Category: Fiction

Crime Fiction Alphabet: Letter P

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

It’s the letter P this week in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet and I have another of Agatha Christie’s books to illustrate the letter.

If you haven’t read any of Agatha Christie’s books don’t begin with Postern of Fate. It’s the last novel she wrote, published in 1973, and it’s rambling and repetitive, with very little in the way of mystery. It’s the fourth of the Tommy and Tuppence Beresford mysteries and it begins with the ageing couple, now retired and living in a new home. I read it because I like Tommy and Tuppence and wanted to know what they were doing in this final book.

I liked the opening pages in which Tuppence is bemoaning the fact that they have so many books and there isn’t enough room to shelve them. They’d sorted out their books before they moved house, only bringing with them the ones they couldn’t bear to part with, but they had bought books from the previous owners of the house. Tuppence is sorting through them and in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow she sees that some of the letters are underlined in red ink, spelling out an intriguing message: ‘Mary Jordan did not die naturally. It was one of us. I think I know which one.’

Naturally the Beresfords have to find out more and after talking to some of the local people Tuppence discovers that Mary Jordan had lived in the house during the First World War and there are rumours that she was a German secret agent. It appeared she had died from accidental poisoning. But they aren’t satisfied and want to know more. Whilst Tuppence continues talking to the locals, Tommy goes to London and talks to Captain Pikeaway, ex-head of Special Branch and the enigmatic Mr Robinson (who appeared in Agatha Christie’s thriller Passenger to Frankfurt). They discover some facts, and have lots of meandering discussions, but the denouement is very vague (at least I found it so).

Its interest for me lies in what the book reveals about Agatha Christie. Clearly she is remembering her own childhood when Tuppence is reminiscing about the books she had read as a child, listing them and exclaiming how much she liked them – books such as The New Treasure Seekers, lots of Stanley Weyman books (he wrote historical romances), The Prisoner of Zenda, Treasure Island and Kidnapped.

Throughout her life she was an avid reader and her books include many references to a variety of sources from Shakespeare to T S Eliot. The title of this book derives from a poem Gates of Damascus by John Elroy Flecker, quoted as an epigraph and by Tommy as he worries about keeping Tuppence out of danger:

Four great gates has the city of Damascus …

Postern of Fate, the Desert Gate, Disaster’s Cavern, Fort of Fear …

Pass not beneath, O Caravan, or pass not singing.

Have you heard

That silence where the birds are dead, yet something pipeth like a bird?

I think when Tommy and Tuppence are complaining about the difficulties of getting tradesmen to complete work on their new house Agatha Christie was writing from experience:

Electricians arriving in a kindly tangle of optimism and efficiency had stated work. “Coming along fine now, not much more to do,” they said. “We’ll be back this afternoon.” But they hadn’t been back that afternoon. Tommy was not precisely surprised. He was used, now, to that general pattern of labour in the building trade, electrical trade, gas employees and others. They came, they showed efficiency, they made optimistic remarks, they went away to fetch something. They didn’t come back. One rang up numbers on the telephone but they always seemed to be the wrong numbers. If they were the right numbers, the right man was not working at this particular branch of the trade, whatever it was. (pages 35-36)

Then there are her misgivings about the state of the country:

England was in a funny state, a different state from what it had been. Or was it really always in the same state? Always underneath the smooth surface there was some black mud. There wasn’t clear water down to the pebbles, down to the shells, lying on the bottom of the sea. There was something moving, something sluggish somewhere, something that had to be found, suppressed. (page 138)

But there is rather too much of this sort of digression in Postern of Fate and Agatha Christie comes across as disillusioned with modern life. Here, for example, she has Colonel Pikeaway complaining about the worship of money:

…big fortunes made out of drugs, drug pushers, drugs being sent all over the world, being marketed, a worship of money. Money not just for buying yourself a big house and two Rolls Royces, but money for making more money and doing down, doing away with the old beliefs. Beliefs in honesty, in fair trading. (page 249)

Although there are things I like in this book and I am glad I’ve read it, I think it must be my least favourite of Agatha Christie’s books that I’ve read.

