The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Despite hearing wonderful things about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society from various British bloggers, I blithely assumed that as a Contemporary Novel it was not for me. But loot, only to have my mother-in-law stare bemusedly at The Parson's Wife by Elizabeth von Arnim (in Virago reprint, of course) and say, "by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden? That's a real book, then? I thought they just made it up to put the Nazis off the trail -- in the book I just read, I mean, the one I was telling you about yesterday..."

I assured her it was in fact a real book, and one that I thought she'd really like, and then when I got back home again I immediately requested the Guernsey etc. from the library -- and when it came I read it all in one long sitting, something I hardly ever do these days. It may be a contemporary novel but it has all the things I usually find in older fiction, most importantly people who actually behave like human beings as I know them, rather than the tortured souls which seem to inhabit so many books nowadays... but that rant must wait for another time.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (mostly written by Mary Anne Shaffer, and then finished by her niece Annie Barrows after Shaffer's untimely death) is an epistolary novel, set in 1946 Britain. The central character is Juliet Ashton, a successful writer of non-fiction who is rather taken aback by her own success, a book-lover who feels herself a little outside of the world she's been so good at writing about. While coping with her daily life she receives a letter from a Guernsey farmer who has a book of Juliet's -- not, that is to say, a book by her, but rather a Charles Lamb book with her name & address in it that he picked up used. There are no bookshops on Guernsey since the Occupation, he writes, so he's imposing on her by letter to ask if there are more books by Lamb, and if so where he might get them.

This is one of those set-ups for a novel that is so palpably artificial that it ought not to work, and yet at the same time it is exactly the sort of thing that I (and many of my friends) might do, should the Internet disappear from the earth and our only way of finding out about books be to write random strangers. So artificial, yes, and yet I believed it -- and that's a fine summary of the rest of the novel. I could see what was coming in terms of the relationships, the revelations, the developments of intimacy, and I had the nagging knowledge that it was all too predictable, but at the same time it came together in ways that I not only understood but desired, which made it a very satisfying read all the way through.

(This is the point at which My Friend Carl would ask, "So was it a phatic novel?" and I would think about it and say that while it wasn't a content-free book, it certainly reinforced some of my own beliefs about people and literature and friendship.)

What I loved most about this novel, though, was its celebration of reading as an activity which is simultaneously intensely individual and yet capable of creating communities. The readers in the book read different texts for very different reasons, and their relationships to their readings are very personal, but in coming together to share what they've found they become deeply involved in one another's lives. Rather than developing friendships through a similarity of tastes, they find it in their willingness to listen and respond to each other's literary passions. Not that Shaffer envisions this as a simple process; I think it's key that this fictional literary society is created from the stresses of living in an occupied territory during WW2. It's only under such an enormous burden of silence and suffering can these people are willing to dive into books in the first place, much less come together to speak their authentic experience of literature.

I strongly suspect this book will be one of my comfort reads for years to come.

currently reading: Schama, Arlen, Phillips

I suspect the baby has been growing by leaps and bounds the last ten days, because I've been too tired to do anything except for read, watch the swimming competitions in Rome, and sleep. In a way this has been peaceful, even satisfying, but I was very glad to wake up this morning with a lot more energy, as my list of things to do pre-baby (which includes items both necessary and fun) has been nudging at me.

So today -- a few book posts (one hopes), some dishes (one promises, as one's husband has been patiently doing them but with the workload that is about to hit him at his paid job it really is time to take back over), and almost certainly some more reading. Right now I'm working on:

• Simon Schama: A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World, 3500 B.C.-1603 A.D -- Yes, sometimes I do read books written recently! I stumbled across this at the library & picked it up because years and years ago an editor who I respect mentioned how much he loved Schama's Landscape and Memory (which, being me, I own and haven't read). Anyway, I finally started this and I am loving it; I know a great deal of the history already, but Schama's voice is incredibly engaging and funny and occasionally provocative, and the full-colour illustrations are not only beautiful but very well-chosen. I may have to ask for this as a birthday or Christmas present...
  
• David Graham Phillips: The Great God Success -- one of the unknown-to-me early 20th century authors I discovered by reading the advertisements in the back of May Sinclair's Superseded. I am so very glad I picked this up, because I'm really enjoying it, even though I think it's going to end badly for the main characters.
  
