Showing posts with label Reading Between The Lines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reading Between The Lines. Show all posts

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym - A Reading Between The Lines Review.

I’ve just finished rereading Excellent Women for the umpteenth time. I really have lost count of the number of times I’ve read this book but it’s like going back to an old friend, comforting, stimulating, always amusing. My paperback copy from 1980 is quite literally falling apart. I had to read it clutching the pages together. It’s foxed and battered and pretty much disintegrating. I’m going to have to buy a new one very soon.

I like all of Barbara Pym’s novels, but the battered state of this one is testament to just how much I love it. The novel is set in postwar London, in a suburbia which reminds me very much of the London suburb where I spent a year as a child, when my father was working at a research institute there. That was a bit later, for sure, but still recognisable. We were in a flat very much like Mildred's, owned by the people downstairs, an elderly retired vicar and his rather scary wife with their 'good' furniture. She took my mother to church jumble sales and other events. I still remember her lamenting the fact that mum wouldn’t wear and had never in fact owned a fancy hat. Or indeed a hat of any kind. This lady was certainly an excellent woman.

Mildred Lathbury, the narrator in the novel, is a spinster in her thirties though she seems older, from a present day perspective when women are no longer set in spinsterhood in their thirties. She is a churchgoer, self deprecating, an ‘excellent’ woman – but her wry observations on life, on academia, on the church and on the opposite sex in particular, still delight me and make me laugh out loud every time I read them.

This is a ‘quiet’ novel but David Cecil called it ‘high comedy’ and it is. It is as sharp and well observed in its own way as the work of Jane Austen. Every time I reread it, I see more in it. It is as intricate, as well made as some beautifully inlaid box. This time, I suddenly became aware – as I think I had not before – of the wonderfully wrought overall structure of it: how perfectly made it is, and how excellent the ending – where we are invited to look to Mildred’s (very interesting) future without ever being certain of precisely how things will turn out. Except that for those who have read all her books, we do find out, because Barbara Pym was very fond of referencing earlier characters in later novels.

The other characters are all superbly drawn, superbly realised. There are no cyphers – all are vivid and vividly recognisable, from the attractive Rockingham Napier – Rocky – who was kind to the ‘Wren Officers’ in Italy during the war and who almost charms Mildred in the same casual way, to the fascinating but selfish widow, Allegra Gray, who enchants the vicar, Julian Malory. ‘I was a little dismayed,’ says Mildred, who has felt reluctantly compelled to offer to help Allegra with her curtains for her new flat ‘as we often are when our offers of help are taken at their face value, and I set to work rather grimly, especially as Mrs Gray was not doing anything at all... “I’m afraid I’m not very good at sewing,” she said.’

Miss Pym’s pen can drip acid, so gently that you hardly notice that it is acid. As Mildred and her friend Dora travel to a school reunion we learn that ‘In the train we read the school magazine, taking a secret pleasure in belittling those of the Old Girls who had done well and rejoicing over those who had failed to fulfil their early promise.
‘”Evelyn Brandon is still teaching Classics at St Mark’s, Felixstowe,” Dora read in a satisfied tone. “And she was so brilliant.”’
Who among us hasn’t done something similar? Who among us can claim never to have known an Allegra Gray? Who has never found themselves reluctantly undertaking some task on behalf of another person who complacently looks on and points our how we ought to be doing it?

In short, I love this writer and I love this novel. The writing is subtle, deceptively simple, unshowy, intelligent in the best possible way, human, insightful and in the last analysis, loving. A. L Rowse said ‘I could go on reading her for ever.’ I must say, I feel exactly the same. How Cape could ever have treated her so badly is beyond me. I remember that article in 1977 in The Sunday Times – after Pym had been shut out, denied traditional publication for some fifteen years, after a very successful career - when Pym's friend Philip Larkin (of whom I was and remain a huge fan) and David Cecil both nominated her as ‘the most underrated writer of the 20th century.’ I had already come across her novels in library sales, and subsequently pounced on anything else I could find. She writes about a world we have lost, she writes with astounding truth about women, she writes about a society which has undergone vast changes, but because she writes the most profound truth and writes it from the heart, she and her work will never really go out of fashion.

This is a 'Reading Between The Lines' review for the RBTL Review Collective. Go to our Facebook group for more review links here.



The City and The City - Miéville's Masterpiece

I've joined the Reading Between The Lines Review Collective and will be posting regular reviews here on my Wordarts blog of  'new books, old books, loved books, neglected books'. And if you remember where that quote comes from, you may well be even older than I am! I won't be discriminating against eBooks or self published books, but I'll be adding plenty of other books into the mix, and they won't all be new or even in print. In short, I'll only be reviewing what I like, when I like.

This week, I'm reviewing a book I like very much indeed.
I'm ashamed to say that the first time I became more than peripherally aware of China Miéville was when he delivered a keynote speech at last year's World Writers' Conference in Edinburgh, to which I was not invited, but a lot of which I followed online. You know how it is. You know about a writer, without knowing too much about what they write and keep adding them to the 'to be read' list.  If you want to know what he said about the future of the novel (raising a few elitist hackles in the process), you can still find it online here.