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

It’s hard to know just what to write about Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. The General Introduction to the book advises that you enjoy the book before reading the Introduction (which I did), so I have tried not to reveal any spoilers in this post.

  • It’s Dickens’s last complete book, first published in 19 monthly instalments from May 1864 to November 1865. It’s meant to be read at a leisurely pace.
  • It’s a long multiplot novel, with a multitude of characters.
  • In it Dickens comments on the ills of contemporary society.
  • It concerns mysteries, lost identities, hidden wills, corruption and violence.
  • It’s varied in style, sometimes comic, other times serious, sometimes sombre and dark and at others ironic and flippant.
  • It’s written in both the past and present tense and from the characters’ differing perspectives.

Brief synopsis (from the back cover of the Wordsworth Classic edition)

The chief of its several plots centres on John Harmon who returns to England as his father’s heir. He is believed drowned under suspicious circumstances – a situation convenient to his wish for anonymity until he can evaluate Bella Wilfer whom he must marry to secure his inheritance. The story is filled with colourful characters and incidents – the faded aristocrats and parvenus gathered at the Veneering’s dinner table, Betty Higden and her terror of the workhouse and the greedy plottings of Silas Wegg.

My view

Although it nows reads like historical fiction, in the mid 1860s Our Mutual Friend was modern up-to-date fiction, beginning with the words:  ‘In these times of ours’, in case there was any doubt in the readers’ minds.

The opening chapter reveals a darkly atmospheric scene on the River Thames, a modern scene for its first readers,with a macabre story of a boatman, Gaffer Hexham and his daughter, Lizzie, searching the Thames for human corpses:

Allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface, by reason of the slime and ooze with which it was covered, and its sodden state, this boat and the two figures in it obviously were doing something that they often did, and were seeking what they often sought. (pages 3-4)

In direct contrast in the next chapter Dickens moves to the nouveau-riche setting of the Veneerings house:

Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick-and-span new. (page 7)

Just like their name the Veneerings are all show, all surface, without any depth. They collect people as well as objects. Their standing in society is dependent on their wealth – just as Gaffer Hexham’s is at the other end of the financial strata. And there is a great emphasis on money, wealth and poverty in Our Mutual Friend.

There are some wonderful characters, such as the Boffins, Silas Wegg and Jenny Wren to name but a few. As John Harmon is presumed to have been drowned in  the Thames (the body found by Gaffer Hexham), it is his father’s faithful servants, Mr and Mrs Boffin who inherit the miserly and incredibly wealthy ‘dust’ contractor’s fortune. This pair are at first unchanged by their good fortune and take in Bella Wilfer, the socially ambitious young woman who would have married Harmon, had he lived. Through these characters Dickens shows the effect that greed in all its forms can have.

I particularly like Dickens’s depiction of Wegg, who is employed by Mr Boffin to read to him what he calls the ‘Decline-And-Fall-Off-The-Rooshan-Empire.’ Wegg is a hard, rascally character, out for anything he can get. His wooden leg reflects his nature:

Wegg was a knotty man, and a close-grained, with a face carved out of very hard material, that had just as much play of expression as a watchman’s rattle. … Sooth to say, he was so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg naturally, and rather suggested to the fanciful observer, that he might be expected — if his development received no untimely check — to be completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in about six months. (page 43)

Wegg is one of the characters that Dickens also uses to inject some humour. He is obsessed with his lost leg and goes to Mr Venus’s shop to see if he can find it for him – Venus is an articulator of skeletons and a taxidermist, who has great skill in piecing things together. He boasts:

Mr Wegg, if you was brought here loose in a bag to be articulated, I’d name your smallest bones blindfold equally with your largest, as fast as I could pick ’em out, and I’d sort them all, and sort your wertebrae, in a manner that would equally surprise and charm you. (page 77)

Wegg is positive that he doesn’t want anyone’s bones:

… I tell you openly I should not like – under such circumstances, to be what I call dispersed, a part of me here, and a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself like a genteel person. (page 77)

It’s not just social injustices, the class system, the importance of money, property, greed and materialism that Dickens highlights, but also family relationships – in particular that of fathers and daughters and the position of women. He also concentrates on instances of violence, through drownings and physical assaults.