• Michael Arlen: The Green Hat -- I've been meaning to read this absolutely forever, as innumerable other books from the 20s mention it, but it's taken me forever to pick it up. I was expecting it to be a quick, light read, but instead I'm finding myself wanting to linger over certain scenes; Arlen is very good at the little moments which develop relationships between two characters, and those are the moments I like to daydream on before continuing.
  

Time for ablutions and physical fortification involving apples and multi-grain toast with Boursin, and then I will try my best to write proper posts for the books I've finished in the last few weeks.

BBC proms & current reading

I am delighted that it is Proms season once more, and that I realised it this time right before it started, so that I have been able to listen to some of the broadcasts on the BBC website. I don't really understand instrumental music -- I often can't even recognise repeated themes, much less hear the differences in various interpretations of a piece -- but I enjoy listening to it, and keep hoping that with enough exposure my brain may eventually develop the proper neural pathways for real appreciation. Thanks to my husband (who grew up in a very musical family) I'm at least able to tell if I'm not enjoying something, which is a start!

Vocal music, fortunately, is another story, and thus I'm currently listening to last Saturday's performance of Haydn's Creation oratorio and loving every moment of it. What a gorgeous, gorgeous piece; I must get my own copy.

I finished quite a few books this week -- more on that in my next post -- and am still slogging through the Sinclair. Every time I think I'm going to give up on it in frustration I hit a chapter that I really enjoy, only to bog down again 10 or 15 pages later due to the exceptional unpleasantness of the heroine. The library will want it back soon, though, so I'd best get through it this weekend! There are entrancing books on the English Civil War awaiting me, as well as those aforementioned novels by unknown (to me) early 20th century authors. New authors are always so tantalising...

currently reading: still more Bagnold & Sinclair!

I'm still working on the Davidson, which is interesting and dense and going to take a while. Meanwhile, I'm reading...

• Enid Bagnold: A Diary Without Dates -- I've been meaning to read this forever, and I finally picked it up. I don't plan to go on a huge Bagnold spree, this will be the last for a while, but oh it's interesting. There are some tonal similarities to The Happy Foreigner, but it's definitely it's own thing. Non-fiction.
  
  
• May Sinclair: The Helpmate -- Sinclair always seems to write with such a didactic agenda, and this novel is so far no exception. Just what is the agenda here, though? Something about true spirituality, true companionship, versus the workings of the ego and the sort of pride that makes a person judge others. I know from her WWI work (this is earlier, from 1907) that she was very into Freud and psycho-analytic thought... I wonder just when that happened? Yet another call for a biography, as all I really know about her real life is that Charlotte Mew was fonder of her than she was comfortable with.
  

A huge stack of novels are on my horizon, mostly by authors I've never heard of before, but the Sinclair is slowing me down!

Bagnold, Sinclair, and a Dorothy Whipple surprise

Lying in front of the fan on Tuesday afternoon I tore through both the Bagnold and Sinclair I mentioned in my earlier post, as well as a novel by Dorothy Whipple that was just too appealing to ignore.

May Sinclair's Superseded was a very short book (ah, shades of the Provincial Lady), taking a rather pessimistic view of the "Woman Question." Superseded suggests that most women will be destroyed by competition in a labour market, and that education merely unfits them for experiencing the emotional side of life as wives and mothers. As it was published with another short novel in a volume titled Two Sides of the Question I can only assume that the other half of the novel gave the other half of the argument.

The focus of the book is Miss Juliana Quincey, an "old maid" teacher at a school for girls. At forty-five Miss Quincey's emotions have never been truly engaged, and she expects little from her thankless students, her fault-finding aunt, and her critical peers. The Head of the school would love to replace Miss Quincey with someone younger and more intelligent, which poses some of the tension in the book, but the real conflict comes as she encounters for the first time both a man and a woman who treat her with kindness and respect. Her stifled emotions blossom into attachment to each of them, but the environment she's in is unforgiving of emotional development in a woman of forty-five. It's a painful book, probably all too realistic for its time, and made me grateful to be living in urban Northern California where a woman is never too old to discover herself.

Enid Bagnold's The Happy Foreigner was an entirely different experience, and to be honest I'm not really sure what to make of it. The prose is beautifully vague... perhaps impressionistic is the right word? Despite the novel being entirely from the perspective of Fanny, the young Englishwoman who goes to France to drive for the French Army immediately after the first World War, I never really understood who Fanny was. Bagnold details Fanny's immediate emotional reactions to events, but never describes her past or her hope for the future, which gives the novel a very dream-like sense to it. I see the art in that, the way that a woman after the war might feel like all she had was the present, both past and future irrelevant, but it meant that I was never able to connect with Fanny emotionally, and thus I didn't really care what happened to her.

