Flowers on the Grass, Monica Dickens
If this book is any indication, I am going to enjoy Monica Dickens' fiction just as much as the memoirs that introduced her to me. That's good, since in my first enthusiasm I've collected a few of her books (as often happens with new literary crushes). This one I bought under a misapprehension, though, from a section in her autobiography where she was talking about a cottage that she bought in Hertfordshire: "Under these idyllic conditions, I wrote a novel called Flowers on the Grass, which began and ended in this cottage." In the next paragraph, she went on to talk about an idea she had had for years, to write a book about alternative lives, along the lines of Kate Atkinson's Life After Life. I didn't realize she was talking about different books (and one still unwritten at that). So I started this one, expecting time slips and alternate selves - and it took me a couple of chapters to figure out my mistake and abandon my assumptions.
This book is, however, about different lives. As Dickens explained, "I used the idea of a man disappearing from view and leading different lives as a stranger in different settings." This man, Daniel Brett, had a difficult childhood. Orphaned at 14, he became the family's problem child, expelled from Eton and sent to live on Capri with a "disreputable great-aunt who had hitherto been outside the pale, but now proved her uses." There he learns to draw and paint, but his studies are interrupted by the Second World War. Returning to England and military service, he meets again one of his cousins, Jane. She has been in love with him for years, yearning to make a home and family for him, in a cottage that sounds exactly like the one Monica Dickens found in Hertfordshire. A tragedy in that cottage leaves Daniel alone again, and disinclined to stay there.
In each of the chapters that follow, Daniel is in a different place, a different job, a different life. Each is titled with a person's name, and we're introduced first to that person. We learn a little about them, who they are, what they do, how they live. And then Daniel wanders into their story. The events that follow are told from their point of view. In one chapter we meet Doris, a maid at a seaside hotel, preparing No. 4 for a new guest. In another, George is finishing a meal at a roadside café. On his way north with a truckload of goods, he reluctantly takes up a hitch-hiker. In one of my favorite chapters, we meet Dickie, a host at the Gaydays Holiday Camp near Whitby, smart in his white slacks and bright-blue sweater, full of camp spirit. To some of these lives, Daniel brings change, challenge, upset. He is more open, to connection, to friendship, even to love, with some. With others, he simply passes through their lives at a particular moment.
Each of the stories is self-contained, and only at the end do any of the characters reappear. With most of the chapters, the ending came too soon for me. I wanted to follow these people further into their lives, even if it meant abandoning Daniel. I was particularly concerned about Pamela, a young student at an awful avant-garde school where Daniel briefly joins the faculty. I suppose it's too much to hope that any of these people turn up in other books. I also enjoyed the different settings, slices of life in England in the late 1940s. I was impressed with the range of characters, most of whom felt like real people. Dickens writes about them with warmth and empathy, while allowing them their faults and weaknesses. She doesn't mock them, not even Dickie - though Daniel does, often. Her narrative voice is different here, less sardonic and snarky, but equally observant.
N.B. The spell-check option has disappeared from my tool-bar. No matter how many times I proof my drafts, I always find another mistake just after I hit the publish button - so mortifying.
Monday, June 17, 2013
Friday, June 14, 2013
An interrupted holiday in Provence
Madam, Will You Talk? Mary Stewart
When I think of Mary Stewart, I think of her Merlin series, particularly of The Crystal Cave, my favorite. I can't remember how old I was when I first read these books, but her Merlin Emrys is my Merlin. No others need apply. Though I've read a couple of her contemporary stories, I really have no memory of them, other than the entries in my reading diary. Then last year I began seeing posts about her books on some of my favorite blogs, like Anbolyn's, Helen's and Katrina's. They convinced me that I have been missing out on some wonderful stories. And the gloriously bright and retro covers on the new Hodder editions made me want to run out and buy them all, just for the pleasure of admiring them on my shelves.
But as happens too often, I got distracted by other things. So it was a pleasant shock last Sunday to come across a whole shelf of Mary Stewart's books, in the Hodder editions, at Half Price Books. I didn't in fact buy them all, in part because I'd also found a Barbara Pym (Less Than Angels) and an Eva Ibbotson (Magic Flutes). I virtuously restricted myself to two (while reserving the right to come back the following weekend for more). I chose Madam, Will You Talk? from the back-cover blurb:
It sounds idyllic: a leisurely drive through the sun-drenched landscape of Provence. But Charity's dream holiday turns into a nightmare as she becomes embroiled in a murder attempt . . . and she finds herself falling in love with the suspected murderer.
I didn't realize until later that this was Stewart's first novel, published in 1955. What a wonderful way to begin! I enjoyed this book so much. While I had a pretty good idea where the story was heading, some of the plot twists still took me by surprise. I took to Charity Selborne, the narrator, straight off, even before she informed us, "I get on well with cats. As you will find, I have a lot in common with them, and with the Elephant's Child." As the book opens, she has just arrived in Avignon with her friend Louise, whom she has invited to join her for a two-week holiday in Provence. Louise is an artist as well as an art teacher, but she is much less interested in playing tourist than Charity is. Charity makes friends with a boy, David Shelley, staying at the same hotel with his stepmother. From another guest, she learns of a tragedy involving David and his father, and realizes why he seems so unhappy and isolated. She invites him to join her on a day trip from Avignon to Nîmes. There they meet someone from David's past, who thinks Charity his keeper. Soon she finds herself in a desperate race to Marseilles and then out of it, trying to shield David while unraveling the truth of the family's tragedy.
As much as the characters, I loved the setting: Provence, baking in the summer sun (much like Houston these days), the towns with their Roman ruins and their cheerful crowds. Then there is Marseilles,
sliced in two by the straight line of the Canebière, the busiest street in Europe, where, sooner or later, all the world passed by. It was said that if you sat in the Canebière long enough, you would see passing by you every soul that you knew.
And in the harbor at Marseilles, the Château d'Ilf. Charity, a bit distracted on her visit there, doesn't mention the Count of Monte Cristo, though I'm sure the tour guides do.
I could perhaps have done with a little less description of the long drives, even the white-knuckled chases. And I confess that I prefer my heroes less domineering and prone to violence (however great the provocation). These are mere quibbles, however. This book was another perfect summer read, and a great antidote for a not-so-great week. I'm looking forward to more Mary Stewart, including a reading week that Anbolyn is organizing.
When I think of Mary Stewart, I think of her Merlin series, particularly of The Crystal Cave, my favorite. I can't remember how old I was when I first read these books, but her Merlin Emrys is my Merlin. No others need apply. Though I've read a couple of her contemporary stories, I really have no memory of them, other than the entries in my reading diary. Then last year I began seeing posts about her books on some of my favorite blogs, like Anbolyn's, Helen's and Katrina's. They convinced me that I have been missing out on some wonderful stories. And the gloriously bright and retro covers on the new Hodder editions made me want to run out and buy them all, just for the pleasure of admiring them on my shelves.