I loved what he said and have been quoting him ever since, especially this assertion: 'You don't have to think that writing is lever-pulling, that anyone could have written Jane Eyre or Notebook of a Return to my Native Land to think that the model of writers as the Elect is at best wrong, at worst, a bit slanderous to everyone else. We piss and moan about the terrible quality of self-published books, as if slews of god-awful crap weren't professionally expensively published every year.'

So after that, I just had to investigate his work. A younger friend and Miéville fan made some recommendations. The City and The City was my first taste of what he had to offer. It didn't disappoint. It is the most disturbing, exciting, moving and engrossing book I've read for a very long time, one of those magical novels that lodges itself in your mind and refuses to go away. One of those books you want to tell other people about, hoping against hope that they will appreciate it too.

Where to start?
It begins with a murder. The body of a young woman is discovered on a piece of waste land in the Eastern (ish) European city of Beszel. And you think it's going to be a detective story, a police procedural in an interesting foreign setting.
Well, it's that. But there's more. So very much more.

The narrator - we get to know him rather well and like him a lot as the novel progresses - is Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad of Beszel. He's thoughtful, intelligent, moral, attractive in the sense of being a character with whom you can identify. You find yourself liking him. And that's just as well, because he is about to be your guide through a thoroughly disturbing world. I don't want to give the game away. And please don't plough your way through all the multitude of reviews on Amazon, if you want to enjoy this in the way the writer clearly intended. Although some of them are excellent and illuminating. But read the book first. For this is a novel like no other. It will stretch your brain. I read it far into the night for several nights. It's a long book, fortunately, because I didn't want it to end. I dreamed about it a lot, bizarre, disturbing dreams. Not nightmares, just immensely complicated dreams, indicative of my brain's repeated attempts to come to terms with the world the author has created. I would wake up again in the early hours and carry on reading, anxious to get back to the story, but perhaps even more anxious to get back to the world of Beszel and its neighbouring city of Ul-Qoma.

Is this Science Fiction? I don't know. It seems real. Ordinary in the sense that it's easy to imagine yourself there. A real place. Or then again, perhaps not. There are frightening, possibly supernatural elements. But they too are utterly credible. Is it dystopian? Maybe. It's dark at times. But most of all, it's a stunning evocation of a world which is so believable, so firmly lodged in the realities with which we are familiar, so manipulative of language itself, utilising the 'almost familiar' to explain new concepts, that it defies any easy categorisation. I have never struggled so much to do justice to a book I loved.

The writing is dense, rich, intricate and occasionally ragged in no bad way. It has to be. He plays with words, with ideas. He plays with your mind. Reading The City and The City made me realise just how many modern novels are edited to within an inch of their lives. So many widely praised books these days seem to have been edited until they are thin.  I'm not talking about popular fiction here. I enjoy popular fiction a lot. At its best, it's a well made blueberry muffin, or a light-as-a-feather croissant with jam, and there are times when that's exactly what I want to eat. But there are other times when I fancy something much more rich and strange. Unfortunately, you get the feeling that so many novels which began as something complex and strange and rough around the edges in the mind of the author, have been processed smooth by assiduous editors until they all seem curiously similar: bland, correct, predictable mush. You finish them, and you think 'Is that it then?'
Whatever you feel about The City and The City, you won't feel that!

The unease begins early on. Tyador has been at the crime scene, discussing the case with a constable named Lizybet Corwi, and then speaking to a group of journalists gathered at the edge of the waste land where the body has been discovered. He turns away from them, and quite suddenly, there it is.
'As I turned, I saw past the edges of the estate to the end of GunterStrasz, between the dirty brick buildings. Trash moved in the wind. It might be anywhere. An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling sway. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance, I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself and looking.
With a hard start I realised that she was not on GunterStrasz at all, and that I should not have seen her.'
At that point, with that small, seemingly unimportant - but oddly disturbing - encounter, you start to ask yourself why? Why should he not have seen her? Why was she not on GunterStrasz?

The answer - gradually revealed, always consistent - is complex and mind-bending: a realisation of the nature of the world in which Tyador lives and works. But not once, as I read this novel to its inevitable and satisfying, but unguessed, conclusion, did I ever stop believing in the truth of it, even while my brain struggled to encompass it. It's not an easy read. Don't blame me if you don't like it. Don't blame Miéville if you don't like it. Just acknowledge that it isn't for you. But if you do like it, you may also find that your perception of your own world won't ever be quite the same again. You'll dream about this book and go back to it, and be intrigued by it months later. I found myself desperately wanting to talk to people about it, which is why I'm reviewing it now. I've read very few novels in the last ten years which have filled me with such excitement - even in retrospect. I'd be interested to know what other readers think!

The City and The City was published by Pan in 2010 and is available on Kindle as well as in paperback.
You'll find it on Amazon UK and Amazon US.


Catherine is part of the Reading Between the Lines Review Collective a group of professional writers committed to writing good reviews about great books!