{review} the return of the soldier

Rebecca West The Return of the Soldier (1918)

That day its beauty was an affront to me, because, like most Englishwomen of my time, I was wishing for the return of a soldier. Disregarding the national interest and everything else except the keen prehensile gesture of our hearts toward him, I wanted to snatch my Cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness his wife and I now looked upon.

I've read hardly any Rebecca West - apart from bits of her The Meaning of Treason (1949: specifically, on Lord Haw-Haw) - and I approached The Return of the Soldier with some [fear of politics-disguised-as-literature-inspired] trepidation. Could I have been more wrong? Yes, we are not allowed to forget class difference, but what a wonderful, beautifully written book.

Source

Published in 1918, The Return of the Soldier is the story of Chris - the beloved but stifled head of a family of adoring women - who returns from the Great War shellshocked and amnesiac. He has lost fifteen years of his life and believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he is the carefree 22 year old who had yet to assume the mantle of responsibility for caring for his family and the family home. Worse still - for his wife Kitty and doting cousin Jenny [the narrator] - he remembers only his first, great love. But nowadays Margaret is a seemingly broken housewife struggling with borderline poverty and a husband unable to work.

The star of the book is Chris' family home which has remained a sort of pre-war Edwardian sanctuary for the women who have devoted themselves to Chris' comfort. The women's world has not been "infected with the squalor of war". So, how shocking not to be recognised. 

The women respond differently: Jenny, who has always carried a torch for her cousin (and would, to paraphrase The Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviewer, benefit from the Hitachi magic wand: "We kissed not as women, but as lovers do; I think we each embraced that part of Chris the other had absorbed by her love."), realises that he has never seen her as anything other than friend and cousin. However, because she loves him, she is willing to do anything to restore his memory, even if it means that she loses any chance to begin over with him. Kitty, the wife, is horrified at how Chris' loss of memory, which she believes is just a trick, affects her as his wife: what will society think of her with a mad husband in an asylum? What will become of their lavish Edwardian lifestyle? Will - horror! - he leave her for his old, first love? Kitty's responses to these worries demonstrate that she is, indeed, well-named, with "[h]er irony... as faintly acrid as a caraway-seed".

There came suddenly a thud at the door. We heard Chris swear and stumble to his feet, while one of the servants spoke helpfully. Kitty knitted her brows, for she hates gracelessness, and a failure of physical adjustment is the worst indignity she can conceive. "He’s fallen down those three steps from the hall," I whispered. "They’re new."

…

His fall had ruffled him and made him look very large and red, and he breathed hard, like an animal pursued into a strange place by night, and to his hot consciousness of his disorder the sight of Kitty, her face and hands and bosom shining like the snow, her gown enfolding her, and her gold hair crowning her with radiance, and the white fire of jewels giving passion to the spectacle, was a deep refreshment. She sat still for a time, so that he might feel this well, then raised her ringed hand to her necklaces. "It seems so strange that you should not remember me," she said. "You gave me all these." He answered kindly: "I am glad I did that. You look very beautiful in them." But as he spoke his gaze shifted to the shadows in the corners of the room, and the blood ran hot under his skin. He was thinking of another woman, of another beauty. Kitty put up her hands as if to defend her jewels.

And what of Margaret, the old lover: could she dare to snatch back her lost love, life and happiness? Or will she make a supreme sacrifice for Chris and his womenfolk and return to her common life (with her umbrella with an "unveracious tortoiseshell handle"!)? 

The characterisation is wonderful, particularly that of Chris whom we see only through the different viewpoints of his family as they discover that he was not at all the man they thought they know. As the safe, luxurious sanctuary of the house disintegrates, the inhabitants become aware that their perfect little world is over forever, regardless of whether Chris' memory can be restored.

"Kitty! Kitty! How can you!" But her little pink mouth went on manufacturing malice. "This is all a blind," she said at the end of an unpardonable sentence. "He’s pretending." I, who had felt his agony all the evening like a wound in my own body, was past speech then, and I did not care what I did to stop her. I gripped her small shoulders with my large hands, and shook her till her jewels rattled and she scratched my fingers and gasped for breath. But I did not mind so long as she was silent.

The narrator, Jenny, stays in one's mind long after the narrative has ended. She is such a sad figure ("a lonely life gives one opportunities of thinking these things out"), living with her dreams of Chris as putative lover, the realisation of the loss of her youth, and the new awareness that her constant companion Kitty has never liked her and that, contrary to her first impression, Margaret cuts the best figure of them all, despite her social commonness:

I pushed the purse away from me with my toe, and hated her as the rich hate the poor as insect things that will struggle out of the crannies which are their decent home and introduce ugliness to the light of day.

