Category: Book Reviews

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

 

I was pleased this book was chosen for discussion for Cornflower’s Book Group because I thought it was a brilliant  book when I first read it some years ago. I like to re-read books I’ve enjoyed and sometimes I find that my views/mood have changed and I no longer think the book is as good as I first thought. No such problem with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie! I still think it’s an excellent book.

It’s set in Edinburgh and starts in 1936 with schoolteacher Miss Brodie and the Brodie Set, a group of girls she has groomed to accept her ideas. The school is the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, a traditional school where Miss Brodie’s ideas and methods of teaching are viewed with dislike and distrust. The Head Teacher is looking for ways to discredit and get rid of her. The story is told in flashbacks from 1930 – 1939 and quite early on in the book we are told who ‘betrayed’ Miss Brodie.

Although it’s a short book I immediately was plunged into the school world, reminded so much of my own schooldays when you had to wear the school hat or beret under penalty of detention and it was absolutely forbidden that any girl from my school should be found eating even an ice cream in the street. Like the Brodie Set my friends and I used to meet boys either before or after school, both boys and girls leaning on the handlebars of our bikes as we talked. The likeness to Marcia Blaine ends there though – there were no teachers like Miss Brodie at my school, but I did enjoy that trip down memory lane for a brief time.

Team spirit is encouraged at Marcia Blaine but team spirit is despised by Miss Brodie, who encourages the girls to recognise their ‘prime’ and live it to the full. Instead of lessons she takes them outside and with text books open in case anyone comes she regales them with stories of her life and loves. Miss Brodie’s love affairs intrigue the girls, from her lover who was killed in World War 1 to the love triangle of Miss Brodie, Gordon Lowther the singing teacher and Teddy Lloyd the married art teacher with six children.

Miss Brodie wants to dominate the girls’ lives and the darker side of her character is shown through her admiration of Mussolini and fascism. Despite, or may be because, of her failings the girls are all loyal to her until one of them betrays her and she is left to wonder just which girl it was.

The novel is not so much concerned with plot as with character. The moral aspect of Miss Brodie’s betrayal is not questioned but how people are influenced by others, their vulnerability or indifference to others’ feelings and thoughts, how we appear to others and how we try to impose our beliefs are amongst the issues explored.

Coincidentally, I see that the film, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie starring Maggie Smith is being shown on ITV1 today at 1.00pm. I saw this after I first read the book and loved it. Maggie Smith was just right as Jean Brodie.

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

I’ve had my copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel for a long time. I can’t remember how long and there is no date in the book – all I know is that it cost 3s 6d and I must have been about 11, 12 or 13 when I first read it. Once I started to read it this time I realised that I remembered very little of the plot, apart from the fact that it’s about the French Revolution and a band of Englishmen, led by the mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel,  rescuing French aristos from the guillotine. No-one knows his identity, the French hate him and are desperate to catch him whilst he is the toast of the British aristocracy – the Prince of Wales describes him to Chauvelin, the agent of the French government, as “the bravest gentlemen in all the world, and we all feel a little proud, Monsieur, when we remember he is an Englishman.”

And I hadn’t forgotten this little verse that that “six foot odd of georgousness as represented by Sir Percy Blakeney, Bart” had composed whilst tying his cravat:

We seek him here,
We seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven?
Is he in hell?
That demmed elusive Pimpernel.

Everyone knows that Sir Percy is hopelessly stupid, but he is incredibly rich and as a leader of fashion he is the talk of the town and “his inanities were quoted, his foolish laugh copied by the gilded youth at the Almanack’s or the Mall.” His French wife, Marguerite is by contrast, a clever, witty woman, but she is trapped by Chauvelin into betraying the identity of the Pimpernel. Chauvelin had acquired a letter written by her brother revealing that he was working with the Scarlet Pimpernel – either she finds out who the Pimpernel is or her brother will go to the guillotine.

I wish I could remember whether I guessed the identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel when I first read the book, but I do remember that I loved the romance and the action of this tale based loosely on the French Revolution. I was still spellbound by the romance and drama of it all. I’ve discovered that it start out as a play, starring Fred Terry (the brother of Dame Ellen Terry and great-uncle of Sir John Gielgud) as the Scarlet Pimpernel. There have been many films of the book and the role of the Scarlet Pimpernel has been played by many actors on stage and screen including Leslie Howard, Anthony Andrews, and Richard E Grant. Amazingly I have never seen any of them, so my mental vision of the characters is drawn straight from the book, which is what I prefer.

