A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

4 December 2011 23:59

This is another book from my 2011 reading list and a quick read. I think I’ve said before that you never really know what you’re going to get from Evelyn Waugh. To begin with A Handful of Dust is one of his satirical books on the lifestyle of the English upper classes but exactly half way through it turns into something much less comfortable.

Brenda and Tony Last have been married for several years and have one small son – John Andrew. Tony is really only interested in his family stately pile which is one of those very gothic places which is decorated in a sort of mock Arthurian style. Brenda hates his rural idyll and is bored stiff there.

She’s so desperate that she starts an affair with John Beaver, a young mummy’s boy type whom everybody dislikes. Brenda has no interest in John Andrew at all and spends all of her time in London with John Beaver who is penniless and is hoping to be able to live off Brenda’s husband when she gets divorced and is given alimony.

Quite a bit of the book concerns the hoops which people had to jump through to get a divorce in those days. In fact I can remember as late as the 1970s that men used to go off to seaside hotels and pretend to be having an affair with someone so that their wife could get their divorce without the wife’s lover being named as correspondent. How gentlemanly they were!

Anyway, when Brenda demands loads of alimony Tony quite rightly sees red and takes himself off abroad to avoid going to court. He gets involved with an explorer and ends up in a god awful place where disaster follows disaster.

I really disliked the end of this book. Apparently the American version has a different ending and I would have preferred that one. If you’re interested in knowing more about it have a look here. It is included in the Modern Library List of Best 20th Century Novels. I can’t say that it would make it on to my list. It was readable but I wouldn’t say it exactly set the heather alight!.

My copy of A Handful of Dust is an ancient Penguin from 1953 which originally belonged to my grandad but it was first published in 1934. Evelyn Waugh is mentioned quite a lot in Deborah Devonshire’s autobiography so now I can’t think of him without picturing him rubbing a bottle of alcohol into his hair when he was absolutely stinking drunk – which he often was. He did become part of her set though which he would have been very pleased about as he was a monumental snob, by all accounts.

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Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

25 July 2011 14:00

I’ve had this Daniel Defoe book in my house for over 30 years and it’s one of those lovely wee dark blue leather bound books but luckily the print is quite good so it’s easy on the eyes. I’ve been avoiding reading it mainly because I’ve seen numerous TV adaptations but over the last couple of years I’ve been struck by how many authors have mentioned Robinson Crusoe in their own books, it must get the most name checks of any book surely. It was the detective in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone who was most keen on reading it though and he seemed to find everything he needed in Robinson C.

Anyway, first published in 1719 and as you would expect, the writing seems quite archaic at first but I got used to it and ended up quite enjoying it. Everybody knows the story probably, if Robinson had been a dutiful son he would have taken his father’s advice and lived a sedate middle-of-the-road life as his father had noticed that those were the happiest of people. Being young and looking for adventure Robinson sailed off looking for excitement and he found it. He eventually ends up being taken as a slave but after years of slavery he manages to escape on a ship only to be shipwrecked and ending up being the only survivor of it when he manages to reach a nearby island.

Luckily he was able to swim back out to the ship and rescue lots of useful things to help him to survive – tools, some seeds, rum, sailcloth, guns and gunpowder – in fact he was fairly well stocked with the necessities of life. The island had a reasonable amount of edibles so I like to think that I could have managed as well as he did in the same circumstances.

The only thing that he doesn’t have is human company although he does have a dog and some ship’s cats. Robert Louis Stevenson thinks that the part where Robinson finds a human footprint in the sand as one of the most unforgettable scenes in English literature. Even although he later discovered that the island was used as an occasional ‘picnic area’ for a tribe of cannibals it was the scenes involving wolves in snowy mountains when he gets back to Europe which I found to be the most scary.

I did find the many descriptions of how he made pallisades around his cave a wee bit tedious but I’m glad that I’ve read it at last.

