More coronatime reading

Tags

18th century, Alaska, Corona virus, Cotswolds, Czechia, Lake District, London, South Wales, Sussex, Zatopek

So, corona virus restrictions are being reimposed.  Less socialising, less going out of the house, maybe worse to come.  But the upside of all that is, you can top up your lockdown reading …   Your Books To Be Read pile might have shrunk in the past six months, but why not add to it now?  Why not choose something new, maybe something you wouldn’t normally touch?

Taking some books at, er, random – you can enjoy historical fiction, thrillers, comedy, romance, novels exploring relationships and the human heart; revel in the settings of London (in the 18^th century and today), modern Czechia, Sussex, the Lake District, Alaska, South Wales, Devon and the Cotswolds.

Or you can read biography and moving memoir; and if you are a manager and your staff are all working from home, why not take advantage of their absence and bone up on management thinking?  And if you’re a parent or doting grandparent, get a lovely book for the little one.

Last, but not least, there’s poetry.  What better way to cope with today’s vicissitudes than settling down with some great poetry ‘the best words in the best order’, as I think someone said.

Happy reading!

 

 

 

Behaving Badly – and Barbara Pym

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Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society, Behaving Badly, Catherine Heath, Green Leaves, Judi Dench, St Hilda's College Oxford

‘I could hardly make a big production of it, you know… when he told me, about how he’d spent the night with some girl called Rebecca, all I could think of was the fact that I’d bought turbot for supper…’

Catherine Heath’s fifth and final novel Behaving Badly gives us one of the most brilliantly-conceived comic heroines ever. Published in 1984, it is somehow perfect escapist reading for today, taking us to a past which feels in retrospect to have been more innocent and less complicated.

‘I was going to do Hollandaise sauce, and I thought, oh dear, our lovely dinner’s going to be quite wasted. So when he told me about this girl I just said, oh, yes, I see. Oh, thank you for telling me. And that was all and we ate the turbot and do you know I quite enjoyed it… So I mean, there’s no point in putting on a tragic act. It stands to reason that nobody, nobody that greedy has much dignity to stand on.’

Fifty-year-old Bridget Mayor has dutifully filled her life with hobbies, television and church-going after her husband dumped her five years earlier to marry a much younger woman. Nothing very unusual about that for women in seventies Britain. But what happens when an Excellent Woman stops being excellent and decides she will start pleasing herself instead of other people? What’s the point in clinging to dignity? To her husband’s horrified discomfiture Bridget insists on moving back into her old home in Hampstead, where her devious ex-mother-in-law Frieda conspires to get rid of the intruder Rebecca. But that’s just the start…

Writing in The Times, Isabel Raphael wrote of Behaving Badly: Here is an exceptional novel, brisk and unsentimental, touching and subtly romantic. It is also very funny. Her style is poised and cool and her dialogue as artfully artless as that of Barbara Pym; and there is no higher praise in novels of this kind.

There are connections between the two novelists Barbara Pym (1913-1980) and Catherine Heath (1924-1991): both studied English Literature at St Hilda’s College Oxford, both seamlessly combine wit, satire and sympathy, and both died of cancer aged sixty-six. But it’s disappointing that Catherine Heath remains relatively unknown. In the Barbara Pym Society’s publication Green Leaves of November 1998 Hazel K. Bell wrote how she hoped that Catherine Heath’s wonderful novels would one day be rescued from obscurity, in the same way as Barbara Pym’s have been.

That hasn’t happened, despite Judi Dench’s superb performance as Bridget in the 1989 British television series of Behaving Badly, now available as a DVD. If only they would show it again!

Behaving Badly clearly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It will seem too dated for some, too much a piece of social history, even too trivial. But for others it’s an altogether delightful read where favourite lines can be relished over and over again: Upstairs Frieda closed a detective story. It was useless. She had no access to South American arrow poison. And as one character says near the end, using a very Barbara Pymish word, ‘Isn’t it, in a way, splendid?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oxford delights: Jilly Cooper and Barbara Pym

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19 magazine, Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society, Georgette Heyer, Harriet, Jane and Prudence, Jane Austen, Jilly Cooper, Lisa & Co, Nancy Mitford, Oxford, Petticoat magazine, Virago

What’s the connection between Jilly Cooper and Barbara Pym apart from them being quintessentially English and writing splendidly funny novels?