Even the house cannot save its occupants, as they become aware that it is "not so much a house as a vast piece of space partitioned off from the universe and decorated partly for beauty and partly to make our privacy more insolent". War has changed things forever and the bitter irony of their trying to save Chris only to send him back "to that flooded trench in Flanders, under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that No-Man's-Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead" is never far from the surface of this extraordinary book.

BTW, I read this as a free book from girlebooks (although I have the Virago classic too). I think girlebooks is marvellous.

Rating: 10/10.

If you liked this... the evocation of the 'perfect summer' in The Return of the Soldier is somewhat earlier than the norm, but reminded me that I have - still - yet to finish The Perfect Summer.

{review} cynical amber eyes

Edmund de Waal The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010)

I tell Sasha why we’ve come, that I’m writing a book about – I stumble to a halt. I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is still a book about small Japanese things.

This is going to spawn a zillion imitators, isn't it? Intimate biographies of objects. The telling of personal stories entwined with objects. In mere months we'll no doubt be overwhelmed with narrative histories of soup ladles and the like. Petit-point door stops. Mirrors (oops, done already). Fish knives. Telegraph poles. There's been a bit of 'object biography' - the life of things - around already, of course (e.g., the excellent Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon by Gijs van Hensbergen), but the emphasis now shifts to the intimate, the personal. Is this a consequence of the narcissistic nineties? Would The Hare with Amber Eyes (or, indeed, The Bloke Who Played With The Hare With The Amber Eyes) have a made a brilliantly witty series of Facebook status up-dates? Almost certainly.

I read a fair bit of biography, and the trend away from the subsumption of the biographer in his/her subject is becoming increasingly more overt. The first one that really caught my eye was Diana Souhami interspersing Wild Girls: Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks with verbal images of her own loves and losses. Then I thought that I was finding out too much about Sarah Helm as she investigated Vera Atkins in A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins & the Lost Agents of SOE. Do we want to know (or is the questions, 'Do I want to know?') the daily trials faced by the biographer in search of his/her material? Most certainly I think it is important to know what ideologically motivates the biographer. And certainly much (~ all?) biography is covertly autobiographical. But do I want to know the type of car she drove to the archive? That the misty view of Vienna is due to breaking his glasses? I'm not so sure. Is it all too narcissistic? - this focus on the cleverness of the amateur researcher who can read two or three languages and negotiate libraries in foreign countries? Is it because this is a dying skill-set that so much fuss is made of it? Are we becoming incapable of subsuming ourselves when it is not our story? Is biography to be a form of therapy for the self? Is the biographer's broken eyewear just as significant as the fate of 65,459 Viennese Jews?

Nevertheless, hypocritically and despite the slight queasiness engendered by Too Much Information, I really enjoyed The Hare with Amber Eyes. The writing was excellent: rather like the inside of a creamy brie. The objects (I would have liked more images but they are available here) were very sweet. The base-line story was interesting - and shocking - and well-presented. The horror of being Jewish in Anschluss Vienna is communicated most vividly. It's a good read. I'm just way too cynical:

And I have the slightly clammy feeling of biography, the sense of living on the edges of other people’s lives without their permission. Let it go. Let it lie. Stop looking and stop picking things up, the voice says insistently. Just go home and leave these stories be.

Rating: 7/10

If you liked this... I'm not sure I can embrace the genre much further (the mirror one does tempt me a little though). I perhaps need a switch to the first person: reading in The Hare with Amber Eyes that Patrick Leigh Fermor has passed through the family home at Kövesces (recorded in A Time of Gifts) reminds me that I've a few more of his books to read. Perhaps it's A Time to Keep Silence...

{review} two lady detectives

Nicola Upson An Expert in Murder (2008)

Katharine McMahon The Crimson Rooms (2009)

An Expert in Murder: great concept; not convinced about the follow-through. Gorgeous cover. Upson's premise – a series of detective novels with the real life detective novel writer Josephine Tey (aka Gordon Daviot aka Elizabeth Mackintosh) as protagonist – is a very appealing one. And it taps into a current interest in the 1930s. And the settings are nicely done: lots of foggy London-ness and neat use of other contemporary figures more or less disguised by pseudonyms. The story revolves around the cast and crew of the play 'Richard of Bordeaux', written by Mackintosh/Tey (as Gordon Daviot). Incidentally, the 'real' play made a star of John Gielgud. 

What mystery lies in Josephine Tey's past that has made her the target of a ruthless killer? Hopefully the familiar tortured cop figure (though he is not Alan Grant) with a soft spot for Tey will be able to solve the puzzle before Tey joins the growing body count. What I wondered about was why Tey? This is the sort of book that, say, an Agatha Christie would have pulled off with a totally believable yet entirely fictional author, and without mussing a hair. It's almost lazy to use Tey - and Upson is clearly not a lazy writer: she writes very well indeed and a lot of work has gone into recreating the appropriate background. 