Now that I think about it, the title is even more appropriate than I realised; Fanny really is the happy foreigner, the woman whose past does not haunt her, whose future does not trouble her, who can visit a devastated, desolate France and then leave again, seemingly untouched by the experience. How much of that was Bagnold's own self, and how much a wish for integrity so complete that she is completely unscathed by the war? Perhaps I should find a biography of Bagnold...

My final Tuesday novel was High Wages by Dorothy Whipple, and oh it was a pleasant surprise. I rarely find a book I can just sink into without my terrible page-counting habit interfering, but this was one. The heroine, Jane, makes her way in the world through determination and intelligence, discovers her avocation in selling clothing, and manages to make a vocation of it. She is shown as paying for her success, both through hard work and difficult personal relationships, but the overall tone of the novel is so optimisitc that I never doubted for a moment that Jane would make it through. Objectively speaking the novel has plenty of painful and depressing moments, but I still finished the book feeling pleased with the world and convinced that Jane would be all right. This is the fourth of Whipple's novels I've read, and they've neatly divided up into two which were heart-rending (Someone at a Distance and They Knew Mr. Knight), and two which left me happy -- this one and The Priory. It makes me nervous to read a fifth, since my all rights it ought to be another upsetting one!

self-indulgence, Du Maurier, Goudge

As anticipated, a Wednesday filled with appointments does not leave much energy or clarity for writing. But things got done, and it's hard to complain about that!

Today I am going out with my wonderful friend Carl, whose conversation is always so stimulating that I end the day with a much expanded TBR list, not to mention piles of ideas for writing. After lunch I plan to do the Very Important Errand of taking a bag of books rejected by the first-line bookstore to the second-line bookstore in the hopes that they will keep them, and incidentally checking their shelves for books by Elizabeth Goudge and Daphne du Maurier that I don't already have. I am perhaps being foolish to collect such piles of both of these authors without really knowing what I'm getting into, but so many people with tastes similar to mine like du Maurier -- and I did adore Rebecca back when I was 15 (and have been meaning to reread it since) -- so I'm indulging in the fun of collecting. With Goudge it's a somewhat different story; I loved Linnets and Valerians but found The Valley of Song too twee -- and had no idea that she wrote for adults -- so when I stumbled across some of her adult novels visiting my in-laws in San Diego I had to scoop them up, and now even without having read them (yet) I really want more.

Tueday turned out to be a marvelous reading day in which I tore through a three novels, but that will have to wait until later, or else I shan't be ready when Carl comes to pick me up!

reading right now: bagnold, davidson, sinclair

I am always reading four or five books at once, usually a mix of non-fiction that's going slowly and poetry or drama that's going really slowly, and fiction that's going quickly... although sometimes the fiction slows to a crawl and the non-fiction is brisk.

Right now the books are:

• Enid Bagnold: The Happy Foreigner, my own copy in its 1987 Virago Modern Classics edition. It can be hard to find Virago books in the US, so I was delighted to come across this at a used bookstore. It's about an English female driver for the French army right after WWI, based on Bagnold's own experiences, and is so far a mix of fascinating and frustrating; I love the content, but the style is often so vague that I feel like I'm not quite understanding the book. But I'm only about 1/3 through, so this may improve over time.
  
  
• James Davidson: Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, which E. loaned me at least a year or two ago but I'm only just getting around to. I'm only 10 pages in, but so far it's a fascinating look at the Athenian preoccupation with sensual pleasures. I tend to forget that the ancient Greeks were breathing people, not just Victorian images of white marble, but I think this book is going to go a long way towards correcting that.
  
  
• May Sinclair: Superseded. From 1906 and thus requested from the library, this is one of her earlier novels, about a minimally competent middle-aged teacher at a girl's school who is, as the titled indicates, superseded by the younger, smarter, more competent generation of women who have had better education and more encouragement to develop their intellects. I'm not sure I'm going to like this, but it's pretty short so I see no harm in finding out!
  

Both Sinclair and Bagnold are authors I learned about from some combination of Nicola Beauman's A Very Great Profession and Nicola Humble's The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism, two books I have read over & over again for their insight into a sort of fiction I discovered by accident & now adore. But my stumbling across women's middlebrow fiction and/or interwar fiction is, I think, a tale for a later post.