 I re-read this book as part of the Heart of a Child Challenge. It also qualifies for the What’s In a Name Challenge as a book with a plant in the title, because the Scarlet Pimpernel is not only the nickname of the hero but it is also the symbol with which he signs his messages.

 

The Sunday Salon

Published on by Margaret19 Comments

Sunday SalonLast August I read The House at Riverton by Kate Morton and thought it was one of the best books I’d read in 2007. So it was with great anticipation that I started to read The Forgotten Garden. It starts off well, with a little girl in London in 1913 on a boat bound for Australia. The lady who took her to the boat has disappeared and the little girl is found alone on the Maryborough wharf, with no name and no family. All she can remember is that the name of the lady is the Authoress and she has a little white suitcase containing a book of fairy stories written by the lady.

The Forgotten Garden

The novel is about three women – Eliza, Nell and Cassandra and follows their lives from 1900 to 2005. Nell is the little girl in the opening chapter and the book reveals the story of her birth. Of course it’s not just as simple as that – there are several mysteries in this long book. It’s quite easy to read once you have got used to jumping from England in 1913 to Australia in 2005, and in and out of the 1930s and 1975 in both countries and back again to 2005 in England and Australia and sorting out the characters of the three women.

I was enjoying it and then I realised that I was reading a re-working of The Secret Garden, as Eliza is taken as a child of twelve to live with her aunt and uncle at Blackhurst Manor in Cornwall, just as Mary is taken to live with her uncle at Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire Moors, both houses in isolated places, both girls finding it difficult to fit into their new surroundings, both with maids who help them settle in, both with walled gardens and secrets to be discovered. Even down to both having sickly cousins who stay in their rooms.

I was so disappointed that I stopped reading the book! But I picked it up again the next day and carried on. I worked out the ‘mystery’ quite easily and found the book rather predictable, which was also disappointing. Nell attempts to find out the truth about her parents and in 1975 travels to England, eventually finding Blackhurst Manor where the Mountrachet family used to live. After her death in 2005, Cassandra her granddaughter discovers she has been left a surprise inheritance, Cliff Cottage and its forgotten garden in Cornwall, now derelict.

It wasn’t just the predictability of the story I found a let down, I also had difficulty picturing the settings and working out the locations of the cottage, its garden, the maze and Blackhurst Manor even though I re-read their descriptions several times.

I read this book whilst on my recent travels along with The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers, which I also found a bit disappointing – more about that some other time maybe. Other reading this week has been more enjoyable with The Fall of Troy by Peter Ackroyd and Wessex Tales by Thomas Hardy. I also finished reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. I first read this about 10 years ago and was a bit worried that I would find it a let down on re-reading it, but thankfully I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s the next book up for discussion on Cornflower’s Blog on 12 July. For once I’ve read the book well in advance.

I’m also re-reading The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy for the Heart of a Child Challenge. A tale of the French Revolution, a time of terror and tension as the dashing Englishman rescues French aristos destined to death by guillotine. I loved this book as a child and so far it’s living up to my expectations.

Thomas Hardy

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

I had intended to read one of Thomas Hardy’s books in June as part of the Celebrate the Author Challenge. Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 at Higher Brockhampton, near Dorchester. I’ve read some of his books and thought I read one I hadn’t previously read for the challenge, but I didn’t get one until yesterday, when I borrowed two from the library – Wessex Tales and A Pair of Blue Eyes.

Both Wessex Tales and A Pair of Blue Eyes are Wordsworth Classics editions, with introductions and notes on the text. It’s refreshing to find in Wessex Tales a General Introduction which states

… because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.”

A Pair of Blue Eyes was Hardy’s third novel.  I haven’t started it yet, so I’m not revealing anything that isn’t on the back cover. Apparently this book has a central scene that “shocked and stimulated Victorian readers” and “caused Hardy to be embroiled in arguments concerning the sexual morality of his novels.” We’re not so easily shocked these days, but who knows, I may be in for a surprise when I read this book.

I’ve tried not to reveal too much in writing about Wessex Tales.

Wessex Tales was first published in 1888. It is subtitled: Strange, Lively and Commonplace. As soon as I started to read the first tale, The Three Strangers, I was drawn back into Hardy’s world and this story has all those elements. Strange, because it has a satisfying twist in the tale. It is set in the 1820s in an agricultural England that no longer exists, but can still be seen in the landscape in the form of solitary cottages, ancient hedges (that have survived the 19th century inclosures) and the “long, grassy and furzy downs”. Lively, because the tale has so many elements of a folktale with the appearance at a christening party of three strangers on a cold, stormy, winter’s evening. I liked this description of how wild and wet it was:

The level rain-storm smote walls, slopes and hedges, like the cloth-yard shafts of Senlac and Crecy. Such sheep and outdoor animals as had no shelter stood with their buttocks to the wind; while the tails of little bird trying to roost on some scraggy thorn were blown inside-out like umbrellas.

