Bruno’s Dream by Iris Murdoch (Viking Press, 1969)
Bruno’s Dream is one of the less interesting and satisfying Murdoch novels that I have read. This may be because it’s rather brief and episodic; it doesn’t have much depth or texture, and the characters are all rather vague and underdeveloped, palely colored. What drives what little plot there is, is love — or rather, the fickleness and instability of love. The tensions mount but are are resolved not by any development of character, but by a natural disaster — a terrible rainfall and flood. Because it’s Murdoch it’s engaging to read — she seems to know and tell the truth about her characters, it’s just that in this case their truths are not very complex or interesting.
As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann (Harcourt/Harvest Original, 2021)
I read about this book somewhere recently were it was heralded as a terrific novel about homosexuality, which it is. It is also a very engaging and ambitiously conceived and executed historical novel, and I read it as quickly and avidly as any book I’ve read. The reader (me) is drawn into the world of Civil War (17th century) England and finds it difficult to break out of the book — a result, I think, of the fascinating characters, the vividly-evoked time and place, and the sensual and beguiling writing.
Our (anti-) hero is Jacob Cullen, a young man born to a respectable family who lose their social and financial standing due to the father’s compounding debt, and are reduced to working as servants — first exhaustively in the fields, later more comfortably in the manor house — for a family of rural aristocrats. Jacob cannot control his violent temper, which causes him, again and again, to destroy his happiness and separate him from those he loves. Although I was totally engaged with this book and very much enjoyed the experience of reading it (it did seem like an experience), two things about it somewhat perplexed me, and perhaps detracted from my enjoyment and high regard for this book.
The first was Jacob’s character, most specifically his hot, uncontrollable temper, which causes him much travail (and obviously propels the somewhat melodramatic plot). He is as hot-headed at the end of the book as he is in the beginning, which might be realistic, but is narratively disappointing.
The other thing that made me pause was the, for want of a better expression, “sexual orientation” of the two main characters. Introduced as heterosexual men who have both passionately married women, they become passionate lovers themselves. I suppose this is a reflective of the murkier sexual world of the 17th century, when sexual orientation was not a concept, and people did not think of themselves as hetero- or homosexual. Perhaps what made me question this was the fact that I was not sure if this was a clever manifestation of the sexual culture at the time, or a failing by the author to create coherently sexual men.
All I Wanted was Company by John Hopkins (Arcadia Press Ltd., 1999)
Two beautifully written and extremely engaging and transporting books by a writer I increasingly admire the more I read him.
Both of these novels (they read like auto-fiction) feature the same rather stoic and affectless narrator who leads a solitary and frugal life in an undeveloped country. The Attempt is set in Peru, with our narrator based in Lima but frequently traveling to the interior of the country. All I Wanted was Company (I love this title) finds a similar character traveling to Morocco with a wealthy older woman, and then having a dispassionate but poignant affair with a charismatic Moroccan woman of Spanish and Jewish descent.
Like all great travel writers, Hopkins is a brilliant observer of landscapes, architecture, and people. He recreates them all with a clear-sighted sympathy and appreciation that makes his books very pleasurable to experience, for one doesn’t read them so much as one exists within them.
He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope (Oxford University Press, 1978)
He Knew He Was Right, first published in 1869, is a very long, many-charactered, and intricately-plotted novel about marriage. During the course of its 900+ pages, we watch while one marriage tragically unravels, three marriages are happily consummated, several engagements are broken, and a number of proposals are refused.
The marriage at the center of the book is the one destroyed by jealousy on the part of the husband (Louis Trevalyn) and willfulness on the part of the wife (Emily Trevalyn). He suspects her not of infidelity but of a perhaps compromising friendship with an older man, and when she refuses to cut all ties with this scoundrel, a gulf opens between them that cannot be bridged.
Meanwhile, Emily’s sister, the independent and spirited Nora, rejects an offer of marriage from a charming Lord-to-be because she loves a man who has no money and works as a journalist for a penny newspaper, which is considered ungentlemanly. And Dorothy, the sister of the journalist, who is living with her fiercely controlling maiden aunt, manages to avoid an arranged marriage with a foolish local cleric, instead happily marrying the heir to her aunt’s considerable fortune. A few subplots, also dealing with engagements and marriages complete the plot(s).
The book is set in England (Exeter and London) and Italy (Florence and Siena). Perhaps because we have so many main characters and so many relationships to consider, our sympathies are attenuated and the strong and pleasurable connection a Trollope reader often feels for the book’s hero and heroine is missing here. The characters have less time on the page to reveal themselves and charm us, so we must take many of these love relationships on faith. This makes the book somewhat less satisfying than those Trollope novels that are more exclusively centered on one (or two) relationships — a deprivation that is partially compensated for with the book’s richness of plot and characters.
The Far Cry by Emma Smith (Readers’ Union 1951; originally published by MacGibbon & Kee in 1949)
I’m not sure when or how I acquired this book, but it’s been on my shelf for many years. With the exception of a single blurb on the back cover (“Hers will one day be a very important name indeed” — New Stateman), the jacket reveals nothing about the book or its author — no cover image, no description of the book, no bio of the author. Only the title: The Far Cry.
It’s interesting to read a book without any of the basic information or assumptions one usually enters a book with — where, when, who, what — all of those basic orienting facts. Is this ignorance an asset or a detriment? The reader must initially work a little harder, perhaps, to establish a connection with the book, but perhaps this connection, once established, is stronger and deeper than usual. The reader must read more carefully in order to conjure a world from the blank slate . . .
For some reason I stopped writing about this book before describing its content, about which I have no memory whatsoever. Who, and what, was it about? Did I like it? I have no idea. I shall have to glance through its pages and hope that something about it comes back to me.