There is so much in this novel, more that I can explore in this (long) post. I haven’t even touched on the majority of the major characters.

This Wentworth Classics edition includes the original illustrations by Marcus Stone. The one shown below is ‘The person of the house and the bad child‘ – this shows ‘Jenny Wren’, the dolls’ dressmaker, whose back is ‘so bad‘ and whose legs are ‘so queer‘, and her drunken father, who she calls her ‘bad child‘ and treats him as such.

  • Paperback: 832 pages
  • Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd; New Ed edition (1 Jan 1998)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1853261947
  • ISBN-13: 978-1853261947
  • Source: my own copy
  • My Rating 3.5/5

The Girl on the Stairs by Louise Welsh: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

The Girl on the Stairs

The Girl on the Stairs is Louise Welsh’s latest book. It’s a book that once I started reading it I just had to finish it. It’s full of suspense and increasing tension as Jane moves to an apartment in Berlin to join her partner, Petra. Everything is new to her, she only speaks a little German, she doesn’t know the area and has no friends there. And she’s pregnant.

It begins slowly and calmly, with Jane alone in the flat. Whilst Petra is out at work, she explores the neighbourhood, the streets, the church and the forbidding, derelict building (the backhouse) that overlooks their apartment building at the back.

She meets some of the other residents of the apartment building, their neighbour Dr Mann and his daughter Anna – the girl on the stairs. She hears them arguing and fears Dr Mann is abusing Anna. She ventures out at 3.00am one dark morning drawn by a flickering light in the backhouse, worried that Anna was hiding in there:

Jane looked up towards the looming bulk of the backhouse, hearing the sound of her own breath, shallow and uneven. the light was gone from the window. This was her cue to turn back, but she stepped on, into the dimness of the courtyard, tensing against the cold and the sensation of unseen eyes. The backhouse door gaped; beyond it, nothing but blackness. (page 55)

Then there are the Beckers, who live in the ground-floor flat. Heike Becker is suffering from dementia and insists that Dr Mann had killed his wife and buried her beneath the floorboards in the backhouse.

Jane’s suspicions about her neighbours grow, and her sense of isolation mounts when Petra has to go to Vienna for a week for her work. The book is narrated by Jane, which means that there is only Jane’s perspective on events and as more secrets are revealed I began to wonder just how paranoid Jane was and how much was down to her imagination. Jane tries to befriend Anna, who regards her with suspicion and contempt – are Jane’s fears justified or is she delusional? The uncertainties and ambiguities kept me guessing to the end.

The Girl on the Stairs is a dark, psychological thriller, full of atmosphere and claustrophobic tension. I really enjoyed it.

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: John Murray (2 Aug 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1848546483
  • ISBN-13: 978-1848546486
  • Source: Review copy from the publishers
  • My rating: 4.5/5

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson: Book Notes

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson is the fourth book featuring Jackson Brodie and one in which he doesn’t have a major role. It’s a complex book with several plots and sub-plots. The narrative moves between the past and the present day – sometimes not too clearly and is told from various characters’ perspective.

Jackson Brodie is working for Hope McMaster, who was adopted as a very young child in the 1970s and wants to find out about her birth family. Tracy Waterhouse, an ex-police officer is working as a security post in a shopping centre and can’t forget about a particular murder that had happened when she was a young detective. Detective Superintendent Barry Crawford,Tracy’s ex-colleague, with now just two weeks to go before retirement is also haunted by past events. Tilly is an elderly actress, suffering from the early stages of dementia. Add in to this mix a small child, Courtney and a little dog, called The Ambassador.

The book begins slowly and gradually builds to a tremendous pace. Brodie’s past keeps surfacing as he travels around in his search for Hope’s family roots, staying at Travel Lodges at Premier Inns, and in Bed and Breakfasts. He’s tired:

And truth be told he was tired of his vagrant life. He wanted a home. He would like a woman in that home. Not all the time, he had grown too used to his own company. (page 103)

There’s a lot in this novel about grief and loss, parenthood and responsibility and it paints a grim picture. The characters are well-drawn – the ex-copTracy, the child Courtney and the actress Tilly stand out in my mind as memorable characters, not forgetting The Ambassador, a small scruffy dog, who is ‘big inside‘.