Daniel Defoe was born plain Daniel Foe and he decided to stick the De on to it to make himself seem aristocratic, that’s always a sign of a ‘dodgy’ person. And indeed Defoe was actually an English spy who took up residence in Edinburgh and infiltrated Scottish society and became an adviser to committees of the Scottish Parliament and the Church of Scotland. The English government had given orders to make sure that Scotland joined itself to England, for one thing Scotland had a ‘great treasury of men’ which England wanted to use.

Afterthe deed was done Defoe had the grace to admit that he had been wrong. He had apparently thought that Scotland would become more prosperous joined to England but of course the opposite was the outcome and poverty and unemployment became much worse.

Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe whilst he was living in Edinburgh and it’s thought that he got the idea from the true story of Alexander Selkirk from Lower Largo in Fife who had been marooned on the island of Juan Fernandez near Chile which has since had a change of name to Robinson Crusoe Island.

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The Quiet American by Graham Greene

27 June 2011 23:23

Graham Greene wrote this book between 1952 and 1955. He was inspired to write it after spending four weeks as a war correspondent in Indo-China for the Sunday Times and Le Figaro.

It’s set in the beginnings of what later became the Vietnam War. Thomas Fowler is an English war correspondent there and although he has an abandoned wife back in England who refuses to give him a divorce, he has been having a relationship with Phuong, a young Annamite (from eastern Indochina). Phuong is obsessed with the British royal family and hopes to be able to go to London some day.

Pyle is a young American and he is besotted with Phuong from the minute he first sees her. I’m not sure if Pyle is supposed to be ‘not quite the full shilling’ – anyway, he is completely upfront about wanting to take Phuong from Fowler and seems to be under the impression that that means he is a decent man.

Phuong’s main job is to prepare Fowler’s opium pipes and to be a compliant easy lay, basically. Fowler is attached to her because she’s of use to him without giving him any emotional problems.

Fowler was sick of Americans before Pyle came on the scene, he saw them as greedy and imperialistic, making sure that they came out top in any business deals and that their allies the French were left out of things.

Fowler realises that Pyle is working undercover and underneath all that wide-eyed deceny and innocence is a dangerous man who thinks in black and white – the white being America and the black being anything against America but particularly communism. Pyle is quite happy to unleash bombs in areas which he knows will be full of innocent people, he thinks the cause is good, so their deaths are unimportant.

As you can imagine this book didn’t go down well with the American reviewers at the time but I think that it’s probably an accurate reflection of what Graham Greene experienced.

This is another one from my 2011 Reading List.

The subject matter wasn’t really my cup of tea, but I quite enjoyed it.

If you’ve read the book and you want a laugh, have a look at this review here from The New York Times 1956.

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Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope

9 April 2011 23:43

Can You Forgive Her? is the first in The Palliser Series and I thought it was about time that I got around to reading them, especially as the Angela Thirkell books which I’ve been enjoying recently are very loosely based on the series, although a few generations later.

I had seen a comment from another blogger that the book should have been called Can You Stand Her? and I can see what they mean, but in the preface it says that it could have been called Can She Forgive Herself?

Alice Vavasor is a young woman with a very complicated love life and as her mother died within a year of her marriage to Alice’s father it means that Alice has no older female to guide her in these things. Her cousin Kate Vavasor is keen for Alice to become engaged to Kate’s brother George and George is happy to go along with the idea because it means he would get his hands on Alice’s money.

However Alice broke the engagement because of George’s bad behaviour and subsequently became engaged to John Grey a gentleman who has a small country house, called Nethercoates, in Cambridgeshire. Alice finds the area unlovely and fears that she won’t enjoy life amongst people that she doesn’t know and thinks she will miss the bustle of London, even although she rarely goes into society there.

It has to be said that John Grey could be described as being a decent but boring man and Alice believes that, in modern parlance he’s not that into her. But she’s entirely wrong about that, it’s just that John Grey is a very buttoned-up sort of chap who isn’t very good at showing his feelings.

Inevitably Alice changes her mind yet again and cousin George comes back on the scene, aided and abetted by his sister Kate.