Commonplace, because the tale is full of information about the daily lives of country labourers – shepherds, hedge-carpenters, dairymen and a detailed description of how mead was made. There is also a sense of the macabre about this tale. Who are the three strangers, who arrive at intervals during the evening and are slow to say who they are and why they are there? It becomes clear that one of them is a hangman, which casts a sinister shadow over the evening.

I’ve written before how I sometimes find short stories too short to be satisfying, either leaving me feeling the characters are sketchy and incomplete, or thinking “so what?”. Hardy’s Tales just aren’t like that – even A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four which is only 6 pages long is complete – I could visualise the characters from the succinct descriptions. The tale is narrated by Solomon Selby in the “yawning chimney-corner of the inn-kitchen” as he withdrew

the stem of his pipe from the dental notch in which it habitually rested, he leaned back in the recess behind him and smiled into the fire. The smile was neither mirthful or sad, not precisely humorous nor altogether thoughtful. We who knew him recognised it in a moment: it was his narrative smile.

You could almost believe that the events in this story actually happened. It held my interest right from the opening sentence:

The widely discussed possibility of an invasion of England through a Channel tunnel has more than once recalled old Solomon Selby’s story to my mind.

I can’t write about this without revealing something of the story, so if you want to read it, don’t read on.

The fear of invasion is from the French. Bonaparte had crossed the Alps, fought in Egypt, “drubbed the Turks, the Austrians, and the Proosians, and now thought he’d have a slap at us.”  Where on the coast would his troops land and was it “Boney” that Solomon saw on the shore? In the preface to the Tales Hardy wrote that in 1882 when he first published this story he had invented the incident of Napoleon’s visit to the English coast, but had been surprised several years later to be told that it was a real tradition.

More on the other stories in this collection will follow in a later post.

A Clubbable Woman by Reginald Hill

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

A Clubbable Woman (Dalziel & Pascoe, #1)

A Clubbable Woman came out in 1970. It was Reginald Hill’s first published book and the first book featuring Dalziel and Pascoe. I borrowed this book from the library and read it very quickly last week. At times I thought I knew the story as I’ve watched practically all the Dalziel and Pascoe episodes on TV but I couldn’t remember how it ended.

Connon, known as Connie, was set to play rugby for England before an ankle injury ended his career. He is no longer Wetherton Rugby Football Club’s star player but he still plays occasionally. After a match in which he returns home dazed and confused after a blow (was it deliberate?) on the head he finds his wife, Mary watching television, leaving him to get his own meal. Feeling sick he goes upstairs, then passes out. Later he realises that she is still downstairs, apparently still watching the television – then he discovers that she is dead, with a hole in the middle of her forehead.

Dalziel and Pascoe investigate the murder. Dalziel who is a member of the rugby club is on his home ground and knows all the players.  Has Connon killed his wife suspecting that she had been unfaithful? Or could someone at the club have it in for the rugby star and his family? As the mystery unravels, I was just as interested in the characters of Dalziel and Pascoe as in identifying the murderer. My image of Dalziel is inevitably formed on Warren Clarke’s portrayal of him and this fits well with Reginald Hill’s description:

Superintendent Andrew Dalziel was a big man. When he took his jacket off and dropped it over the back of the chair it was like a Bedouin pitching camp. He had a big head, greying now; big eyes, short-sighted but losing nothing of their penetrating force behind a pair of soild-framed spectacles; and he blew his nose into a khaki handkerchief a foot-and-a-half square. … Dalziel sank over his chair and scratched himself vigorously between the legs. Not absent-mindedly – nothing he did was mannerism – but with conscious senuousness. Like scratching a dog to keep it happy, a constable had once said within range of Dalziel’s very sharp hearing. He had liked the simile and therefor ignored it.

He is passionate about rugby and Pascoe (then a Sergeant) responds “with the resigned condescension of one certain of the intellectual superiority of Association Football.” Pascoe’s thoughts about the investigation and about Dalziel are scattered throughout the book:

Do I want to amuse Dalziel? And if I do, is it to keep him sweet so I can manipulate him, like I pretend? or is it because he puts the fear of God into me? Just how good is he anyway? Or is he just a ruthless sucker of other men’s blood?