In sum: I'm not panning the book by any means. I'm just concerned that it didn't grab me and it should have grabbed me because I'm a huge Tey fan. There was little flavour of her carefully contained, almost bland style here - maybe that threw me? Imagining what it would be like in a Tey 'style'... 

Rating: 6/10

If you liked this... read Tey. TEY. I don't understand why she's badly rated nowadays. Ignore that bit about 'bland'.

The Crimson Rooms by Katharine McMahon is the sort of satisfactory read that one might term a 'happily waste a leisurely afternoon and never regret it sort of book'. Set in 1924, a decade before Upson's novel, this book too deals with complications arising from the First World War, in which heroine's brother perished. Evelyn Gifford is the bread-winner of a constricted household and faces challenges both domestic and professional. Can she escape her miserable home life? Can she shake her brother's ghost? Is the child on the doorstep really her brother's son, conceived on the battlefields of France? 

And then there's her professional struggles to achieve recognition in her chosen profession as a barrister. But who will employ a lady barrister in those first few years after women were admitted to the bar in 1922? What ulterior motives lie behind the championship, professional and romantic, of Evelyn by the dashing Nicholas Thorne? And there are orphans too. What more could you want? The Crimson Rooms is a perfect blend of historical reality and wild romancing. Ideal, as I said, for a leisurely afternoon in the recliner. 

Rating: 8/10

If you liked this... I thought McMahon's writing was excellent and The Rose of Sebastopol is on my TBR as we speak...

 

{review} todd + goodman

Charles Todd A Test of Wills (1996)

Carol Goodman The Lake of Dead Languages (2002)

 

One yea; one nay.

A Test of Wills has an interesting premise: a Scotland Yard detective with PTSD from service in the First World War who hears in his head the argumentative and malicious voice of a young soldier whom he was forced to execute for refusing to fight in the trenches. We are used to, indeed sometimes bored by, dedicated detectives with a typical series of problems (pick from marital, disciplinary, weight, substances, etc.) but this was a new one for me. The story - the detective sent to investigate the murder of one war hero by another war hero - is well-plotted too, with plenty of suspects to choose from. It took me a long time to guess the murderer and I wouldn't have picked the twist in the tail in a million years. A very satisfying read. I'll definitely read a few more from the series.

Rating: 8/10.

If you liked this... Maisie Dobbs is the WW1-traumatised heroine of the series by Jacqueline Winspear.

I know that I should have liked Carol Goodman's The Lake of Dead Languages simply because I must like anything that promotes the study of ancient world. But unfortunately the murderer was completely obvious within the first 45 pages and that left 355 more pages of figuring out to go down the drain. This book reminded me of Donna Tartt's The Secret History: there was a lot of classical stuff going on (much Latin; ironically, the Latin gave the murderer away at page 44...), and a fair bit of class warfare, but it never really achieved The Secret History's level of suffocating malevolence. On the plus side: interesting setting (girl's school; freezing weather); neat classical allusions; the structure really tried very hard (interweaving of the unreliable past and the present). But I never liked the narrator, although I realise that I was intended to care about her fate. In sum: OK, but it didn't grab me. A coincidence: this is the third book by a Vassar author which I've read lately (with Daddy-Long-Legs and The Group). My tendency is to listen to and follow up these coincidences.

Rating: 5/10

If you liked this... it's got to be its big brother, The Secret History (1992), which came out when I was beginning my MA in classical studies and made the study of the ancient world seem almost sexy.

{wishlist}

Begging to join the groaning shelves this week:

 

Juliet Nicolson (2010): 

The Great Silence:

1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War

{lit link}

Via the always interesting 

war poetry:

Cambridge University Library

has an exhibition on its

Siegfried Sassoon archive.

{review} ashenden

W. Somerset Maugham (1928) Ashenden, or The British Agent:

"There's just one thing I think you ought to know before you take on this job. And don't forget it. If you do well you'll get no thanks and if you get into trouble you'll get no help. Does that suit you?"

"Perfectly."

What a fabulous cover:

I've had this book on my wish-list for a long time but it has been out of print (and even the library didn't have it), so when I saw that it had been reprinted, I snapped it up. It was one of many classic crime/spy/thrillers noted by Julian Symons in Bloody Murder: from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (3rd edn. 1992) which I want to read. I have found Symons a most reliable referee: this is how he saw the top 100 in 1957.

I also wanted to read this book because I loved Alfred Hitchcock's campy Secret Agent (1936: see imdb) which is based, very loosely, on Ashenden.

So, what did I think of this long-anticipated book? In short, absolutely wonderful.

Maugham has been back in the news recently, thanks to a recent revelatory biography by Selina Hastings. Ashenden is a accessible introduction to Maugham (as are his short stories).