Jilly Cooper’s introduction to the 2007 Virago edition of Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence, first published in 1953, tells the story of how she borrowed the novel quite by chance from a library and fell in love with it. ‘I shamefully lied to the librarians that I had lost it, paying a 3s 6d fine … over the years, as Barbara Pym replaced Nancy Mitford, Georgette Heyer, even Jane Austen, as my most loved author, I devoured all her books, but Jane and Prudence remains my favourite.’

Jilly Cooper was therefore the perfect and altogether delightful guest at a magnificent tea in Oxford, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Barbara Pym Society, as part of the Society’s weekend conference featuring Jane and Prudence.  Some of those attending might never have read a Jilly Cooper novel; others like myself have delicious youthful memories of revelling in her stories serialised in magazines like 19 and Petticoat, some of which were subsequently expanded into short romantic novels named after their heroines.

It’s in Harriet, partly set in Oxford and published in 1976, that we get a rather endearing echo of a scene in Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence; in both novels young girls remark to each other that thirty sounds so old but forty must be worse… whereupon they brood silently upon this horror!

Jilly Cooper might be more famous now for her ‘bonkbuster’ novels, starting with Riders in 1985, but perhaps the older among us will always have an affectionate soft spot for the irresistible heroes and scatty/naughty/dreamy/kind-hearted/unselfconfident/innocent heroines of the early romantic novels Bella, Emily, Octavia, Prudence, Harriet, Imogen and her collection of short stories Lisa & Co, first published as Love and Other Heartaches. They offered the escapist, romantic, comfort-with-comedy reading we sometimes needed when growing up.

As Jilly Cooper wrote of her short stories in 1981 ‘I cannot pretend that these stories are literature. They are written purely to entertain… Their mood is rooted firmly in the sixties, where we all lived it up… when the young were still optimistic about marriage, and believed that God was in his Heaven if all was Mr Right with the world.’

Jilly Cooper met Barbara Pym just once – at the Hatchards Authors of the Year Party in 1979 – a wonderful memory she will always treasure. I know I will do the same after meeting Jilly Cooper.

Not a ‘horribly good’ heroine

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Cynthia Kirkpatrick, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, Mrs Gibson, Wives and Daughters

‘I am not good and I never shall be now… I might be a heroine still…’

Cynthia Kirkpatrick is not the heroine of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Wives and Daughters but some modern readers may think she deserves to be.

Elizabeth Gaskell brought up four daughters in a happy, high-principled family home. In her portrayal of the sweet-natured, truth-telling Molly Gibson, the actual heroine of this last unfinished novel published in 1866, she writes with all the realism and delicate perception of a good and wise mother. But while it is impossible not to love Molly, it is Cynthia, the daughter of a bad and neglectful mother, who is somehow more interesting and arguably Elizabeth Gaskell’s finest creation.

Patricia Beer, in her study of the women characters of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot Reader, I Married Him writes that ‘Cynthia is perhaps the least hypocritical girl, and the one with the most self-knowledge, that we meet before the twentieth-century novel.’ It’s this that gives her so much appeal to modern readers, who may not always relate to Molly’s struggles to be good when presented with a truly appalling stepmother.

‘Cynthia was very beautiful, and was so well aware of this fact that she had forgotten to care about it; no one with such loveliness ever appeared so little conscious of it.’ We see her being the perfect companion and guest: ‘She exerted herself just as much to charm the two Miss Brownings as she would have done to delight Osborne Hamley, or any other young heir. That is to say, she used no exertion, but simply followed her own nature, which was to attract every one of those she was thrown amongst.’