But as happens too often, I got distracted by other things. So it was a pleasant shock last Sunday to come across a whole shelf of Mary Stewart's books, in the Hodder editions, at Half Price Books. I didn't in fact buy them all, in part because I'd also found a Barbara Pym (Less Than Angels) and an Eva Ibbotson (Magic Flutes). I virtuously restricted myself to two (while reserving the right to come back the following weekend for more). I chose Madam, Will You Talk? from the back-cover blurb:
It sounds idyllic: a leisurely drive through the sun-drenched landscape of Provence. But Charity's dream holiday turns into a nightmare as she becomes embroiled in a murder attempt . . . and she finds herself falling in love with the suspected murderer.
I didn't realize until later that this was Stewart's first novel, published in 1955. What a wonderful way to begin! I enjoyed this book so much. While I had a pretty good idea where the story was heading, some of the plot twists still took me by surprise. I took to Charity Selborne, the narrator, straight off, even before she informed us, "I get on well with cats. As you will find, I have a lot in common with them, and with the Elephant's Child." As the book opens, she has just arrived in Avignon with her friend Louise, whom she has invited to join her for a two-week holiday in Provence. Louise is an artist as well as an art teacher, but she is much less interested in playing tourist than Charity is. Charity makes friends with a boy, David Shelley, staying at the same hotel with his stepmother. From another guest, she learns of a tragedy involving David and his father, and realizes why he seems so unhappy and isolated. She invites him to join her on a day trip from Avignon to Nîmes. There they meet someone from David's past, who thinks Charity his keeper. Soon she finds herself in a desperate race to Marseilles and then out of it, trying to shield David while unraveling the truth of the family's tragedy.
As much as the characters, I loved the setting: Provence, baking in the summer sun (much like Houston these days), the towns with their Roman ruins and their cheerful crowds. Then there is Marseilles,
sliced in two by the straight line of the Canebière, the busiest street in Europe, where, sooner or later, all the world passed by. It was said that if you sat in the Canebière long enough, you would see passing by you every soul that you knew.
And in the harbor at Marseilles, the Château d'Ilf. Charity, a bit distracted on her visit there, doesn't mention the Count of Monte Cristo, though I'm sure the tour guides do.
I could perhaps have done with a little less description of the long drives, even the white-knuckled chases. And I confess that I prefer my heroes less domineering and prone to violence (however great the provocation). These are mere quibbles, however. This book was another perfect summer read, and a great antidote for a not-so-great week. I'm looking forward to more Mary Stewart, including a reading week that Anbolyn is organizing.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
A pet-sitter investigates
The Cat Sitter's Pajamas, Blaize Clement
I've noticed that after I've spent some quality time in the Victorian era, as with The Clever Woman of the Family, I often have a reactional impulse to read something very much of my time, preferably with a spunky independent heroine who takes no guff from anyone - a modern-day Amelia Peabody. Dixie Hemingway, the main character in Blaize Clement's series of mysteries, is a perfect answer to that, and this book was a perfect summer read.
Dixie ("no relation to you-know-who") lives on Siesta Key, a barrier island off the Florida coast, on the Gulf of Mexico just west of Sarasota. Every time I read one of these books, I want to book an immediate flight to Sarasota:
I live here for the same reason so many famous people have second or third or maybe eighth homes here - because it's a paradise of riotous colors, balmy sea breezes, cool talcum sand beaches, and every songbird and seabird you can think of. Snowy egrets walk around in our parking lots, great blue herons stand vigil on people's lawns, and if we look up we see the silhouette of frigate birds flying above the clouds like ships without a home.
Dixie grew up on the Key, in a house on the beach that her grandparents built many years before. Her brother and his partner now live in the house, and she has an apartment over the carport. She moved back in with her family after her husband and small daughter were killed. In the aftermath, Dixie gave up her job as a sheriff's deputy. She now has her own business working as a pet-sitter, mostly for cats, dogs, and birds (she doesn't mind snakes but hates feeding them live mice). Through her work, Dixie sometimes finds herself in the middle of criminal cases that involve her clients. She often involves herself more deeply than her brother or the police think she should, if she feels someone needs her help, and she is willing to cross moral and ethical lines to provide that help.
In this book, the seventh in the series, Dixie's clients include Cupcake and Jancey Trillin, who have left their cats in her charge while they travel to Italy. Cupcake is a star athlete, a linebacker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, whom Dixie met in the previous book (Cat Sitter Among the Pigeons). When she arrives one morning at their home in an exclusive gated community, she is met by a nearly-naked woman who announces that she is Cupcake's wife. Dixie steps outside to call the Trillins and then the police. When two officers arrive, they enter the house with her to find a woman dead in the living room, her throat slit. But it's not the woman Dixie met, who later finds her, asking for her help. Dixie feels compelled to help her, though at the same time she wants to protect Cupcake and Jancey from both accusations of complicity, and the storm of publicity that a dead woman in a star athlete's home will set off.
Like the other books in the series, this one has an intriguing mystery for Dixie to unravel. I always enjoy the characters, human and animal, who make up her extended family, and who often help her in her cases. I love the vivid sense of setting that Blaize Clement evokes, though in this book perhaps some of the description could have been pruned back a bit. On the other hand there is just enough description of Dixie's work and her animal clients, which as a cat-owner I think are presented pretty realistically. (After a stressful day at work, I often think that I will give it all up and become a pet-sitter.) I have to say though that I don't think Dixie or her creator have been well-served by her publisher, Minotaur Books. The last few covers have featured cutsie kittens whimsically posed, with punning titles like this one. Neither the covers nor the titles have anything to do with the stories, and to my mind they give a false impression of cosiness, as if Dixie were a Florida version of Miss Marple, with cats instead of knitting. These books are not noir, but they aren't G-rated either. In this one, there are frequent (though non-graphic) references to the sexual abuse that one character suffered as a child, and another character's head gets blown off.
I was sorry to learn that Blaize Clement died in 2011. I enjoyed following her blog and had wondered when she stopped posting to it. According to an obituary I read, she left the manuscripts for two more books in the series, as well as materials her son will use to write others. I don't usually read continuations, but I will keep an eye out for these.
I've noticed that after I've spent some quality time in the Victorian era, as with The Clever Woman of the Family, I often have a reactional impulse to read something very much of my time, preferably with a spunky independent heroine who takes no guff from anyone - a modern-day Amelia Peabody. Dixie Hemingway, the main character in Blaize Clement's series of mysteries, is a perfect answer to that, and this book was a perfect summer read.
