July Reading

I’ve read PG Wodehouse for the first time. I don’t know what put me off before. Thoroughly enjoyed ‘Thank You, Jeeves.’ I love the lack of description. Somewhere in the book Bertie Wooster describes why he isn’t bothered bunging a whole load of titivation and scene-setting our way and I kind of agreed with him. I love all his free-standing dialogue and the way it all rattles along. I was reading it – somewhat inappropriately – at the Goth conference, between papers and talks.

So this is my attempt to catch up with the month’s reading.

Another new discovery – someone I’d never gone near – was Ngaio Marsh. But I’m trying to fill in some empty stretches in my crime genre reading and found ‘Tied Up In Tinsel’ hilarious. It’s proper Golden Age detective and feels wonderfully pastichey and filled with grotesques. There’s some lovely savage, comic business with a knitting bag early on. I read somewhere that the Marsh books are fun till a third of the way through, until the Inspector turns up, and that was kind of true. There was a wonderful morbid gleefulness about the whole thing.

Noel Streatfeild I hadn’t read before, either. ‘The Growing Summer’ was a Puffin-book find in a charity shop in Lancaster. (I love collecting up elderly, frangible Puffins and rescuing them.) It’s one of those summer-holiday kids’ books, which begins with everyone being taken off Elsewhere – often the coast – and having to muck in and get used to newness. I loved this one. The ludicrous, seemingly uncaring Aunt Dymphna in her man’s hat, and insisting on taking the kids out lobster hunting by the full moon… It’s a wonderful period piece.

Another Puffin saved from the brink – Betsy Byars’ ‘The Cartoonist’ – about a kid who goes to his attic and draws endless comic strips while his family get all dysfunctional downstairs. I’d have loved this as a kid, I just know. As it was, I still revelled it. Line by line her writing is gorgeous – just as Streatfeild’s is, but in a completely different way. It’s casual, swift, filled with non-sequiturs. Her protagonist really thinks like a kid. And Byars makes it seem easy, writing like this.

Something I love: writing that makes it seem like it’s easy. That doesn’t draw undue attention to its own cleverness – it doesn’t have to.

What else? E.F Benson’s autobiography, found for two pounds in that marvellous bookshop on the seafront on Morecambe. (One of the best second hand bookshops in the world.) Lovely story about how Henry James couldn’t recognise people on the street. In Rye he spied a woman tottering towards him. Who she was he had no idea. ‘I made the rest of it into rissoles,’ she told him and sloped off sharply. He was most put out, until later, at home, he remembered she was his cook and she was on about yesterday’s leg of lamb.

Some lovely stuff about bishops and vicars and siblings cracking up and everyone in the family being gay and writing novels all over the place. Benson’s like an old friend. I love how he describes James (his mentor and benefactor) composing a whole novel in his head and walking around with it, carefully packed and ready to offload into the ear of a secretary. The whole book would be ‘creaking beautifully’ like a leather portmanteau.

I was let down by Michelle Lovric’s third Venice novel, ‘The Remedy.’ I loved the first two – the one about the painter who has wild affairs with Casanova and then Byron. And the one about the printing press. But this third one left me a bit cold – possibly because it was overwritten. It felt sticky. And the plot was too twisty-turny for its own good, perhaps. Too long, definitely – but most novels are just now.

The Jojo Moyes novel I’m finishing just now – ‘Foreign Fruit’ – is definitely too long, but it’s held me. A split-level novel set at the seaside (I love seaside books, I realise) in the fifties and the present. It involves characters who for various reasons come to Arcadia, an art deco house on the south seafront. The bohemians in the fifties cause various scandals and in the present the place is being done up as a swish hotel. There are lovely criss-crossing love affairs, intrigues, secrets, all sorts. The best of it is in the evocation of this run-down and small-minded locality. I love the touch of DH Lawrence in the early chapters, when the two girls go to encounter the louche world of Arcadia back in the fifties – they’re like Ursula and Gudrun in ‘Women in Love’ for a chapter or two. Too much time is spent on some of the misery in the present day – Daisy being left with the baby and the decorating business by wet husband Daniel. That strand feels like it could come from any contemporary saga. But on the whole it’s good. I’d read her again. I like the way Moyes will crank things up for the end of a chapter and having Just the Wrong person turn up at Just the Wrong Moment. She does it about three times to great effect. (I wonder if she grew up, like me, enraptured by the episode endings of Dynasty and Dallas? That gorgeous soapiness is here, definitely.)

Anyway – enough! Too long. That’s covered about two weeks of reading. I can’t go through all of it. Just pick out some threads from what I’ve been devouring recently. I’m enjoying books that really take you somewhere and steep you in an atmosphere, but without laying it on too thick. I love characters who are allowed to get larger than life and even turn into parodies… who can suddenly take your breath away by telling the absolute truth. I’m enjoying juicy, succinct dialogue that sounds like I can hear it drifting over from the next table or over the hedge, easy as anything. And I’ve no patience at all with stuff that sounds too composed, too heavy, too fancy for its own good.

Now I’ve got to work out which books to pack to take with me on holiday.