Cynthia is the daughter of another splendid creation, the widowed Hyacinth, tired of having to earn her own living:  ‘How pleasant it would be to have a husband once more; someone who would work while she sat at her elegant ease in a prettily furnished drawing room, and she was rapidly investing this imaginary breadwinner with the form and features of the country surgeon.’ Mr Gibson, anxious to provide his daughter Molly with a suitable stepmother, falls into the trap set for him.

The new Mrs Gibson, caring only for her own comfort, has been a lazy mother to her own child Cynthia. She sent her away to school at four years old to be out of the way; not wanting to be outshone on her wedding day to Mr Gibson she even cunningly arranges for Cynthia to be kept in France. ‘If there is one thing that revolts me, it is duplicity,’ she asserts, but her selfish neglect of her daughter has meant that Cynthia too has a mercurial relationship with the truth.

It is Cynthia’s recognition that she does not love her mother – this at a time when filial love and duty were part of Victorian thinking – and her apparent careless acceptance of the damage that has been done to her which give her character its modern flavour and conviction. As she says to her stepsister Molly, to whom she is a loving and sympathetic listener ‘But don’t you see I have grown up outside the pale of duty and “oughts”. Love me as I am, sweet one, for I shall never be better.’

Cynthia’s disarming self-knowledge contrasts sharply with that of her mother, who has none at all: ‘I never think of myself, and am really the most forgiving person in the world, in forgiving slights.’ When speculating about the advantages of the possible death of the heir to an estate, Mrs Gibson insists ‘I should think myself wanting in strength of mind if I could not look forward to the consequences of death. I really think we are commanded to do so somewhere in the Bible or the Prayerbook.’

‘Do you look forward to the consequences of my death, Mamma?’ – Cynthia’s barbs, always directed at her mother, provide much of the comedy in the novel, much as do the exchanges between Mr and Mrs Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. But there is a greater depth of seriousness and pathos in Elizabeth Gaskell’s examination of relationships between mother and child or husband and wife. Mrs Gibson’s futile attempts to win back her husband’s esteem after he has discovered her shallow self-seeking deceit not only stir the kind-hearted Molly into pity, but also the reader. Mrs Gaskell is careful too not to reduce her to the level of caricature – whereas Mrs Bennet comes perilously close – by small details; we learn that Mrs Gibson was always good to the poor.

‘I wish I could love people as you do, Molly!’ Cynthia knows what she is and what is likely to become of her. She escapes into what an earlier or sterner morality might call worldliness – though Elizabeth Gaskell does not make this judgment – but what nowadays we see as the fun and pleasure that life may have on offer.

Cynthia’s need is to be always admired, and relies on ‘all the unconscious ways she possessed by instinct of tickling the vanity of men.’ But these men mustn’t find her out. ‘I try not to care which I dare say is really the worst of all, but I could worry myself to death if I once took to serious thinking.’ ‘I don’t like people of deep feelings… I’m not worth his caring for’. Her eventual choice shows her understanding of her own inability to commit herself to anyone who wants too much from her or sees the flaws behind the fascinating created self she displays to the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jane Austen’s husbands: why do clever men marry silly women?

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Charlotte Palmer, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, Lady Middleton, Miss Bingley, Mr Darcy, Mrs Allen, Mrs Bennet, Mrs Gibson, silly wives, Wives and Daughters

‘Men of sense do not want silly wives’ says the wonderfully sensible Mr Knightley, that infinitely dependable hero whom everybody in Highbury – and Jane Austen’s readers – know to be an infallible guide. But who is really speaking here? Is Jane Austen having a secret laugh with us behind Mr Knightley’s back? After all, his own brother, astute and perceptive as he is shown to be, has married Emma’s sister Isabella who ‘was not a woman of strong understanding or any quickness.’

Clever men have a habit of marrying silly women in Jane Austen novels. Not that they mean to; it’s as if Jane Austen observed from life that sensible, rational men can be remarkably stupid in matters of the heart. Mr Bennet married without taking the trouble to discover that underneath the sexual attractions of youth and beauty his wife was ‘a woman of mean understanding, little information and uncertain temper.’ Not really a man of sense then, one can’t help thinking.