Dixie ("no relation to you-know-who") lives on Siesta Key, a barrier island off the Florida coast, on the Gulf of Mexico just west of Sarasota. Every time I read one of these books, I want to book an immediate flight to Sarasota:
I live here for the same reason so many famous people have second or third or maybe eighth homes here - because it's a paradise of riotous colors, balmy sea breezes, cool talcum sand beaches, and every songbird and seabird you can think of. Snowy egrets walk around in our parking lots, great blue herons stand vigil on people's lawns, and if we look up we see the silhouette of frigate birds flying above the clouds like ships without a home.
Dixie grew up on the Key, in a house on the beach that her grandparents built many years before. Her brother and his partner now live in the house, and she has an apartment over the carport. She moved back in with her family after her husband and small daughter were killed. In the aftermath, Dixie gave up her job as a sheriff's deputy. She now has her own business working as a pet-sitter, mostly for cats, dogs, and birds (she doesn't mind snakes but hates feeding them live mice). Through her work, Dixie sometimes finds herself in the middle of criminal cases that involve her clients. She often involves herself more deeply than her brother or the police think she should, if she feels someone needs her help, and she is willing to cross moral and ethical lines to provide that help.
In this book, the seventh in the series, Dixie's clients include Cupcake and Jancey Trillin, who have left their cats in her charge while they travel to Italy. Cupcake is a star athlete, a linebacker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, whom Dixie met in the previous book (Cat Sitter Among the Pigeons). When she arrives one morning at their home in an exclusive gated community, she is met by a nearly-naked woman who announces that she is Cupcake's wife. Dixie steps outside to call the Trillins and then the police. When two officers arrive, they enter the house with her to find a woman dead in the living room, her throat slit. But it's not the woman Dixie met, who later finds her, asking for her help. Dixie feels compelled to help her, though at the same time she wants to protect Cupcake and Jancey from both accusations of complicity, and the storm of publicity that a dead woman in a star athlete's home will set off.
Like the other books in the series, this one has an intriguing mystery for Dixie to unravel. I always enjoy the characters, human and animal, who make up her extended family, and who often help her in her cases. I love the vivid sense of setting that Blaize Clement evokes, though in this book perhaps some of the description could have been pruned back a bit. On the other hand there is just enough description of Dixie's work and her animal clients, which as a cat-owner I think are presented pretty realistically. (After a stressful day at work, I often think that I will give it all up and become a pet-sitter.) I have to say though that I don't think Dixie or her creator have been well-served by her publisher, Minotaur Books. The last few covers have featured cutsie kittens whimsically posed, with punning titles like this one. Neither the covers nor the titles have anything to do with the stories, and to my mind they give a false impression of cosiness, as if Dixie were a Florida version of Miss Marple, with cats instead of knitting. These books are not noir, but they aren't G-rated either. In this one, there are frequent (though non-graphic) references to the sexual abuse that one character suffered as a child, and another character's head gets blown off.
I was sorry to learn that Blaize Clement died in 2011. I enjoyed following her blog and had wondered when she stopped posting to it. According to an obituary I read, she left the manuscripts for two more books in the series, as well as materials her son will use to write others. I don't usually read continuations, but I will keep an eye out for these.
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Clever women
The Clever Woman of the Family, Charlotte M. Yonge
Devoted myself to Miss Yonge's last novel, The Clever Woman of the Family; her best, I think, since Heartsease. She has no great creative or constructive power; she can produce but two finished portraits of woman-kind (Amy and Laura in The Heir of Redclyffe, Lady Temple and Rachel Curtis in this last book, Violet and her sister-in-law in Heartsease), but all she writes is pure, refined, womanly, healthy, and wholesome beyond the work of any living novelist. Anthony Trollope comes next . . . - George Templeton Strong, diary entry, July 13, 1865.
Over the past week I have also devoted myself to this book. I've now read three of Charlotte Yonge's novels, and I like each one better than the last. I can't agree with Strong that she has "no great creative or constructive power." This story is more complex than either The Daisy Chain or The Heir of Redclyffe, with a larger cast of characters and a mystery to be unraveled at its heart. It is the story of two sets of sisters, one set of brothers, and a brother and sister. The "clever woman" of the title is Rachel Curtis, who is introduced in the first chapter, living with her older sister Grace and their widowed mother in the seaside town of Avonmouth (standing in for Exmouth). Their estate, The Homestead, of which Grace and Rachel are joint heiresses, includes much of the land around the town, which is becoming popular as a winter resort. Rachel has just turned 25, and she longs to be doing something to improve the lives of the local people, particularly the girls who are apprenticed too young to lace-making. She want a purpose, a mission. She spends her spare time in study, but she has no one to discuss and debate with, no one to guide her reading, which has made her rather dogmatic and overbearing. People agree with her to escape confrontation, or they just avoid her conversation all together.
A mission soon comes to hand with a letter announcing the impending arrival of her cousin Fanny and her family from India. The daughter of a soldier, Fanny went out to join her parents in South Africa when she was 16. At her father's death, which quickly followed her arrival, she married his old friend Sir Simon Temple, aged 60 to her 16. Now, nine years later, Sir Simon has died, and Fanny is returning to England as Lady Temple, with seven children, including a new-born daughter, Stephana. (There is also a son named Leoline, though the others have more usual names). Rachel determines to take charge of the widow and her children, appointing herself tutor to the boys and chaperone to the mother. The boys do not take kindly to her regime, and gentle Lady Temple is quick to defend and excuse them. Rachel, finding her theories of education and child management falling short of the reality of six troublesome boys, agrees to give up charge of them to a new governess.
Fortunately, there is a candidate close at hand in Alison Williams. She and her sister Ermine live in a small cottage with their niece Rose. Ermine, the elder, is in a wheelchair, having suffered terrible burns in an accidental fire that left her unable to walk. She spends much of her time caring for Rose, a winsome child of seven, the daughter of their brother Edward. In the second great tragedy of their family, Edward was accused of fraud, in connection with an industrial process that he was developing, and fled to the Continent. Alison and Ermine have been ostracized by their family for insisting on his innocence. In their poverty and isolation, the offer of a position with the Temples comes as a great relief. Alison handles her new charges very easily, and she gets on well with Lady Temple. Rachel, meanwhile, finds herself drawn to Ermine, recognzing in her a well-read, educated, thinking person, with a deeper understanding than Rachel herself. Ermine listens patiently to Rachel's theories and dogmas, but she isn't afraid to challenge, and she will not be intimidated or overborne. Rachel learns from one Williams sister as the Temple boys do from the other.
