A Sensible Life

It's always lovely to finish a book you've been reading for ages. It's not that it's long or dense, that the book hasn't kept my interest, or even that I haven't had time, just that I've been distracted. Reading novels has taken a back seat to reading other things, mostly online. Actually, I've been wanting to read A Sensible Life, which is the second Mary Wesley book I've encountered. Or, perhaps more accurately, I've been wanting to want to read it. And this weekend I've finally had the time.

I first discovered Mary Wesley when I saw the miniseries adaptation of The Camomile Lawn, and subsequently read (and wrote about) the novel. It's interesting to compare the two. Both span about 40 years, and have main (or semi-main, in Camomile Lawn) female characters who are 10 years old when the story begins. Both books also follow a cast of characters who were all together once, long ago, as they grow up and go their separate ways. Mary Wesley's books could thus perhaps be called formulaic (the endings are extremely similar, too), but although themes and certain situations recur, the stories, the shape of the cast, and the mood differ enough to make them thoroughly worth reading.

A Sensible Life begins in France in 1926, where English families go on holiday with their children, thinking it good for them to get some sea air and learn some French. Flora Trevelyan is 10 years old, shy, with distant, inattentive parents. This holiday is her first encounter with real families and with love. She falls in love with three boys: Hubert and Cosmo, 15-year-old English schoolboy friends, and Felix, 21-year-old Dutchman. It is the people met on this holiday who step in and out of the rest of the book, getting older and living mostly happy, mostly sensible lives. Cosmo's sister Mabs and her friend Tashie, his parents Milly and Angus, Flora's parents, the Russian immigrant dressmaker Irena, and others.

What shapes this book, and The Camomile Lawn, too, is that it's the events of adolescence that are the brightest, clearest, and most lasting. Everything that happens later springs from or revolves around things that happened on that holiday in France, or during a holiday at Cosmo's house, Coppermalt, five years later. And it takes a long time for things to change, for the relationships Flora begins at 10 years old to pan out in one way or another. Some things take four decades.

It's probably because of the focus on youth that these books are so very bluntly sexual; people have and talk about sex in proportion to how much a part of life it actually is, unlike many books, especially those about this time period (but this was written in 1990). The writing is lovely; some blunt, irrelevant statements somehow sum up entire scenes. Like this one--it may not work out of context, but it's a bit funny nonetheless. They're talking about having lusted after Botticelli's Venus when they were fifteen or so.

Hubert said, "Rubbish," and lay back, stretching his legs towards the fire. For a while neither spoke. Hubert's glass rested empty on his chest; Cosmo let his drop to the floor. Presently, rallying thought from far away, he said: "It wasn't a cockleshell the Venus was standing in, it was a scallop."

Hubert said, "Of course, how silly of me. It was a scallop."

So this was a lovely, satisfying, very real and imperfect book. I'm glad it didn't suffer from my slow reading of it.

Musing

Yes, I missed Friday's Ephemera. Yes, I have not reviewed (or finished) a book in three weeks. I blame this failing partly on the start of a new quarter, partly on my recent preoccupation with, basically, thinking about what I want to be when I grow up, partly on simple laziness.

I have been reading, somewhat. I finally got back to the Obama book I was supposed to have read last quarter, and I'm even getting towards the end of it. I started one of the books I bought around Christmas, Mary Wesley's A Sensible Life, though it's been over a week since I read any more of it. I've also been reading the first draft of Sam Starbuck's new novel, Charitable Getting, which is being posted here chapter by chapter. It's very good, and very different from Nameless (which I reviewed here) and his other novels. And very entertainingly influenced by real life.

Once again I find it interesting how my reading comes in waves. Periods of inhaling books followed by barely reading anything, occasionally a steady plodding through one book (as with The Children's Book) in between. I know not everyone reads like this; for some, no amount of life can prevent always working on a book. I used to be one of those people. I think part of this change is that I relate to books differently than I used to. While books are still very important to me, I don't think reading is so integral to my personality as it once was. I'm made up of more parts now. I don't mind that aspect of the change, having more hobbies and interests and facets, but I do mind that I'm not such a voracious reader as I used to be. I often feel like I'm wasting time that could be spent reading. I kind of wonder if I'm reading the wrong books, if my interests have changed but my reading choices haven't caught up.

