen treatments of a whodunnit.

“You have to reach for the greatest of the Great Names (Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen) to find Christianna Brand’s rivals in the subtleties of the trade” said Anthony Boucher, a well-regarded critic for the New York Times. Groan at the great names on his list, but don't miss reading this exceptional classic.

European Reading Challenge #10

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2024.

Peaks of Shala - Rose Wilder Lane (Albania)

The author was “baby Rose” of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The First Four Years, a fictionalized autobiography that recounted her only surviving child’s infancy and hard times on a prairie homestead.  Lane (1886 – 1968) worked as a journalist in San Francisco in the years before WWI and wrote serialized biographies of Henry Ford and Jack London for popular magazines like Sunset. During WWI she went to London to write about women who were active in humanitarian work. She travelled extensively in Syria, Georgia, Turkey, and Egypt. She got this book out of a trip with English Red Cross activists in 1921.

Knowing nothing about Albania except “bandits,” she meets the north of the country with wide-eyed American candor and enthusiasm. A major attraction of the travelogue is her description of scenery that captures the beauty of the mountains of Albania.

The sun swung to its highest and sank again while we climbed…. [I]t was low in the sky—it seemed on a level with us—when we made the last interminable hundred yards up into the Chafa Bishkasit [the Road of the Mountaineers]. We were in the sky; there is no other way to say it, and no way in which to describe that sensation of infinite airiness. Forty miles behind and below us, Lake Scutari lay flat, like a pool of mercury on a gray-brown floor.

She always brings a keen ear to quoting at length old songs and a keen eye to describing clothes, linen, and crafts like weaving and embroidery. She tells about rituals of etiquette, table manners, mountain hospitality, courtesy, personal and tribal honor. She reports, but mercifully not at length, about the Albanian practice which has always interested foreigners, feuding a.k.a. revenge killing as capital punishment. She also identifies national characteristics as stubborn, indifferent to danger, fatalistic, patient, tenacious of their own language and customs, all of which aided their integrity and survival against invading Romans, then the Turks, then the Austrians and Italians and always the Serbs.

Sure, the reader has to endure at times. Lane has excessive fascination with superstitions and stories of wood and pond spirits. The rapture over the “animal beauty” of the local men and women may weary the reader.

Then for the first time I really looked at Lulash. He had been until then simply a marvelously beautiful animal; a man such as men must have been before cities and machines and office desks brought dull skins and eyes, joy rides, padded shoulders, and crippling collars. Now I perceived that he was also a real person.

Note also the reference to our lost Eden, when men were men and wore loose clothes. But there’s more:

I felt a regret, purely romantic, perhaps, at the inevitable disappearance of this last surviving remnant of the Aryan primitive communism in which our own fore-fathers lived, and at the replacing of Lulash by men like our politicians. I am a conservative, even a reactionary; I should like to keep the Albanian mountains what they are.

Let’s let “Aryan” go since nowadays the obsolete concept is beneath notice, but we can wish that in Paradise anthropologist Edith Durham lets Lane know “primitive communism” is a myth too since many traditional peoples had notions of private ownership of land, houses, trees, ponds and even beaver stands and eagles’ nests. It’s a source of needless misery to feel nostalgic for the life of primitive simplicity; human life has always been full of conflict and complication because conflict and complication are normal and natural consequences of our sociality and our linguistic ability to impose our persuasive arguments on the world. Lane, an advocate of rugged pioneer individualism like a reactionary would be, may also be missing the interdependence implied in:

Padre Marjan spoke of the unimportance of past glories and shames, of the new dawn of liberty for Albania which brought responsibilities and duties, and of the importance of eternal things, of goodness, strength, and courage, given by God to man for man to use. For, said he, the knife in its scabbard cuts no leaves to feed the flocks, and the goodness of man when not used for those around him becomes a rusty knife, which is of value to no one.

The phrase “used for those around him” implies working in and for a community, seeking excellence not only for one’s self and family. 

Lane was a journalist and our default assumption when dealing with reporters is that they will make things up to make a good point, fictionalizing to make points that are true. And that is okay as long as we readers are sophisticated enough not to take literally everything we read. Lane was not an anthropologist like Edith Durham.

But I will grant Lane writes with journalistic simplicity and she is sincere in her admiration of and advocacy for an historically impoverished, exploited, brutalized people. She laughs at her impatient self as she deals with pre-modern attitudes toward time (“slowly, slowly, little by little”) and getting the hell started, for the luvva Mike, it's been hours waiting. Some scenes are very amusing, like dealing with local indifference to discomfort, hunger and fatigue and getting across to mountain men that though maps are flat, the earth is round.

Links: Librivox and Text