Though she gives up charge of the boys, Rachel still feels herself the guardian of their young mother (like Rachel, aged 25). Lady Temple is good-hearted, simple and generous. Though she is determined never to marry again, having loved Sir Stephen deeply and sincerely mourning him, Rachel keeps a suspicious eye on every man who comes near her. She particularly resents Colonel the Hon. Colin Keith, whom Sir Stephen made the guardian of his family with Fanny's Aunt Curtis. Fanny depends on him for everything, she refers all questions to him, especially those involving the boys. Rachel also keeps a close eye on the Colonel's distant cousin Captain Alexander Keith. Alick served under Fanny's father, and his sister Bessie, who also knew the family, comes to stay with Lady Temple. Rachel, suspecting every man of designs on Lady Temple, never notices that both men have other reasons for staying in Avonmouth.
I did enjoy this book, for its twisty plot but also for its characters. I felt for Rachel, who like Jo March in Little Women has great energy and talents, but no real outlet for them. According to the introduction, this book addresses the problem of "surplus women" in British society in the mid-19th century, when "women outnumber men to such an extent that not all women can expect to marry." Rachel does not plan to marry, but to work at some mission, once she discovers the proper one. At age 25, she considers herself past the marrying age anyway, a point of view not shared by her older sister Grace. Alison Williams is another young woman who has made a career as a governess instead of marrying. But as much as I enjoyed this book, it also left me a little uneasy, because more than any other 19th-century novelist I've read, Yonge makes her characters pay for their mistakes, their sins, and retribution falls heavily on the women. Perhaps that is why 19th-century readers like George Templeton Strong saw her books as so "pure, refined, womanly, healthy and wholesome." In this book, one character's misbehavior leads to her death, and another's mistakes cost the life of a child.
I was also uncomfortable with Yonge's insistence that women's intellect, and even their souls, must be guided and shaped by the men in their lives. Here is another parallel with Little Women: Rachel must find her Professor Bhaer, to tone down her stridency, to make her realize that she is not as educated and well-informed as she thinks she is. In the end, it takes two mentors, one of whom helps her find again the faith that she thought lost to rationalism. "And after all, unwilling as she would have been to own it, a woman's tone of thought is commonly moulded by the masculine intellect, which, under one form or another, becomes the master of her soul." As a 21st-century woman with an unmastered soul, I am absolutely unwilling to own that.
And yet in other ways this book is surprisingly progressive. Yonge also gives us Ermine Williams, a truly clever woman, who seems to have succeeded where Rachel failed in shaping herself without a master. And Yonge gives us not one but two characters, physically maimed and handicapped, both of whom are loved and marry happily. One character even has a home prepared and made handicap-accessible. A third character, Alick and Bessie's uncle Mr. Clare, is blind but still continues as rector of a parish, with the help of a curate. I can't think of another 19th-century novel that I have read where anything like this happens - where physically disabled characters can be central and heroic while also living normal lives. In another unexpected twist for a novel of this time, Yonge makes one of the male characters - again, a central and heroic one - a tender and devoted nurse, much in demand.
Admist all the discussion of serious reading, I was tickled to find two of my favorite characters are fans of Anthony Trollope. Alick Keith is visiting his uncle, to whom he often reads aloud. Mr. Clare asks, "You have not by chance got Framley Parsonage?" Alick tells him no, but that they will get a copy. Mr. Clare goes on to say, "Bessie has it. She read me a very clever scene about a weak young parson bent on pleasing himself; and offered to lend me the book, but I thought it would not edify Will Walker [his curate]." Instead, they settle down to read Silas Marner.
I was so surprised and happy to find this book at Half Price Books. I always look in the "Y" section at used-book stores but without much hope, since so few of Yonge's books have been reprinted and they are very hard to find. The edition I found is from the Broadview Press, which has published many 19th-century novels in editions like this one, which has not just an introduction by a professor of English, Clare Simmons, but also appendicies with supplementary information on Yonge herself, on the "Surplus Women" question, and some background historical information (on the British army in the period of the novel, for example). I have since discovered that my copy of Margaret Oliphant's autobiography is also a Broadview edition. I can only hope that they will continue to reprint women writers, and I am hoping specifically for more of Yonge's novels (which are available as e-texts; I still prefer print).
Devoted myself to Miss Yonge's last novel, The Clever Woman of the Family; her best, I think, since Heartsease. She has no great creative or constructive power; she can produce but two finished portraits of woman-kind (Amy and Laura in The Heir of Redclyffe, Lady Temple and Rachel Curtis in this last book, Violet and her sister-in-law in Heartsease), but all she writes is pure, refined, womanly, healthy, and wholesome beyond the work of any living novelist. Anthony Trollope comes next . . . - George Templeton Strong, diary entry, July 13, 1865.
Over the past week I have also devoted myself to this book. I've now read three of Charlotte Yonge's novels, and I like each one better than the last. I can't agree with Strong that she has "no great creative or constructive power." This story is more complex than either The Daisy Chain or The Heir of Redclyffe, with a larger cast of characters and a mystery to be unraveled at its heart. It is the story of two sets of sisters, one set of brothers, and a brother and sister. The "clever woman" of the title is Rachel Curtis, who is introduced in the first chapter, living with her older sister Grace and their widowed mother in the seaside town of Avonmouth (standing in for Exmouth). Their estate, The Homestead, of which Grace and Rachel are joint heiresses, includes much of the land around the town, which is becoming popular as a winter resort. Rachel has just turned 25, and she longs to be doing something to improve the lives of the local people, particularly the girls who are apprenticed too young to lace-making. She want a purpose, a mission. She spends her spare time in study, but she has no one to discuss and debate with, no one to guide her reading, which has made her rather dogmatic and overbearing. People agree with her to escape confrontation, or they just avoid her conversation all together.
A mission soon comes to hand with a letter announcing the impending arrival of her cousin Fanny and her family from India. The daughter of a soldier, Fanny went out to join her parents in South Africa when she was 16. At her father's death, which quickly followed her arrival, she married his old friend Sir Simon Temple, aged 60 to her 16. Now, nine years later, Sir Simon has died, and Fanny is returning to England as Lady Temple, with seven children, including a new-born daughter, Stephana. (There is also a son named Leoline, though the others have more usual names). Rachel determines to take charge of the widow and her children, appointing herself tutor to the boys and chaperone to the mother. The boys do not take kindly to her regime, and gentle Lady Temple is quick to defend and excuse them. Rachel, finding her theories of education and child management falling short of the reality of six troublesome boys, agrees to give up charge of them to a new governess.
