A recent sunny break in Cyprus (away from damp, cloudy Cornwall) was a time for relaxed waterside reading, as well as on long train and plane journeys. Since then some drab autumnal weather has led to a bit more time for further reading. Here’s a roundup.
Two Elizabeth Jane Howard novels:
Odd Girl Out, Picador 2015, 19721. A rich young Botticelli beauty called (of course) Arabella disrupts the staid bourgeois lives of a married couple when she stays with them for a while. Arabella is a force of nature, a product of the post-sixties social revolution that challenged the class complacencies that had solidified after the war.
The way these tangled dynamics work out is well handled and reveals a great deal about the shortcomings of those decaying social structures.
Something in Disguise, Picador 2015, 19691. Very different from the above – but it does involve again a family’s fragility in the face of challenging forces represented by another kind of disruption: this time the horrible machinations of a horrible second husband. May had married him because he seemed kind, but discovers that he’s anything but. Her two grownup children escape, leaving her vulnerable. There’s a sweet love story, but lots of things go wrong for them all. Again it’s very skilfully crafted, if a little nasty. But that’s ok. Life isn’t usually all sweetness.
Henry de Montherlant, Chaos and Night, PMC 1966, first published in French 1963, translated by Terence Kilmartin. An embittered and still fanatical Spanish exile – a former anti-fascist anarchist who’d fought against Franco’s forces – has lived grouchily in Paris for two decades. He falls out with everyone, including his oldest friends and long-suffering daughter, as a result of his pig-headed dogmatism and sense of being the only one who’s always right (a flaw in most of our recent top politicians here in the UK). When he goes back to Spain to claim his part of an inheritance it’s evident that he’s going to encounter difficulties, maybe retribution – or even an epiphany. I can’t say I was too interested in finding out, but it was an interesting read.
C.J. Sansom, Dissolution, Pan Books, 2015, 20031. Borrowed from our travelling companion when I finished my own holiday books. It was ok, but far too long. Essentially a standard murder mystery, but set in a monastery at the time of the, well, dissolution of such institutions at the order of Henry VIII – his petulant riposte to the Pope’s refusal to allow him to divorce. Much corruption is exposed when his ‘commissioners’ charged by Thomas Cromwell to plunder these monastic estates set about their work with ferocious zeal. Matthew Shardlake is the lawyer/sleuth who investigates the multiple deaths that happened when his predecessor as a commissioner visited a Sussex monastery and ended up beheaded. Much of the period detail is fascinating, but it became a bit too intrusive after several hundred pages.
Anthony Seldon, with Jonathan Meakin, Truss at 10: How Not to be Prime Minister, Atlantic Books, 2024 (library copy). The title says it all. Chilling. Things can only get better.
Tessa Hadley, The Party, J. Cape, 2024. This was another novel (well, novella, it’s just over 100 pp. long) passed on to me by Mrs TD. I couldn’t see the point of it: two sisters meet some gruesome people, make bad decisions.
Robert Harris, Precipice, Hutchinson Heinemann, 2024 (another library copy). Very different from his last one, Act of Oblivion, that I posted on recently. This one tells the extraordinary story of the dangerously indiscreet correspondence (and affair) between H. H. Asquith, prime minister in his early sixties, and twenty-something aristo/socialite Venetia Stanley. Amazingly, the letters sent (several each day, obsessively) from HHA to Venetia quoted in the novel, full of official secrets, are all genuine. Hers to him are invented (very persuasively) by Harris because HHA burnt them when his career ended.
Harris ingeniously invents a troubled cop (aren’t they always in fiction) who’s recruited by the predecessor of MI5 to investigate when it becomes apparent that top secret documents and highly sensitive political details are being illegally sent to his girlfriend by the besotted, rather sad and possibly unhinged PM. Venetia wasn’t the first of his infatuations with much younger women, and she wasn’t the last. That all this happened on the brink of WWI (hence the title – although it also refers to Asquith’s increasingly teetering premiership) and during its first year makes it all the more astonishing. It’s another long novel but I rattled through it in a couple of days. Great fun. Once again it sheds light on the behaviour of some of our more recent top politicians, who have also demonstrated unbalanced tendencies.
I’ve also recently read a fascinating and sobering account of the wife of the first bishop of Cornwall, Mary Benson, by Rodney Bolt. He was not a very nice husband and father.
My neighbour lent me a three-volume history of our local area by Viv and Bob Acton. It’s a well-researched account with lots of interesting illustrations.