Enough musing, though. There's a nice comfortable bean bag chair in my room now, and one of those pretty star-shaped lamps above it, so I've finally got a good place to read without having to go too far afield. And maybe that's what I should be doing.

The loot

This seems to have been the Christmas of books. I got eight books as presents, and bought four others in the days before Christmas. I'd better get reading.I bought three of these at Goodwill, and one in a lovely little bookshop in Pike Place Market. The only other Barbara Pym I've read was Some Tame Gazelle. Civil to Strangers is her last novel and various shorter works. Mary Wesley is the author of The Camomile Lawn, which I read in February. I've never read any Umberto Eco, but I had a feeling he'd have interesting things to say about literature; this book is a collection of his essays. And I've never read Penelope Lively, but thought I ought to.Most of these books came from my father, who dearly loves to buy me books (and he's good at it, too). I read Bill Bryson's book The Mother Tongue last summer, so I know whatever he says about Shakespeare will be pretty fascinating. Bardisms sounds entertaining, mostly as reference or novelty; it seems to be separated into sections like "Shakespeare on Fathers," "Shakespeare on Parties," and so on. I know there's a story about why my father decided I needed to read Parnassus on Wheels, by Christopher Morley, but I can't remember it. My mum got me that copy of Pride and Prejudice (which makes my total copies up to three if you count the collected works) purely because it's so beautiful; it's leather-bound. And The Children's Book, which I'm sure you remember me reading, because it's one of those books that I just want to own. Now I get to go back and replace all the post-its I had to take out of the library copy. The book below it, which you probably can't read the title of, is Authentic Victorian Dressmaking Techniques. I do need to do some more sewing, maybe that will help get me into the mood. Victorian Visitors sounds quite fascinating. It's non-fiction, and I have a feeling it's going to be the kind of non-fiction I find utterly absorbing. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, on the bottom, is apparently about the Salem witch trials, alternating stories between modern day and the 17th century.

So my to-read stack has just about doubled in size, but what the hell. I'm looking forward to it all.

The Cazalet clan

I finished reading The Light Years yesterday, and quite liked it, enough that I've already ordered the next book in the series from the library. I'm going to quote a bit of it, which is a lot of what I like. This paragraph comes as they are listening to Neville Chamberlain's radio address about whether there is going to be a war (we're in 1938). And it's very long, so I'm abridging it.

'He looked first at his mother: the Duchy sat absolutely straight with her eyes fixed upon the radio as though Mr. Chamberlain was in the room and speaking to her personally. "How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing." He looked at his sister who was reclining on the sofa with Sid sitting on the arm at her feet. They seemed not to be looking at each other, but Sid suddenly handed an ash tray to Rachel to stub out her cigarette. "I would not hesitate to pay even a third visit to Germany if I thought it would do any good." He looked at Polly and Clary, side by side on the floor, arms around their knees: Polly was frowning and biting her bottom lip; Clary, his own daughter, was watching her and as he looked, she rocked her knees so that they touched Polly's. Polly looked up and a tiny smile flitted across Clary's face inhabiting it with such encouragement and love that he was struck by her beauty, felt dazzled and shut his eyes.... Zoe was sitting on the windowsill behind Angela. He blew her a kiss and her look of anxiety softened to unexpected gratitude--an expression he had only ever seen on her face when he gave her a present. He reached his father just as the broadcast came to an end.'

This has certain qualities of a film montage, it's so vivid and lovely, but it is, in a way, better than film. I love how it's this concrete piece of history, but all mixed in with these characters being very distinctly themselves, and their reactions to each other and to the history.

The book begins in the summer of 1937, switches between the numerous members of the Cazalet family, three generations, not to mention their servants and friends. The heads of the family, fondly called the Duchy and the Brig, have a house in Sussex called Home Place, where all their children and grandchildren spend their summer holidays. We see 1937, then skip to the summer of 1938, when everyone returns to Home Place. The cast of characters is enormous, yet every one of them is extremely well defined, and their relationships to each other fascinating.