Fortunately, there is a candidate close at hand in Alison Williams. She and her sister Ermine live in a small cottage with their niece Rose. Ermine, the elder, is in a wheelchair, having suffered terrible burns in an accidental fire that left her unable to walk. She spends much of her time caring for Rose, a winsome child of seven, the daughter of their brother Edward. In the second great tragedy of their family, Edward was accused of fraud, in connection with an industrial process that he was developing, and fled to the Continent. Alison and Ermine have been ostracized by their family for insisting on his innocence. In their poverty and isolation, the offer of a position with the Temples comes as a great relief. Alison handles her new charges very easily, and she gets on well with Lady Temple. Rachel, meanwhile, finds herself drawn to Ermine, recognzing in her a well-read, educated, thinking person, with a deeper understanding than Rachel herself. Ermine listens patiently to Rachel's theories and dogmas, but she isn't afraid to challenge, and she will not be intimidated or overborne. Rachel learns from one Williams sister as the Temple boys do from the other.
Though she gives up charge of the boys, Rachel still feels herself the guardian of their young mother (like Rachel, aged 25). Lady Temple is good-hearted, simple and generous. Though she is determined never to marry again, having loved Sir Stephen deeply and sincerely mourning him, Rachel keeps a suspicious eye on every man who comes near her. She particularly resents Colonel the Hon. Colin Keith, whom Sir Stephen made the guardian of his family with Fanny's Aunt Curtis. Fanny depends on him for everything, she refers all questions to him, especially those involving the boys. Rachel also keeps a close eye on the Colonel's distant cousin Captain Alexander Keith. Alick served under Fanny's father, and his sister Bessie, who also knew the family, comes to stay with Lady Temple. Rachel, suspecting every man of designs on Lady Temple, never notices that both men have other reasons for staying in Avonmouth.
I did enjoy this book, for its twisty plot but also for its characters. I felt for Rachel, who like Jo March in Little Women has great energy and talents, but no real outlet for them. According to the introduction, this book addresses the problem of "surplus women" in British society in the mid-19th century, when "women outnumber men to such an extent that not all women can expect to marry." Rachel does not plan to marry, but to work at some mission, once she discovers the proper one. At age 25, she considers herself past the marrying age anyway, a point of view not shared by her older sister Grace. Alison Williams is another young woman who has made a career as a governess instead of marrying. But as much as I enjoyed this book, it also left me a little uneasy, because more than any other 19th-century novelist I've read, Yonge makes her characters pay for their mistakes, their sins, and retribution falls heavily on the women. Perhaps that is why 19th-century readers like George Templeton Strong saw her books as so "pure, refined, womanly, healthy and wholesome." In this book, one character's misbehavior leads to her death, and another's mistakes cost the life of a child.
I was also uncomfortable with Yonge's insistence that women's intellect, and even their souls, must be guided and shaped by the men in their lives. Here is another parallel with Little Women: Rachel must find her Professor Bhaer, to tone down her stridency, to make her realize that she is not as educated and well-informed as she thinks she is. In the end, it takes two mentors, one of whom helps her find again the faith that she thought lost to rationalism. "And after all, unwilling as she would have been to own it, a woman's tone of thought is commonly moulded by the masculine intellect, which, under one form or another, becomes the master of her soul." As a 21st-century woman with an unmastered soul, I am absolutely unwilling to own that.
And yet in other ways this book is surprisingly progressive. Yonge also gives us Ermine Williams, a truly clever woman, who seems to have succeeded where Rachel failed in shaping herself without a master. And Yonge gives us not one but two characters, physically maimed and handicapped, both of whom are loved and marry happily. One character even has a home prepared and made handicap-accessible. A third character, Alick and Bessie's uncle Mr. Clare, is blind but still continues as rector of a parish, with the help of a curate. I can't think of another 19th-century novel that I have read where anything like this happens - where physically disabled characters can be central and heroic while also living normal lives. In another unexpected twist for a novel of this time, Yonge makes one of the male characters - again, a central and heroic one - a tender and devoted nurse, much in demand.
Admist all the discussion of serious reading, I was tickled to find two of my favorite characters are fans of Anthony Trollope. Alick Keith is visiting his uncle, to whom he often reads aloud. Mr. Clare asks, "You have not by chance got Framley Parsonage?" Alick tells him no, but that they will get a copy. Mr. Clare goes on to say, "Bessie has it. She read me a very clever scene about a weak young parson bent on pleasing himself; and offered to lend me the book, but I thought it would not edify Will Walker [his curate]." Instead, they settle down to read Silas Marner.
I was so surprised and happy to find this book at Half Price Books. I always look in the "Y" section at used-book stores but without much hope, since so few of Yonge's books have been reprinted and they are very hard to find. The edition I found is from the Broadview Press, which has published many 19th-century novels in editions like this one, which has not just an introduction by a professor of English, Clare Simmons, but also appendicies with supplementary information on Yonge herself, on the "Surplus Women" question, and some background historical information (on the British army in the period of the novel, for example). I have since discovered that my copy of Margaret Oliphant's autobiography is also a Broadview edition. I can only hope that they will continue to reprint women writers, and I am hoping specifically for more of Yonge's novels (which are available as e-texts; I still prefer print).
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Four lives in London
Quartet in Autumn, Barbara Pym
When I found a copy of this at Half Price Books last week, I decided it would be my first choice for the Barbara Pym Reading Week. As I've mentioned before, I read some of Pym's books many years ago. I enjoyed them, but they made no lasting impression on me, and I can't even remember now which ones I read. Once I started blogging, I found such enthusiastic readers that I knew I had to try her books again. I began with Excellent Women, which left me eager to read more.
Quartet in Autumn was not what I expected in a "Barbara Pym novel." I had no idea that any of her books included the phrase "F*ck off," even spoken by a passing unnamed character. That made me realize that though I've read so little of her work, I've unconsciously type-cast her books: quietly ironic social comedies of spinsters, curates, tea, frustrated romances. Actually, this book has all of those, but in a very different kind of story. It is set in London in the 1970s, with immigrants swelling the population amid economic uncertainties. The quartet of the title are two men, Norman and Edwin, and two women, Marcia and Letty. All four are in their sixties, coming up on retirement after working together in an office for years. We learn almost nothing about their work, what they do during office hours, other than talk. Though circumspect, never sharing too much information, they know each other's situations. Yet though each is single, and on his or her own (despite Edwin's married daughter and grandchildren), they don't meet outside of the office, even at lunch. All go their own way, and the story follows them each in turn. Looking back, it seems to me that we learn almost as little about Norman's life outside the office as his work inside, other than his constant worry about inflation and his fondness for butter beans. Edwin's life is the Church, and he follows the liturgical year through the High Church parishes that he visits in turn. Marcia has recently had a serious operation, and it is clear that she is not completely well, physically or mentally. Her neighbors have noticed some odd behavior, though Janice, the social worker who visits regularly, never seems to notice that Marcia simply stonewalls her (Janice's inexperience is matched only by her self-complacency).