It’s very much a book about consequences, full of regrets and lost opportunities as it moves, seemingly without reason from one character to another and from the past to the present. It’s a book you have to read with thought and concentration. I think It would benefit from re-reading, but my copy is a library book, due back today. Maybe I’ll re-read it one day.

  • Paperback: 496 pages
  • Publisher: Black Swan (17 Feb 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0552772461
  • ISBN-13: 978-0552772464
  • Source:  library book
  • My Rating: 4/5

August Prompt – A Classics Challenge

Published on by Margaret7 Comments
This year I am taking part in a Classics Challenge hosted by Katherine of November’s Autumn. The goal is to read at least seven classics in 2012 and every month Katherine is posting a prompt to help us discuss the books we are reading. This month we are asked to share some quotes from our current read.
Rather than a questions August’s prompt is to share a memorable
Quote… or a few of them from what you’re currently reading. Try to select ones that are not so well-known but, of course, if you can’t help yourself share it too!

This month I’ve been reading Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. There are many passages I could quote. Here are just a few:

“Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? ‘Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world. Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it,? Don’t try to go confounding the rights and wrong of things in that way. But it’s worthy of the sneaking spirit that robs a live man.” (page 6)

“No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.” (page 18)

“And this is the eternal law. For, Evil often stops short at itself and dies with the doer of it! but Good, never. (page 95)

“I have made up my mind that I must have money, Pa. I feel that I can’t beg it, borrow it, or steal it; and so I have resolved that I must marry it.” (page 302)

“This reminds me, godmother, to ask you a serious question. You are as wise as wise can be (having been brought up by the fairies), and you can tell me this: Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?” (page 410)

“And Oh! there are days in this life, worth life and worth death. And Oh, what a bright old song it is, that Oh, ’tis love, ’tis love, ’tis love, that makes the world go round!” (page 636) (From a popular song usually sung to the French tune ‘C’est l’amour’.)

Wondrous Words Wednesday

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

I’m currently reading Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. It’s taking me quite a while as it’s a long book of just over 800 pages and there are many characters and sub-plots. There are also many new-to-me words!

I’m reading it in bed on Kindle, a free edition without any notes, but, of course Kindle has its own built in dictionary, which I’m constantly using. During the day I’m reading the Wordsworth Classic edition, which does have notes, and illustrations and an introduction, all of which help with understanding the literary references as well as words that are no longer in current use.

For today I’m just going to pick out one word: hipped. Eugene Wrayburn has been telling Mortimer Lightwood, his friend and fellow lawyer about how he enjoys goading the schoolmaster, Bradley Headstone, by walking all over London knowing that he is being followed by Headstone. He describes this as enjoying the ‘pleasures of the chase’. Lightwood says he doesn’t like it. Eugene then says:

‘You are a little hipped, dear fellow’, said Eugene; ‘you have been too sedentary. Come and enjoy the pleasures of the chase.’

I wasn’t at all sure I knew what that meant – was Lightwood getting a bit broad in the hips, sitting down too much, a bit too fat, maybe and needing the exercise?

One of the Kindle dictionary defines it as ‘having hips of a specified kind: a thin-hipped girl‘, so maybe that’s what Dickens meant – Lightwood has fat hips! Another definition given on Kindle is ‘obsessed or infatuated with‘, which seems to fit better.

The Wordsworth Classics edition has a more appropriate definition, I think. Hipped meaning ‘depressed‘. Lightwood needs more exercise to lift his mood.

Then I wondered how my Chambers Dictionary defined hipped. It has several to choose from, including the more modern use of ‘hip‘, meaning ‘following the latest trends in music, fashion, political ideas, etc’, ‘ the fruit of the dog-rose or other rose‘, and so on. But the one that fits is:

hipped: melancholy; peevish, offended, annoyed; obsessed.

No wonder, it’s taking me longer than usual to read this book, when just one little word takes up so much thought. :)

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme created by Kathy at BermudaOnion, where you can share new words that you’ve encountered or spotlight words you love.