The melodrama I mentioned earlier as being rather present in the miniseries was not at all in the book. Unlike The Camomile Lawn, another World War II book and miniseries, it definitely feels worth it to both read it and see it. In that book it felt like a novelization of a movie, almost, in that the fact of its being written down didn't really make it more interesting or better. It wasn't poorly written, it just wasn't interestingly written, either. Elizabeth Jane Howard, however, is a lovely writer, with the above quoted paragraph being one of my favourite examples of this.

I'm very much looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

Camomile in Cornwall

Yesterday I finished reading The Camomile Lawn, by Mary Wesley, another in my series of war/post-war books. There's a miniseries adaptation of it, which I saw first, and then I wanted to read the book so much I got it interlibrary-loaned. Having now read it, I find that the film is extraordinarily faithful to the book. There were some points where the dialogue was so much the same that it seemed ever so slightly pointless to read the book at all, but writing was so lovely that this feeling never lasted long.
The book begins in 1939, in Cornwall, where Helena and Richard Cuthbertson live with their niece, Sophy. Every summer all their other nieces and nephews--Polly, Calypso, Walter, and Oliver--come to stay, and this summer all of them except Sophy, who is 10, are on the verge of adulthood. Add to this mix of characters the twins, Paul and David, sons of the town Rector, two Austrian refugees, Max and Monika Erstweiler, and the various other people who attach themselves to the group throughout the story. We follow them through the war, as th

ey all grow up, have sex, fall in love, and enjoy themselves immensely despite the air raids. As we get further on through the book, more and more glimpses of the characters 40 years later appear, on their way to the funeral of one of the central members of their group.

The writing always has a certain quality of memory, in the way some things can only be described by vague, skirting words that talk about the thing without saying so. The dialogue is often quite hilarious and snappy, and sometimes very, very blunt, and the characters are a lovely mix of reality and very real ridiculousness, and all of them very individual. It was for some reason a really addictive book, even though I knew exactly how it would end.

War and Post-War and Background War

My reading seems to be hovering around the '40s and '50s, lately. I'm not sure how that happened. I'm still working on Someone at a Distance, which is set in the '50s, I think, and also The Dud Avocado, '50s. Yesterday, not being in the mood to read either, I started The Story of a Marriage, set in 1953, and then The Camomile Lawn came home from the library, and that's set during World War II, and of course I had to start that too, so here I am, lurking about in England, France, and San Francisco with air raids, rations, and the ends of them.

I just finished The Story of a Marriage, which is by Andrew Sean Greer. It was one of the books in Dovegreyreader's Christmastime book draws, which I entered, and at some point late in December or possibly early in January it came in the mail, all the way from England. It took me a while to get around to it, but now that I have I love it totally. I think this is one of those books that I just so happened to read at the perfect time, where I felt in reading it as though I could insert my own muddled thoughts into the story and they would not be amiss.

It's set in San Francisco in 1953, and that's another way in which this is well timed--I was in San Francisco briefly six months ago, and it was a city that made a strange impression on me, and it helped me see the backdrop of the story perfectly. Even had I not known what it looked like I think the book would have provided the feel, but it was doubly clear (or foggy, as the case may be in that city by the sea) having been there. It's not one of those stories where the setting is it's own character, but it is a story that would be vastly different had it taken place somewhere else.

Pearlie Cook is a wife and a mother, and she begins her story by saying, "We think we know the ones we love." She spends the rest of her story discovering how much she doesn't know them and they don't know her, although she doesn't always find out entirely what she doesn't know. It is a book full of very powerful images and associations, the kind of book that can, with a sentence, bring to mind a strong feeling of something, even though it is an indescribable and inexplicable feeling that cannot possibly be summed up in just one sentence.

The book didn't just bring up those kinds of associations though--though it is definitely its own book and quite an individual one, it reminded me a lot of other authors in certain places. In the beginning, the characters sounded a lot like characters Sam Starbuck would write, something in their speech patterns or their personalities. He's a writer who is currently only self-published, mostly online, whose writing I love vastly. His original novels live here. Later on in the book, I stopped being reminded of him, and began to be reminded for completely inexplicable reasons of Geek Love. Something about the mood, I think. Sunlight.

Anyway, I'm very glad this book came my way; it's lovely.