Of the four, the two women are the closest to retirement. While Marcia owns her small house, Letty plans to share her old friend Marjorie's cottage in the country. But when Marjorie's situation changes, Letty loses that comfortable future and must make new plans. She has already lost one home, when a Nigeran immigrant buys the house where she has rented a room for many years. Though Letty has some concerns about living among Africans and immigrants, which her office-mates share, it is her new landlord's congregation, meeting in his flat and singing exuberant hymns, which finally drives her to move.
Barbara Pym does something wonderful with these quiet lives. I agree with the cover blurb from The Financial Times about her "Extraordinarily delicate irony, fine writing, understated humour, and some bleak perceptions about the human condition." I am still thinking about her people, wondering what happened to them, how their stories turned out. Anbolyn has also written about Quartet in Autumn, and now I'm off to read her review, and see what other people are reading for the week - and maybe find my next book.
When I found a copy of this at Half Price Books last week, I decided it would be my first choice for the Barbara Pym Reading Week. As I've mentioned before, I read some of Pym's books many years ago. I enjoyed them, but they made no lasting impression on me, and I can't even remember now which ones I read. Once I started blogging, I found such enthusiastic readers that I knew I had to try her books again. I began with Excellent Women, which left me eager to read more.
Quartet in Autumn was not what I expected in a "Barbara Pym novel." I had no idea that any of her books included the phrase "F*ck off," even spoken by a passing unnamed character. That made me realize that though I've read so little of her work, I've unconsciously type-cast her books: quietly ironic social comedies of spinsters, curates, tea, frustrated romances. Actually, this book has all of those, but in a very different kind of story. It is set in London in the 1970s, with immigrants swelling the population amid economic uncertainties. The quartet of the title are two men, Norman and Edwin, and two women, Marcia and Letty. All four are in their sixties, coming up on retirement after working together in an office for years. We learn almost nothing about their work, what they do during office hours, other than talk. Though circumspect, never sharing too much information, they know each other's situations. Yet though each is single, and on his or her own (despite Edwin's married daughter and grandchildren), they don't meet outside of the office, even at lunch. All go their own way, and the story follows them each in turn. Looking back, it seems to me that we learn almost as little about Norman's life outside the office as his work inside, other than his constant worry about inflation and his fondness for butter beans. Edwin's life is the Church, and he follows the liturgical year through the High Church parishes that he visits in turn. Marcia has recently had a serious operation, and it is clear that she is not completely well, physically or mentally. Her neighbors have noticed some odd behavior, though Janice, the social worker who visits regularly, never seems to notice that Marcia simply stonewalls her (Janice's inexperience is matched only by her self-complacency).
Of the four, the two women are the closest to retirement. While Marcia owns her small house, Letty plans to share her old friend Marjorie's cottage in the country. But when Marjorie's situation changes, Letty loses that comfortable future and must make new plans. She has already lost one home, when a Nigeran immigrant buys the house where she has rented a room for many years. Though Letty has some concerns about living among Africans and immigrants, which her office-mates share, it is her new landlord's congregation, meeting in his flat and singing exuberant hymns, which finally drives her to move.
Barbara Pym does something wonderful with these quiet lives. I agree with the cover blurb from The Financial Times about her "Extraordinarily delicate irony, fine writing, understated humour, and some bleak perceptions about the human condition." I am still thinking about her people, wondering what happened to them, how their stories turned out. Anbolyn has also written about Quartet in Autumn, and now I'm off to read her review, and see what other people are reading for the week - and maybe find my next book.
Friday, May 31, 2013
An Open Book
An Open Book, Monica Dickens
Audrey asked the other day, "Are you interested in the biographies of the authors you read? Does reading a biography enrich your reading of the novels or the poems, or does the work stand on its own?" It was an opportune question, since I was already reading this autobiography. I'm very much interested in reading about the authors I enjoy. Usually, though, I turn to books about an author after I've read much if not all of her or his own work. With Monica Dickens, I started reading not fiction but memoir, with One Pair of Hands, her account of working as a cook-general. When I saw that she had written an autobiography in addtition to her memoirs and novels, it seemed like a good idea to read that before going on to her other work.
The first lines of this book are a clear statement of what it will be: "This is not the whole story of a life. It is an attempt to capture some of those elements of it which are the origins of the books that I have written." Her family is perhaps the most important of those elements. She belonged to two eccentric extended families that mixed English, French and Germans. Her father, half-French through his mother, was a grandson of Charles Dickens, though as a child Monica did not understand or appreciate her literary heritage. Her mother Fanny's parents, originally from Germany, settled into English country life (by way of Cuba) on an estate in Somerset, where Monica and her sister spent summers and holidays with a host of cousins (her only brother, the oldest child, was away at school and then naval college).
Monica called her parents by their first names from a young age. "It is only now that I am surprised at how progressive they were about it." She writes movingly about their close relationship, which lasted throughout their lives. It was rooted in the love and security they gave her in childhood:
Apart from the bourgeois entrenchment of the large Runge and Dickens families, there was the strengthening reassurance of parents who thought you were all right, and frequently told you so. Fanny was too small and bony for bosomy cuddling and knee-sitting, but if you hurled yourself into her arms, she would pat you on the back, after she recovered her balance, and hum at you. She never sat still for very long, but Henry was in one place for hours, reading or making lists or cutting out jigsaws from posters pasted onto plywood, his lap always available as an extra piece of warm furniture . . . I did not really want them to change, and they did not even try to change me. If I was scowling and sullen, it was not, 'Don't behave like that.' It was, 'She's scowling and sullen.'
She had another source of that love and reassurance in the well-named Nanny Gathergood, who "did gather good out of her warm, unselfish heart and heap it on our family" in the 30 years that she spent with them.
In contrast to her parents, the extended family was less supportive when Monica's life did not follow the usual pattern of début, marriage, and children. Feeling lost and drifting, she discovered a vocation in work, first in cooking and then in nursing, as well as friendships she had not expected. It was finally in writing that she found her real work. In this book she talks about how she came to write One Pair of Hands, her first book, published when she was just 24. Its immediate success brought her magazine and newspaper work, including a column in Woman's Own for 20 years. But not all the family approved: "Some of the Dickens aunts were outraged that I had played fast and loose with the name . . . Charles Dickens was expected to be the last family member to appear in print."
Her writing then becomes another major element of the story that Monica is telling here. She discusses the inspiration for books, her first ideas or the suggestions from others. She talks about research, including a very unsettling section about shadowing case workers from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children on home visits and in court. She writes about reactions to her books, especially to her memoir of nursing in World War II, One Pair of Feet, which got her banned from work as a nurse for some time. After this autobiography was published in 1978, she wrote another seven books, the last published after her death in 1992.
