oursin | Recent reading update (Reply)

Litfic
Read May Sinclair' The Helpmate (1908) and Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922). The first was pretty daring for the date and for a woman to write, about a troubled marriage, while the second was in her post-Great War/discovery of Freud mode and has both a (convincing) depiction of shell-shock and a (less convincing) deployment of almost instantaneous healing abreaction through use of psychoanalytical insights. But I'm still in keeping on with Sinclair mode. (Also, having begun dipping into a collection of critical essays on Sinclair, think I perhaps ought to re-read the Raitt biography which is around somewhere, and The Creators.)

George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880). A posthumous recommendation from Dame Rebecca, who mentioned Cable as a forgotten author of her youth in her Paris Review Interview with Marina Warner, which I was dipping into. I suspect that since this novel is still in print Cable isn't that forgotten, but classified under something like late nineteenth century Southern regionalism or the like that puts him outside mainstream canonical traditions. The novel is set in New Orleans just after the Louisiana Purchase. I think Scott was probably a significant influence, what with the fairly substantial amount of dialogue in phonetically rendered dialect, and the several episodes in which someone recounts large quantities of back-story. But it was really quite readable, and Cable was clearly Right-On (given his own period) on matters to do with race, slavery, and even the position of women. I might even venture on his other works.

Annabel Dilke, Rule Three: Pretend To Be Nice (1964). Picked up in the local Oxfam bookshop, and what provoked my post yesterday on the mysterious attractions of the 'bad boy', because in this the bad boy is a privileged young man who has been cut off by his family and living a life of petty (and not particularly competent or well-organised) crime, with whom the very young, and very naive, heroine is besotted in spite of his sociopathic traits. (In fact she's so wringing wet she makes the heroines in the early works of Edna O'Brien look like miracles of gitup and git.)

ETAGrace Aguilar, Women's Friendship: A Tale of Domestic Life (1850). Because I have so often commented on women's friendship not being a topic of fiction I really had to pick this up when I came across it in the Oxfam bookshop. Not bad, and surprisingly readable. There is some deeply unrealistic dialogue that makes one feel it should be set to recitative followed by aria; and for a novel of domestic life it includes some v melodramatic properties, including incestuous marriage narrowly averted. Female enmity drives the plot at least as much as friendship, but the latter is fairly much foregrounded. Aguilar is also capable of some nice pithy insights. In the light of this account of her life and career I find a bit odd the sort of invocations to (assumed Christian) religion that are dotted throughout the novel in moments of crisis.

Mysteries/thrillers:
Margaret Maron, Rituals of the Season (2005). Enjoyed this, Maron manages to negotiate the intricacies of the mystery and the ongoing events in series' characters lives pretty well. Having said which, and though I like the Judge Deborah Knott mysteries well enough, I wish she'd do more with Sigrid Haraldsen, but that series seems to have come to a complete halt.

Antal Szerb, The Pendragon Legend (1934, new translation from the Hungarian recently appeared), as it had a number of mentions that made it sound interesting. And It was interesting, and clever, but somehow I could quite warm up to it (not that it's necessarily the type of work that that's appropriate critical vocabulary for). Partly because I couldn't quite decide whether the comments on women and intellectual activity were meant to be the character or Szerb himself.

Robert Barnard, Dying Flames (2005) and Andrew Taylor, A Stain on the Silence (2006). Non-series novels, and both proceeding (though in different directions) from the same initial event: an unknown daughter makes herself known to a middle-aged man. Both were okay, competent and readable enough, but not quite peak performances by either author.

Elaine Viets, High Heels Are Murder (2006). I think this was a bit stronger than the first in the series (featuring a single mother who works as a 'mystery shopper'), and enjoyable in a non-taxing way.

Jill Paton Walsh, The Bad Quarto (2007). I found this a vast improvement on the falling-off in her previous Imogen Quy mystery (Debts of Dishonour), sticking more closely to Cambridge and its idiosyncrasies and traditions (e.g. climbing architectural features).

Sff

Elizabeth Bear, The Chains That You Refuse (2006). This was one of those books that kept somehow slipping away from the place I thought I'd put in in the tbr pile, so I only managed to find it again and put it somewhere it wouldn't vanish from before I'd read it quite recently. As I may have mentioned heretofore, I am sometimes a bit iffy about short stories, but these were pretty compelling and gripping, and likely to be gone back to and savoured.

Re-reads:

Jo Walton, Farthing (2006). Yes, it still justly deserves all its honours granted and potentially impending, and I've managed to clear up one query I had in my mind after the first reading (who is King? - it's only mentioned once and in passing, but it is George VI: I was wondering whether it was in fact Edward VIII and there had been no abdication crisis in this AU). I am yearning now for Ha-penny.

Anne Bishop, the Black Jewels trilogy (1998-2000), and the associated Dreams Made Flesh (2005). This was a promised spate of self-indulgence, but I'm not sure these entirely benefit from reading in a batch when one has a general remembrance of how the plot came out (though I was surprised at quite how much I had forgotten), rather than in the initial 'how-does-this-all-come-out' rush. Okay, I still think that the set-up does get away from a lot of the predictable multi-volume fantasy expectations, but on the re-read I was noticing how much the customs and biology of the society were carefully designed for plot manipulation purposes. Also, an editor ought to have taken a blue pencil to the far too many invocations of Jaenelle's 'midnight voice'.

Non-fiction:

George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C S Lewis (1997 reissue with intro incorporating new evidence, of 1988 biography). Another charity shop find. Okay, a bit dull, by someone who was taught by CSL. Is, unusually, quite pro Mrs Moore.

Jenna Bailey, Can Any Mother Help Me? Fifty years of friendship through a secret magazine (2007), which I mentioned last week. It really is very, very good: my only complaints are, it would have been nice to have even more selections (but length was alas presumably an issue) and I'd have liked, but this is probably a whole different project, some analysis of the dynamics of the group and of the changes over time and life-cycle of what people wrote about, how much, etc (apart from the obvious issues like ageing which do feature).

Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007) - reviewed for hire. An excellent study, though there are some sections I'm dubious about (e.g. her use of the famous disciplining daughters correspondence from The Englishwoman's Domestic Journal, and her rather uncritical deployment of a Famous Factoid about Victorian Doctors and Hysteria). But points for noticing that female friendship is widely prevalent and mostly positive in the Victorian novel, and that friendship preoccupied women in their letters and diaries. Also for some intriguing suggestions about fashion plates and girls and their dollies.