Mr Palmer has fallen into the same trap: ‘through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman’. Is the ironic inclusion of the word ‘unaccountable’ Jane Austen having another sly laugh at men?

A woman’s appearance is almost always what initially attracts and matters most to Jane Austen’s men. Even Mr Darcy, who we suspect has thought much on the subject, says of Elizabeth ‘she is not handsome enough to tempt me’, before eyeing her up and down and deciding that her ‘figure is light and pleasing’.

Sometimes even the possession of beauty or sex appeal doesn’t explain why silly women secure men of sense as husbands. ‘Mrs Allen was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at their being any men in the world who could like them enough to marry them. She had neither beauty, genius, accomplishment nor manner.’ But this excessively boring woman who talks of nothing but her gowns has still managed to get a husband. Jane Austen’s explanation is simple and sarcastic enough. ‘The air of a gentlewoman, a great deal of quiet, inactive good temper, and a trifling turn of mind were all that could account for her being the choice of a sensible, intelligent man like Mr Allen.’

So how do these men of sense conduct themselves when they realise that while they may not have wanted a silly wife, they have got one by mistake? Honourably it appears, though Jane Austen is not in the business of writing explicitly about extra marital forays. Mr Bennet, we are told, ‘was not of a disposition to seek comfort, for the disappointment which his own imprudence had brought on in any of the pleasures which too often console the unfortunate for their folly or their vice. He was fond of the country and of books; and from these tastes had arisen his principal enjoyments’.

Reading offers itself as an escape. Mr Bennet shuts himself up in his library; Mr Palmer buries himself in the newspaper: Lady Middleton, snobbish and less amiable than her sister Charlotte but equally vacuous ‘exerted herself to ask Mr Palmer if there was any news in the paper. “No, none at all,” he replied and read on.’

Silly women in Jane Austen novels do not care for reading. It is quite impossible to picture Mrs Bennet holding a book. Lady Middleton dislikes the Dashwood girls because they are well-read. Miss Bingley pretends to read, but only picks up a book because it is the second volume of the one Darcy is reading. Characters who don’t read are shown to be ill-educated and superficial; Mr Darcy may sound intolerably condescending when he pronounces that a lady should improve her mind by extensive reading, but it is clear that Jane Austen is generally in agreement with this principle, even if she can’t resist poking fun at its unfortunate effects in Mary Bennet.

These men of sense who marry silly women may resort to grumpy rudeness (Mr Palmer) or ridicule and mockery (Mr Bennet) or playing at cards (Mr Allen) but Jane Austen largely ignores any serious unhappiness in their marriages. As for the wives, silliness and good temper sometimes offers its own protection. Charlotte Palmer, pretty and giggling, prattles away, her sheen of stupidity sealing her off from the consciousness of what is going through her husband’s head.

In Jane Austen’s day marriage was the necessary goal for women, and understandably enough they had to use every weapon they possessed to achieve it. ‘My aunt Philips wants you so to get husbands, you can’t think’ – Mrs Bennet, Charlotte Palmer and Mrs Allen succeeded in this at any rate, so you could say they have the last laugh.

Jane Austen is careful to show us these disappointed husbands being thoughtful to other characters if not to their wives. But there is a touch of cruelty in her suggestion that stupid women deserve all they get or are too thick to have real feelings, and should be regarded as mere figures of fun. Although Elizabeth Bennet knows that her father’s treatment of her mother is ‘reprehensible’, as readers we are encouraged to forget about this in our enjoyment of his wit.

These unequal marriages give us some of the funniest scenes in Jane Austen’s novels. If we want a more sombre, serious  look at the regret suffered by a man of sense marrying in haste we have to wait for Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters with its brilliant creation of Mrs Gibson  – but that penetrating combination of comedy and tragedy deserves a post of its own.