Ashenden has a lot of the short story about it, but it stands as a novel thanks to its connecting links and developing personalities. Maugham's introduction sets the scene - and the tone:

In 1917 I went to Russia. I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war. The reader will know that my efforts did not meet with success.

The hero of Ashenden presents his stories with this same, unmistakably dry English quality and eye to the comic side of a time where external events were by no means funny:

Most of the hotels were closed, the streets were empty... and in the avenues by the lake the only persons to be seen were serious Swiss taking their neutrality, like a dachshund, for a walk with them.

We can read as much as we desire of the autobiographic into Ashenden. Events have been, as Maugham notes in the introduction, "rearranged for the purposes of fiction". Certainly, the hero Ashenden is a writer like Maugham, sent to neutral Switzerland in the first world war as a British agent. His boss "R." suspects that he may possess too much flippancy for the role:

...he wrote long reports which he was convinced no one read, till having inadvertently slipped a jest into one of them he received a sharp reproof for his levity.

*

The experience he had just enjoyed appealed to his acute sense of the absurd. R., it is true, had not seen the fun of it: what humour R. possessed was of a sardonic turn and he had no facility for taking in good part a joke at his own expense. To do that you must be able to look at yourself from the outside and be at the same time spectator and actor in the pleasant comedy of life. R. was a soldier and regarded introspection as unhealthy, un-English and unpatriotic.

Ashenden's character ("the amateur of the baroque in human nature") is presented to us in an emblematic fashion - we never really get to know this seemingly passionless figure (after all, he is a secret agent; later we discover he is not without some passions) but have to patch together a picture of him from little gems like the following:

Ashenden sighed, for the water was no longer quite so hot; he could not reach the tap with his hand nor could he turn it with his toes (as every properly regulated tap should turn) and if he got up enough to add more hot water he might just as well get out altogether. On the other hand he could not pull out the plug with his foot in order to empty the bath and so force himself to get out, nor could he find in himself the will-power to step out of it like a man. He had often heard people tell him that he possessed character and he reflected that people judge hastily in the affairs of life because they judge on insufficient evidence: they had never seen him in a hot, but diminishingly hot, bath.

*

Cursing, Ashenden turned on his light, ran a hand though his thinning and rumpled hair (for like Julius Caesar he disliked exposing an unbecoming baldness)...

*

Ashenden admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness. People sometimes thought him heartless because he was more often interested in others than attached to them...

*

In her dark melancholy eyes Ashenden saw the boundless steppes of Russia, and the Kremlin with its pealing bells, and the solemn ceremonies of Easter at St. Isaac's, and forests of silver beeches and the Nevsky Prospekt; it was astonishing how much he saw in her eyes. They were round and shining and slightly protuberant like those of a Pekinese.

All of the ingredients which will become familiar tropes in later spy fiction are present in Ashenden: the beautiful German spy, the dastardly English traitor, the exuberant talkative American, the temperamental foreign assassin (Peter Lorre's embarrassingly campy 'General' in Secret Agent is nothing compared to his original, the Hairless Mexican), et al.:

It appears that in Mexico it's an insult to get between a man and his drink and he told me himself that once when a Dutchman who didn't know passed between him and the bar he whipped out his revolver and shot him dead... The matter was hushed up and it was announced in the papers that the Dutchman had committed suicide. He did practically.

Maugham lays down masterful vignettes which capture everything salient about a character:

The old Irish colonel and his old wife rose from their table and he stood aside to let her pass. They had eaten their meal without exchanging a word. She walked slowly to the door; but the colonel stopped to say a word to a Swiss who might have been a local attorney, and when she reached it she stood there, bowed and with a sheep-like look, patiently waiting for her husband to come and open it for her. Ashenden realised that she had never opened a door for herself. She did not know how to.

*

The fact that before the war she had been secretary to an eminent scientist made her doubtless no less competent a housemaid.

It is not all fun and games though - there are a number of moving moments and the final chapter, set on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, brings the book to quite an unexpectedly sombre conclusion.

I noted the emblematic quality of the characterisations in this book. It is also a work filled with wonderfully epigrammatic moments:

"In my youth I was always taught that you should take a woman by the waist and a bottle by the neck," he murmured.

"I am glad you told me. I shall continue to hold a bottle by the waist and give women a wide berth."

*

It is never very difficult to get to know anyone who has a dog.

I loved this book and I vow to read more Maugham, 'though I should admit that I loathed and have been unable to finish Of Human Bondage. Short stories though...

[Ashenden] passed a good deal of time in the book-shops turning over the pages of books that would have been worth reading if life were a thousand years long.

Rating: 9/10

If you liked this... try the 1930s Eric Ambler books: by no means epigrammatic, but spot on with the atmosphere.