Despite the extensive discussion of her writing, there is almost nothing about her own reading, though her father loved to read aloud, and she herself learned to read before she was four. I am always curious about what other people read, and I missed that - particularly in a book that is so much about books. There were other gaps, things I wanted to know more about. Her family was Roman Catholic, and there are references to attending Sunday Mass, regular confession and so on, the practice of religion, but there is nothing of faith, belief. Perhaps that was too personal a topic. I felt that she also glosses over her marriage to Roy Stratton, an American naval officer whom she met on a plane from Glasgow. Three pages later, she arrives in America and they are married (in the Roman Catholic Church). "An ageing G.I. bride [at 36], I may have been the most insular Englishwoman who ever ventured, for love, into the New World." I was surprised at a later reference to Roy's son, who married soon after they did and made them grandparents around the time they were adopting two daughters from England. That is the first indication that Roy was previously married, but no further information is given, perhaps to protect his and his family's privacy (an unfamiliar concept in many autobiographies today).
Quibbles aside, I very much enjoyed this book. It is more serious in tone than One Pair of Hands, but always entertaining and frequently very funny (which is why the section on child abuse is so jolting). I agree with the cover blurb from the Daily Express, "A rare slice of social history and a warm self-portrait." I realized about half-way through the danger of reading a book about an author's books: I wanted to read all the books she was writing (about). I couldn't resist Flowers on the Grass, because her description reminded me instantly of Kate Atkinson's Life After Life:
Ever since I started to write, perhaps before that, I have been intrigued by the idea of alternative lives. At any moment of any of our days, there are choices . . . What about the choices we don't make? What happens to those alternative selves? Is it possible they have some sort of shadow existence alongside the one we know, and are in some way realized? . . . That would make it easier to understand why certain people and places, glimpsed at the periphery of your own life, are recognizable.
I am also particularly intrigued by The Listeners, written from her experience with The Samaritans, a suicide-prevention group, which she discusses in some detail. In working with this group, she seemed to have again found a sense of vocation, of calling.
Between the books I already have on the TBR stacks, and the ones that I couldn't resist adding, I think this will be a Dickens year.
Audrey asked the other day, "Are you interested in the biographies of the authors you read? Does reading a biography enrich your reading of the novels or the poems, or does the work stand on its own?" It was an opportune question, since I was already reading this autobiography. I'm very much interested in reading about the authors I enjoy. Usually, though, I turn to books about an author after I've read much if not all of her or his own work. With Monica Dickens, I started reading not fiction but memoir, with One Pair of Hands, her account of working as a cook-general. When I saw that she had written an autobiography in addtition to her memoirs and novels, it seemed like a good idea to read that before going on to her other work.
The first lines of this book are a clear statement of what it will be: "This is not the whole story of a life. It is an attempt to capture some of those elements of it which are the origins of the books that I have written." Her family is perhaps the most important of those elements. She belonged to two eccentric extended families that mixed English, French and Germans. Her father, half-French through his mother, was a grandson of Charles Dickens, though as a child Monica did not understand or appreciate her literary heritage. Her mother Fanny's parents, originally from Germany, settled into English country life (by way of Cuba) on an estate in Somerset, where Monica and her sister spent summers and holidays with a host of cousins (her only brother, the oldest child, was away at school and then naval college).
Monica called her parents by their first names from a young age. "It is only now that I am surprised at how progressive they were about it." She writes movingly about their close relationship, which lasted throughout their lives. It was rooted in the love and security they gave her in childhood:
Apart from the bourgeois entrenchment of the large Runge and Dickens families, there was the strengthening reassurance of parents who thought you were all right, and frequently told you so. Fanny was too small and bony for bosomy cuddling and knee-sitting, but if you hurled yourself into her arms, she would pat you on the back, after she recovered her balance, and hum at you. She never sat still for very long, but Henry was in one place for hours, reading or making lists or cutting out jigsaws from posters pasted onto plywood, his lap always available as an extra piece of warm furniture . . . I did not really want them to change, and they did not even try to change me. If I was scowling and sullen, it was not, 'Don't behave like that.' It was, 'She's scowling and sullen.'
She had another source of that love and reassurance in the well-named Nanny Gathergood, who "did gather good out of her warm, unselfish heart and heap it on our family" in the 30 years that she spent with them.
In contrast to her parents, the extended family was less supportive when Monica's life did not follow the usual pattern of début, marriage, and children. Feeling lost and drifting, she discovered a vocation in work, first in cooking and then in nursing, as well as friendships she had not expected. It was finally in writing that she found her real work. In this book she talks about how she came to write One Pair of Hands, her first book, published when she was just 24. Its immediate success brought her magazine and newspaper work, including a column in Woman's Own for 20 years. But not all the family approved: "Some of the Dickens aunts were outraged that I had played fast and loose with the name . . . Charles Dickens was expected to be the last family member to appear in print."
Her writing then becomes another major element of the story that Monica is telling here. She discusses the inspiration for books, her first ideas or the suggestions from others. She talks about research, including a very unsettling section about shadowing case workers from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children on home visits and in court. She writes about reactions to her books, especially to her memoir of nursing in World War II, One Pair of Feet, which got her banned from work as a nurse for some time. After this autobiography was published in 1978, she wrote another seven books, the last published after her death in 1992.
Despite the extensive discussion of her writing, there is almost nothing about her own reading, though her father loved to read aloud, and she herself learned to read before she was four. I am always curious about what other people read, and I missed that - particularly in a book that is so much about books. There were other gaps, things I wanted to know more about. Her family was Roman Catholic, and there are references to attending Sunday Mass, regular confession and so on, the practice of religion, but there is nothing of faith, belief. Perhaps that was too personal a topic. I felt that she also glosses over her marriage to Roy Stratton, an American naval officer whom she met on a plane from Glasgow. Three pages later, she arrives in America and they are married (in the Roman Catholic Church). "An ageing G.I. bride [at 36], I may have been the most insular Englishwoman who ever ventured, for love, into the New World." I was surprised at a later reference to Roy's son, who married soon after they did and made them grandparents around the time they were adopting two daughters from England. That is the first indication that Roy was previously married, but no further information is given, perhaps to protect his and his family's privacy (an unfamiliar concept in many autobiographies today).
Quibbles aside, I very much enjoyed this book. It is more serious in tone than One Pair of Hands, but always entertaining and frequently very funny (which is why the section on child abuse is so jolting). I agree with the cover blurb from the Daily Express, "A rare slice of social history and a warm self-portrait." I realized about half-way through the danger of reading a book about an author's books: I wanted to read all the books she was writing (about). I couldn't resist Flowers on the Grass, because her description reminded me instantly of Kate Atkinson's Life After Life:
Ever since I started to write, perhaps before that, I have been intrigued by the idea of alternative lives. At any moment of any of our days, there are choices . . . What about the choices we don't make? What happens to those alternative selves? Is it possible they have some sort of shadow existence alongside the one we know, and are in some way realized? . . . That would make it easier to understand why certain people and places, glimpsed at the periphery of your own life, are recognizable.