Brian Aldiss

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Arthur Conan Doyle, Brian Aldiss, Frankenstein Unbound, Greybeard, H G Wells, Helliconia, Non-Stop, Prep schools, The Brightmount Diaries, The Hand-Reared Boy

RIP Brian Aldiss, who has died aged 92, the prolific author of over 40 novels, plus poetry, short stories, autobiographies and criticism, in different genres. He also edited anthologies of science fiction.   His Times obituary (published on 22 August) described him as an “ebullient and highly sexed author and poet who persuaded the literary establishment to take science fiction seriously.” His ability in different genres can be compared to his admired H G Wells or Arthur Conan Doyle. In his obituary in the Guardian on 21 August it was stated that “one of the most exhilarating aspects of reading Aldiss is the diversity of his imagination.”

He would recount that he learned how to tell a good story at his prep school, when in the dormitory at night he would tell ghost stories, standing on his bed. The penalty for disappointment was having shoes thrown at him: he was never hit, and he said “I never feared criticism since.”

His early life and wartime experiences in the Far East led to his Horatio Stubbs sex comedies (starting with The Hand-Reared Boy). His first published novel, The Brightmount Diaries, is an account of the life of an assistant in a bookshop, and its success meant that he could leave his job as an assistant in a bookshop! His science fiction included Greybeard, Non-Stop, Frankenstein Unbound and the Helliconia series (about a planet where the seasons last, literally, for ages, and the inhabitants have to adjust accordingly). This SF writing and his work as editor of numerous SF anthologies did much to establish SF as a genre worthy of respect.

Aspiring writers can look to the sheer quantity of his output, to his not being afraid to write in different genres or to write in unfashionable genres. Thanks, Brian.

‘The Shape of Water’

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Andrea Camilleri, Inspector Montalbano, Lunch, Poirot, Sicily, Venice, whodunits

Our creative writing teacher would have not have allowed us to interrupt the narrative simply to describe the meal our hero was sitting down to enjoy. No, no, I hear, you’re breaking the flow, this isn’t relevant to the plot, you’ll lose your reader.

I’ve just read my first Inspector Montalbano story. I’d seen a few episodes on TV and thought I’d try one of the books. And, sure enough, just as on TV he goes to his favourite restaurant and discusses the menu with his host, here we also break for lunch. And it’s great. We are, after all, in Italy. Lunch is important. A few years ago on an anniversary trip to Venice my wife and I had foolishly allowed ourselves to be transported to the glass island of Murano; we were fearful of how we could possibly escape the inevitable hard sell at the end of the tour without too much damage to our bank balance, but to our relief we were spared because it was LUNCHTIME ON SUNDAY. All the hard sellers just disappeared, and we slipped away unnoticed.

So eat on, Salvo. The nearest I can think of a parallel in English whodunits would be Poirot stopping his ratiocination to lovingly prepare a meal for Captain Hastings or Inspector Japp.

The Shape of Water, by Andrea Camilleri (translated by Stephen Sartarelli) is, as I’ve said, my first Montalbano. A complex and occasionally comic Sicilian whodunit. It wasn’t possible for me to work out the solution – we get the clues at the same time as the good Salvo himself (and sometimes afterwards). It was a quick read – with generous spacing on the page, and lots of dialogue. As well as lunch we get glimpses of Sicily, and a picture of corruption in local government and of the bureaucratic confusion of the various Italian law enforcement agencies. There are some helpful notes at the end explaining especially Sicilian and Italian references.

Silvio Luparello, a well-regarded engineer and local bigwig, is found dead of a heart attack in his car in the Pasture, a squalid area known for prostitution. Our hero smells a rat: Luparello had just three days before become Provincial Secretary, leader of the Council, and after years of careful politicking to achieve that dizzy (and profitable) height would not have risked his reputation thus. Pressure to close the case from the great and the good (including the local Bishop) only encourage Montalbano to continue his investigation.

There’s a complex cast of characters, including rubbish collectors, Mafiosi, journalists, various beautiful women, and other leading politicians.  One scene I especially enjoyed takes place in an abandoned chemical factory, both for the description of the place and for the comic action that takes place there. As the blurb says, “Picking his way through a labyrinth of high-comedy corruption, delicious meals, vendetta firepower, and carefully planted false clues, Montalbano can be relied on, whatever the cost, to get to the heart of the matter.”