Anyway, that’s the gist of the story but it’s a very long book in two parts, each of over 400 pages in length. So there’s a lot more to it and at times it veers off to Yarmouth where Aunt Morrow, who is a very merry, rich widow and, despite her husband being dead only four months, is setting her cap at various men. She’s a really unlikeable character. Presumably she is in the book to add some humour but I felt it did get in the way of the story and in fact in the introduction which I always read last it did suggest that readers should skip those bits entirely.

But the most interesting character is Lady Glencora and I can see that her husband Plantagenet Palliser is going to be driven to distraction by her and a good thing too.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I’m really looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

24 February 2010 23:37

I’ve been avoiding reading this book for a very long time because the subject matter didn’t really appeal to me. I’ve never watched a Frankenstein film either but when I saw the book in my local branch of The Works at the amazing price of 10p – I took it as a sign that it was time to read it. Also, I just realised that I can make it my first book which counts towards the Gilmore Girls Challenge.

I did enjoy the book, it wasn’t really what I had been expecting at all. Frankenstein isn’t the monster but is actually a chemist who has managed to construct a monstrous form of life, which is a really crazy idea. The monster escapes and Frankenstein believes that he has let loose a murderous being on society.

The monster learns about human life whilst hiding out close to a family and being able to observe them he develops language and teaches himself to read, hoping that he will be accepted by society despite the fact that he looks so scary. But he is driven away by the family and his anger and loneliness change him from a gentle beastie into one consumed with bitterness and rage. He decides to track down his creator with the intention of making Frankenstein create a female monster to alleviate his loneliness.

The action switches from Switzerland to Britain with Frankenstein hoping that he can avoid the monster there. Frankenstein and his friend Clerval travel round Britain from London to Oxford, Derby and then to Scotland visiting Edinburgh, including Arthur’s Seat and St Bernard’s Well before travelling on to Cupar, St Andrews and Perth, ending up on a remote Orkney island, which is where the monster caught up with him. Obviously this is just a brief outline of the story and I’m not going to go any further with it. I think it is the sort of book which you could read umpteen times and find something new in it at every visit.

Mary Shelley wrote this book during a holiday in Switzerland with her husband Percy Byshe Shelley and Lord Byron. The weather was dreadful with the sun being unable to break through the atmosphere which had been polluted by the eruption of Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa.

During this dark and spooky time they had entertained each other reading German ghost stories and decided they would all write their own, but Mary’s was the only one which was completed.

I was really surprised when the action moved to Scotland, close to where I live. It seems that every book that I pick up at the moment has a Scottish dimension.

Anyway, I’m glad that I read this one at last and I may even do so again.

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The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

15 February 2010 00:33

I’m not going to do an in depth review of this book, I’m just going to make a few observations. It’s a fairly hefty tome at 627 pages, this is partly because it was originally printed in a weekly magazine and I suppose the editor wanted so many words each week to fill the allotted space for it. You can down-load it in instalments if you want to go for the authentic Victorian experience and I think I might have preferred that, then you get the cliff-hangers which Collins wrote for the end of each piece. Also, I imagine that if you are waiting a week for the next instalment then you are bound to think about it more and try to guess which turn the story is going to take.

I did think whilst reading it that the Count Fosco – Sir Percival relationship was what the Victorians would have deemed to be ‘unnatural’. There was the constant repetition that Count Fosco had a strange power over Sir Percival and in my Penguin edition on page 214, Marian describes Sir Percival as having a mania for order and he is upset even by flower-blossoms which have fallen on the carpet.

I think that Victorian readers would have seen such behaviour as ‘womanish’ and definitely suspect in a man. Coupled with Count Fosco’s flamboyant clothes and Sir Percival’s assertion that there was no chance that Laura would be having any children, it does seem to add up to me, but nobody else seems to have noticed it so I might be going off at a mad tangent with that thought. However I see from the introduction which I have just read – I always keep that for last – that Oscar Wilde was given the nickname of Fosco when he was a student.

So, it’s very wordy with masses of description and doesn’t really have much in the way of humour in it. Mrs. Catherick is a tragic/comic figure in her determination to appear to be respectable, but I did enjoy reading it although I probably wouldn’t read it again.

I reviewed this book as part of the Thriller and Suspense Reading Challenge.

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