I am also particularly intrigued by The Listeners, written from her experience with The Samaritans, a suicide-prevention group, which she discusses in some detail. In working with this group, she seemed to have again found a sense of vocation, of calling.
Between the books I already have on the TBR stacks, and the ones that I couldn't resist adding, I think this will be a Dickens year.
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
An eventful cruise aboard a yacht called Dolly
Dolly and the Bird of Paradise, Dorothy Dunnett
Dorothy Dunnett used to relax from writing her intricately-plotted, multi-character historical series with urbane, inscrutable heroes by writing intricately-plotted, multi-character mysteries with an urbane, inscrutable hero. The central character of the Dolly books is Johnson Johnson, a tall man with a set of bifocal glasses that effectively screen his face and his thoughts. He is a world-renowned portrait painter (like Lady Dunnett herself), and a yatchsman, whose boat Dolly plays a big part in the series. Most of the stories are set on the water, in locations like Ibizia, the Hebrides, and in this book, Madeira and the Caribbean (idyllic settings for tax-deductable research, as Lady Dunnett admitted). For Johnson, both his work and his hobby provide cover for his other career, in British Intelligence.
Each of the seven Dolly books has a different narrator, a young woman, the "birds" of the American titles (each book has at least two titles, and some have three - this book was also published as Tropical Issue). Most of them are stand-alones, and except for two they can be read in any order, keeping a couple of things in mind. First, the publication dates don't match the internal time-line of the story. This book, Bird of Paradise, was the sixth published (in 1983), but it's the first of the series, filling out the background hinted at in the previous books. And each book is of the time it was written. So Dolly and the Singing Bird, the first published in 1968, is very much a book of the 1960s (Johnson does the Watusi!), as Bird of Paradise is of the early 1980s, yet the action in Bird of Paradise takes place before Singing Bird. It may sound confusing, but it really matters just with the last two books, the only two that are connected.
The "bird" of this book is Rita Geddes, who arrives at Johnson's studio flat one day. A well-respected make-up artist, working with private clients as well as in film and TV, she is there to prepare TV personality Natalie Sheridan for a photo shoot. The photographer Ferdy Braithwaite has borrowed the flat because his own studio is being re-wired. The flat's owner is nowhere to be seen. He is recovering from serious injuries sustained in a plane crash. His wife Judith, who was travelling with him in the private plane, was killed, along with the crew. Disregarding his physical and emotional condition, Natalie forces an introduction on him, bringing Rita in as well. Later, they meet again on Maderia, where Rita is now working for Natalie at her villa.
I don't want to say too much about the plot, because the fun of the Johnson books is meeting the woman telling the story, figuring out who she is, and watching her try to figure Johnson out, while a complicated plot involving international intrigue unspools around them. Johnson can be as opaque and maddening as Lymond at his worst, though the narrators have their own secrets too. He shares with Lymond not only a love of the sea and ships, but also cat-like reflexes and the skillful handling of weapons. He has a caustic tongue and a wicked sense of humor, which sometimes finds expression in pranks to rival the roof-top chase in Lyon or Nicholas's theft of the ostrich. Unlike Lady Dunnett's other heroes, though, he seems to lack a real fashion sense, frequently appearing in elderly cardigans and woolly vests that he is accused of knitting himself.
It's been a good while since I've read these books, and I really enjoyed meeting Rita and Johnson again. In fact, I might find myself back on Dolly again before too long.
Dorothy Dunnett used to relax from writing her intricately-plotted, multi-character historical series with urbane, inscrutable heroes by writing intricately-plotted, multi-character mysteries with an urbane, inscrutable hero. The central character of the Dolly books is Johnson Johnson, a tall man with a set of bifocal glasses that effectively screen his face and his thoughts. He is a world-renowned portrait painter (like Lady Dunnett herself), and a yatchsman, whose boat Dolly plays a big part in the series. Most of the stories are set on the water, in locations like Ibizia, the Hebrides, and in this book, Madeira and the Caribbean (idyllic settings for tax-deductable research, as Lady Dunnett admitted). For Johnson, both his work and his hobby provide cover for his other career, in British Intelligence.
Each of the seven Dolly books has a different narrator, a young woman, the "birds" of the American titles (each book has at least two titles, and some have three - this book was also published as Tropical Issue). Most of them are stand-alones, and except for two they can be read in any order, keeping a couple of things in mind. First, the publication dates don't match the internal time-line of the story. This book, Bird of Paradise, was the sixth published (in 1983), but it's the first of the series, filling out the background hinted at in the previous books. And each book is of the time it was written. So Dolly and the Singing Bird, the first published in 1968, is very much a book of the 1960s (Johnson does the Watusi!), as Bird of Paradise is of the early 1980s, yet the action in Bird of Paradise takes place before Singing Bird. It may sound confusing, but it really matters just with the last two books, the only two that are connected.
The "bird" of this book is Rita Geddes, who arrives at Johnson's studio flat one day. A well-respected make-up artist, working with private clients as well as in film and TV, she is there to prepare TV personality Natalie Sheridan for a photo shoot. The photographer Ferdy Braithwaite has borrowed the flat because his own studio is being re-wired. The flat's owner is nowhere to be seen. He is recovering from serious injuries sustained in a plane crash. His wife Judith, who was travelling with him in the private plane, was killed, along with the crew. Disregarding his physical and emotional condition, Natalie forces an introduction on him, bringing Rita in as well. Later, they meet again on Maderia, where Rita is now working for Natalie at her villa.
I don't want to say too much about the plot, because the fun of the Johnson books is meeting the woman telling the story, figuring out who she is, and watching her try to figure Johnson out, while a complicated plot involving international intrigue unspools around them. Johnson can be as opaque and maddening as Lymond at his worst, though the narrators have their own secrets too. He shares with Lymond not only a love of the sea and ships, but also cat-like reflexes and the skillful handling of weapons. He has a caustic tongue and a wicked sense of humor, which sometimes finds expression in pranks to rival the roof-top chase in Lyon or Nicholas's theft of the ostrich. Unlike Lady Dunnett's other heroes, though, he seems to lack a real fashion sense, frequently appearing in elderly cardigans and woolly vests that he is accused of knitting himself.
It's been a good while since I've read these books, and I really enjoyed meeting Rita and Johnson again. In fact, I might find myself back on Dolly again before too long.
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