A good read. I’ll read others. First published in 1994. English translation published by Picador.

Buon appetito!

‘Mr Foote’s Other Leg’

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Ian Kelly, Samuel Foote, Simon Russell Beale, theatre seat prices

There is still three weeks in which to see Mr Foote’s Other Leg at the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket in London. Simon Russell Beale plays Mr Foote and does so magnificently. It’s on till 23 January. The play is by Ian Kelly.

Samuel Foote actually lived, and I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of him.  One book I must now get is the award-winning account of his colourful life, in and out of the theatre, that Ian Kelly wrote before the play. It’s called Mr Foote’s Other Leg: Comedy, tragedy and murder in Georgian London, and is published by Picador.

Foote began his public life by writing a best-selling account of the murder of one of his uncles by another. He had an early failed marriage, was sent down from Oxford for (among other things) a bizarre practical joke at the expense of the Provost of his college, and became a flamboyant personality in London coffee house society. He was a comic actor, good at impersonation; a playwright, famed for his satire; and an impresario at the Haymarket Theatre itself, adept at evading the licensing and censorship law of the time. Another strange practical joke (at the hands of royalty) costs him his leg – and eventually, perhaps, his reason. A savage satire on a celebrity Duchess landed them both in court, her charged with bigamy and him with sodomy.

The other actors in the play are great too.  The author of the play, Ian Kelly, plays Prince George (and then George III). Dervla Kirwan is the celebrated Irish actress Peg Woffington and Joseph Millson her lover the great actor David Garrick. Jenny Galloway plays Mrs Garner, the maid-of-all-work who has actually kept Foote’s theatre together for years: she has a great speech in which she lauds those who work backstage, as against the actors with their airs and graces. Micah Balfour plays Frank Barber, a freed slave from Jamaica who becomes Foote’s assistant, with much mutual puzzlement when Foote and Garrick are playing Othello.

There are many jokes (and insights?) to do with the world of the theatre.  There is much Shakespearean stuff.  There are comments on the role of the press (ostensibly in the 18^th century, but also of today).

At first I thought they were speaking too quickly for me to catch it all but then either they slowed down or I caught up, and all became well.

If you go, here’s a tip:  if you have time, before it starts read the timeline of Samuel Foote’s life in the programme.  That will elucidate much of what’s happening (especially at the end).

You also learn from the programme that one reason why Samuel Foote’s plays are not performed nowadays is that he sometimes wrote them with leading roles for a one-legged actor, with subsequent casting difficulties …

We went as a New Year’s Eve treat. As has been our experience at the Haymarket before, our seats were upgraded.  We had bought seats in the Upper Circle but found ourselves in seats with an excellent view in the Royal Circle.  (Haymarket seats are not cheap!)

In the words of the programme, “The play – like the book – is a comedy about theatre folk that also offers a huge panorama of 18^th-century life.”

‘How to Write Everything’

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David Quantick, Eddie Izzard, Follow the instructions, Put the hours in, Sir John Gielgud

David Quantick is a professional writer who has worked in almost every field: journalism, novels, radio and TV scriptwriting, helping Eddie Izzard with his autobiography, etc. He also is a writer for the world’s first internet sitcom. In How to Write Everything he talks about his craft, and if it’s in an area he’s not active in himself he interviews someone who is. The book is written in a humorous style.

His experience in and knowledge of the world of broadcast humour is well demonstrated in his passages about sitcoms, how to structure them, what the myths are etc.

The subjects/chapters are: Introduction, What is Writing?, Ideas and Where They Come From, Books and Publishing, Comedy and Performance, Writing Comedy, Films, Writing a Script and So On, Plays, Journalism, Poetry, Afterword., Bibliography, and Appendix. This last is an obscene anecdote told by Sir John Gielgud – for the text go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gielgud and scroll down to Note 18. In the book it is recorded that it is during the Hamlet soliloquy that the great man unfortunately pauses.