He calls him “Uncle Andrew”, “Randy Andy” and “Bruiser Dalziel lecturing me on tact and diplomacy. It was like Henry the Eighth preaching about marital constancy”. Pascoe’s degree is the butt of Dalziel’s jokes and Pascoe is offended by Dalziel’s lack of organization. He learns that Dalziel was divorced and his wife had gone off with a milkman, fifteen years earlier. Despite being two such diametrically opposed characters you can trace the growing bond between Dalziel and Pascoe and by the end of the book Pascoe finds himself cast in the role of Dalziel’s confidant and even becoming enthusiastic over a game of rugby.

Reginald Hill has written many Dalziel and Pascoe novels, enough to last me for years. I’ve only read three so far and I’m not going to try to read them in the order they were written, but I’ll be looking out for more of them from now on.

The Sunday Salon – Reader Satisfaction

Published on by Margaret14 Comments

I’m in the middle of two very different books – Going Into a Dark House, a book of short stories by Jane Gardam and Messenger of Truth, a Maisie Dobbs mystery by Jacqueline Winspear. Both are giving me a lot of reader satisfaction; they take me out of myself and into their worlds, peopled by believable characters, set in realistic locations, and with plots that are detailed and complicated enough to keep me wondering how everything will turn out and hoping for a sequel.

I’ve only recently begun to appreciate short stories and still prefer the longer short stories in preference to those of just a few pages. The plus factor is reading short stories is that you can read one in just one session, making it a complete experience. Going Into a Dark House is a collection of eight short stories, all long enough to satisfy my requirements. The title story, which I haven’t read yet is the longest and is in three parts. Death figures quite a lot in these stories, in different guises and also reflections on age, youth and nostalgia. The first story is Blue Poppies which begins: “My mother died with her hand in the hand of the Duchess.” You know at the start that there is a death; the rest of the story leads up to this death and its effect on the daughter.  I like the way Jane Gardam writes, conjuring such vivid images that it seems as those I’m actually witnessing the scene. For example the blue poppies are

… just like Cadbury’s chocolate papers crumpled up under the tall black trees in a sweep, the exact colour, lying about among their pale hairy leaves in the muddy earth, raindrops scattering them with a papery noise. 

Zoo-Zoo is a strange little tale about a dying nun who is taken by two of her fellow nuns to a nursing home to end her days. She is not as senile as they suppose. My favourite story so far in this collection is Dead Children, which I think is absolutely brilliant. How Jane Gardam can write twelve pages about such a deceptively simple meeting of a mother and her two children and infuse them with such depth of meaning and emotion is just beyond me.  The twist at the end makes an ordinary everyday event amazingly extraordinary.

Messenger of Truth is a much longer book and my reading has been spread out over a few sessions already. It is a detective story set in 1930/1 in England. The artist Nick Bassington-Hope has fallen to his death from the scaffolding whilst installing his work at an art gallery. The police believe it is an accident, but his twin sister Georgina isn’t convinced and hires Maisie Dobbs to investigate his death. Along with Nick’s death there is also the mystery of the missing piece of art work that was to be the centre of the exhibition.

I’m just over half-way through this novel and I think I’m going to have to abandon other books I have on the go in order to finish it. Maisie’s methods of investigation take her to the art gallery, to Dungeness where Nick lived in a converted railway carriage and to visit his family at their home near Tenterden. After questioning his friends and seeing Nick’s paintings she becomes convinced the mystery of his death is related to the missing painting and that this is connected to Nick’s experiences as a war artist during the First World War.

I like the way the mystery is set in the cultural and social setting of this period, between the two World Wars. England is a place where there is a great divide between the wealthy and the poor. Maisie’s assistant Billy Beale is struggling to accept that people have money to spend on artwork when others can’t afford food and medicine. The realities of life are highlighted when Billy’s family catch diphtheria and his two year old baby, Lizzie is taken into hospital. The lingering effects of the war are starkly and shockingly described in Georgina’s reminiscences about the treatment during the war of men suffering from shell-shock.

 Maisie is a an independent woman living on her own, working out her relationship with Andrew Dene, who hoped to marry her. Their relationship is floundering as she is absorbed in her work and doesn’t want to give it up and conform to the accepted role of being a doctor’s wife. She is discontent and is seeking a quality out of life that she cannot quite define. She finds the thrill of investigation outweighs her desire to help others. It is the search for truth that motivates and thrills her.

Both books are immensely satisfying.