It’s been a while since I’ve read an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel and reading Men and Wives (the title, which isn’t perfectly reflective, seems intriguingly off — why not Men and Woman or Husbands and Wives?) reminded me how singular and scintillating Compton-Burnett novels can be.
This one is centered around Lord and Lady Halsam and their four children (Matthew, Jeremy, Griselda, and Gregory) and their assorted friends and neighbors — a large cast of 16 characters, all of whom are well-developed and figure in just about every aspect of the plot.
Harriet, Lady Halsam, is an unhappy and difficult woman who doesn’t seem to like anyone, including her husband and children. She decides to kill herself and does not succeed, although the results of her attempt are fatal. This book explores — in Compton-Burnett’s uniquely subverted way — depression, and the evanescence and artificiality of all human relationships, both familial and romantic. One of the characters, Camilla, begins the book married to one man has been engaged to be married to three others by its conclusion.
Odd, smart, funny — a book of many keen pleasures.
The True Heart by Sylvia Townshend Warner (Viking, 1929)
The True Heart is an odd book with a whimsical quality that lends it a unique tone that is both beguiling and sometimes confusing.
Suki Bond spends her first 16 years in an orphanage for girls and leaves there when one of the patronesses arranges a position for her as a maid-of-all-work at a desolate farm on an island in the coastal marshlands of England. Mr. Norman runs the farm with his three taciturn sons. Another boy, Eric, who is beautiful but strangely silent and withdrawn, also lives on the farm, but it is unclear what he is doing there. Suki befriends this gentle soul, who responds to her attention and affection tenderly and amorously, and the two youngsters fall in love. But when Eric suffers an epileptic fit it is revealed that he is considered an idiot and has been banished to the farm by his snobbish and hateful upper-class parents, who want nothing to do with their damaged and embarrassing son. He is nevertheless returned to his hateful home and when Suki goes there to rescue him, she is cruelly treated and thrown out into the street.
Steadfast in her love for Eric, she endures hunger, cold, and grueling work while she devises a plan to reunite with Eric, marry him, and give him a loving and happy life. As this plan relies upon a private audience with Queen Victoria, the reader is at first skeptical and then amazed when Suki, with the help of some very friendly strangers, executes it perfectly and successfully.
The travails that Suki endures call to mind the similarly unfortunate Tess of the D’Ubervilles, but Suki refuses to become a victim of hate or fate, and her dignified struggles and quiet triumph make for very enjoyable and heartening reading.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead, 2020)
I enjoyed Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, although nothing about it seemed worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which this Polish writer was recently awarded. It’s smart and odd and funny — a sort of dark eco-murder(s) mystery set in an isolated rural Polish community, and narrated by an angry, solitary, and vengeful older lady who suffers many physical ailments. When local hunters begin to be found murdered in strange, inexplicable ways, she is sure that the animals these cruel men kill are responsible for the hunters’ grizzly deaths. She inserts herself into the police investigation, becoming a suspect in the process.
In addition to animal rights, our narrator is obsessed with astrology, and spends a lot of time pontificating on this subject, both to the reader and to her neighbors. Like her neighbors, I found her pontification to be tedious and annyoing.
A lively book, with a strong and distinct narrative voice and vivid and original characters.
The Matchmaker by Stella Gibbons (Vintage, 2012; originally published by Longmans, Green & Co. in 1949)
The Matchmaker is set in the English countryside somewhere between London and Brighton directly after the end of WWII. The war is, in fact, still very much a part of daily life — food and clothes are rationed, Italian prisoners remain in local camps, and Ronald — or is it Reginald? — our interesting heroine’s husband, is still posted in Germany.
Alda is our interesting heroine. She and her three young daughters have come to live in Pine Cottage, a ramshackle and unpleasant house, since their home in Ironborough was bombed. Alda is beautiful, confident, sensible, impatient, and bossy. Her considerable charm has a selfish edge that can be cutting. She and her daughters are soon joined at Pine Cottage by Alda’s childhood friend Jean, who is sweet and pretty and dim and wealthy, having inherited her father’s successful business. She has never been able to finalize any of the romances she naively pursues, so Alda decides she should marry Mr. Waite, a handsome but somewhat ornery local chicken farmer. Meanwhile at the nearby farm, a romance develops, abetted by Alda, between Fabrio, a handsome Italian POW and Sylvia, a charming but brazen Land Girl from London.
These two romances develop over the course of a year, and many members of the local farming community play a part in the intertwined plots. Gibbons, by paying somewhat exhaustive attention to weather, light, flora and fauna, paints a very vivid portrait of this rural and seasonal world, and her gentle exploration of character is generous and shrewd. Alda, whose beauty and vivacity initially enchants the reader, is gradually revealed to be a smug and shallow person, and Fabrio, who is cruelly jilted by Sylvia, is revealed to be the true hero of the book. A final chapter in which he returns home to Italy and his true love is moving and delightful.
Indiana is a novel about marriage but Sand’s wide-ranging interests and intelligence inform the book, and substantially broaden and deepen the canvas.
Indiana is 16 years old when she moves from the Ile de Bourbon in the Indian Ocean to France, and marries a much older man, who is an ex-soldier and successful factory owner — he has money but no class or sophistication. The match is loveless, and Indiana falls in love with a rakish, titled neighbor who, while seducing Indiana, has an affair with Noun, Indiana’s Creole maid. Noun tragically kills herself when she becomes pregnant. The plot is operatic and melodramatic, and neither Indiana or Reynaldo, her lover, are very sympathetic or interesting. But Sand’s writing is vivid and vigorous, and the frequent philosophical asides about society and marriage are modern and engagingly expressed.
An unusual book, difficult to place in the chronology of literature, as it is many ways old-fashioned and romantic and in others quite modern and bold.