In the Introduction the author states that “I WILL REVEAL THE SECRETS OF WRITING. (Secret Number One: there are no secrets. Wait, come back…)”

There are few technical tips on wordcraft for budding writers in the book, but he does hammer home two general messages:

Put in the hours; and

Read the instructions.

In Chapter 1, for example, he stresses that you should write (every day if possible) and not wait for the Muse to call. Actually doing the writing may indeed encourage the Muse to call. And if there’s a house style for the publication you’re writing for, follow it. Furthermore, deadlines are good for you. They’ll make you do the work.

In Chapter 2, on Where Ideas Come From, his message is Keep Thinking. Ideas come from all directions, but you can help them come by not sitting at your desk just trying to make them come. Write yourself notes whenever a possible idea beckons.

Try your work on friends – as long as they will be critical and won’t just say your work is wonderful.

When trying to get an agent or a publisher interested – good presentation is essential. Follow the instructions on formatting to the letter.

So, there’s no short cut to writing success. Put the hours in is the book’s message.   I think we all feared that that was the case, but it’s salutary to have it emphasised by an experienced professional.

How to Write Everything by David Quantick. Published in 2014 by Oberon Books. ISBN 978-1-78319-103-1  £12-99

 

‘Expo 58’

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Belgium, commuters, Czech, Ian Rankin, Jonathan Coe, Russians, spies

How I must have annoyed my fellow travellers on the train as I chuckled away and occasionally laughed out loud, reading Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe. Published last year, it’s an enjoyably comic novel set at the Expo 58 exhibition in Brussels in 1958. It contains spies, the British Civil Service, love interests, and twists in the tail. An author’s note at the end shows to what lengths he went to get verisimilitude, even in a committee meeting that I had assumed was just invented farce.

Our hero is Thomas Foley, who holds a junior position in the Central Office of Information. His mother was a Belgian refugee and he grew up in a pub, so he is thought to be the ideal person to go on the COI’s behalf to ‘keep an eye on’ the replica Britannia pub, part of the British exhibition there. His duties at the Britannia are vague (indeed we never get to learn what they are), but he is taken aside by two mysterious men from the British Secret Service, Tweedledum and Tweedledee-type characters called Radford and Wayne, and told also to keep an eye on what Eastern bloc folk might be getting up to at the Fair.

Among others we meet a beautiful Belgian guide/hostess, Anneke, for whom our hero develops a soft spot; her plainer friend Clara; Thomas’ roommate Tony Buttress (who is involved with the cutting-edge scientific Zeta Project); the Russian ‘editor’ Andrey Chersky, who befriends Thomas and is unusually interested in the Zeta Project; Emily from Wisconsin, who demonstrates vacuum cleaners in the American pavilion and who is keen on Andrey Chersky; the bulky British spy Wilkins; the alcoholic Mr Rossiter, the manager of the Britannia, who resents Thomas’ presence; and his able barmaid Shirley Knott (indeed!), who pals up with an American, Mr Longman. We learn through some brilliant letters between Thomas and his wife Sylvia that back at home she resents his absence and is getting too close to the obnoxious next-door neighbour, Mr Sparks.

Events get rather complicated. There is farce, and wryer (presumably ‘wry’ has a comparative form?) humour such as the brilliant Civil Service committee meeting near the start of the book. There are some great set-pieces such as an evening in a German bierkeller; a romantic meal for Thomas and Anneke in Expo’s best restaurant, the Praha in the Czechoslovak pavilion (which did indeed have that reputation, and was reassembled back in Prague after Expo); and a picnic in the Belgian countryside. There are sensitive passages too – such as Thomas’ reactions to a concert – and a poignant epilogue.

It is notoriously difficult to recommend humorous books to others – what makes me LOL may raise barely a titter from you. But Expo 58 worked for me. Now I’m reading a cracking Ian Rankin, so my fellow-commuters can snooze undisturbed.