Assorted adults
Jun. 7th, 2009 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI saw George Bernard Shaw's play Heartbreak House the other night, a good production of a play that I didn't love, but liked a lot and which had a number of bits that snag in the memory. It has a lot of interesting points to make about power, as it plays out in British society, and a neat tendency to avoid (or invert) the obvious conclusion. It was written before WWI, a conflict Shaw adamantly opposed, and the ending is tragic-comic and apocalyptic all at once.
Anyway. These three books are also British, also interesting, and also, as with Heartbreak House, indelibly marked by WWI, but I don't think any of them will linger the same way as the play did - they're smoother, somehow, and my attention slides off them.
A.S. Byatt, The children's book. Three children meet in what will become the Victoria & Albert museum, in 1895; the book ends in 1919, with one of those children on-stage, another alive but distant, and the third gone forever… In between, the book follows three families, and those they pull in around them; the central parents are Olive and Humphrey Wellwood, a children’s writer and her socialist/Fabian (and appallingly selfish) husband. Olive writes fairy stories, English fairy tales, and also writes a story for each of her children, kept in their own private book. Some of her stories make their way into the text, and some of the children’s private stories are picked over for her other deadlines and commitments, with problematic results.
A lot of this is about art – writing, pottery, puppetry, the museum’s collections; the crafts movements of William Morris and others, with their focus on getting back to a particular sort of nature. House parties are elaborate but informal, with costumes and plays, and a casual incorporation of the children into activities while they are allowed to run wild at other times – there are explicit references to Edith Nesbit’s books, and Kenneth Graham’s The Golden Age, about a similar group of children. But adult concerns, and adult secrets, shoulder into the narrative far more here, particularly round issues of family identity and sex, and all the sanctuaries the children create are eventually destroyed.
Bits of this work better for me than others – I enjoyed reading it, it’s well-written and there are some really nice moments, but it never really blew me away. I really liked Dorothy’s meeting with her father, and how this plays out for all of them, but Violet’s story gets lost (I know this is part of the point, but it still made it hard for me to care) and Tom feels too doomed – I would prefer this sort of character to have at least a chance of finding some escape that then gets crushed (which is probably nastier of me, but I was thinking of the schoolboy in Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy as a comparable but more emotionally involving character). Philip and his sister Elsie I liked, but some of it's just having them as something different. Also, what I like about Nesbit's stories is the groundedness of her characters, about how they have to fit magic into their everyday lives (particularly in the stories set in London) - the stories here are in unspecified rural areas, and the magic similarly woolly.
The rapid recital of deaths in the closing segments, as we go through WWI, also felt rushed and voyeuristic. I suppose that for anything that chronicles the fall from a golden Edwardian age, the first world war has to act as an end, but it felt a bit under-served here. I would have liked more of Dorothy as one of the women’s medical corps (possibly influenced by my earlier reading about Dr Elsie Inglis) or else less – catching up with each character for a few paragraphs or pages, at the end of which they were either dead or injured, felt obvious in a way that telegrams or newspaper announcements mightn’t.
I like the entangling of the family with German characters, and how this plays out, but it means there’s a slightly odd gap in terms of Empire – Geraint gets offered a job in India, but doesn’t go, and the Boer war is presented largely in terms of white vs white. Japanese art gets the occasional mention (and there are other “exotic” countries exhibiting in Paris), but all the activism is internal, focussing on England’s own (presumably white) poor.
The point of view is interesting – I suppose it’s technically third person omniscient, but it only really pulls back to discuss historical progress, and then only at very restricted places (e.g. section beginnings). Mostly, otherwise, it’s head-hopping, but in a controlled enough fashion that I don’t feel jerked around.
R.F. Delderfield, To serve them all my days. I like British boys' boarding school stories, and I like WWI literature, so realising that this was about a teacher who takes up a post at a boarding school after being invalided out of the army in WWI rather than, as I'd hazily guessed from the title, being about a small town priest, got me very interested. Unfortunately, David Powlett-Jones, the teacher, is one of those perfect characters who can not only do no wrong but is truly impressive in the amount he does right. He saves boys from burning to death in the obligatory school fire sequence *and* then rescues another boy from sinking in mud during an inadequately sign-posted cross-country run; I was waiting for the rescuing from drowning section to complete the trifecta, but had to settle for the rehabilitation of an unfairly expelled student instead, as well as the really rather unbelievable sequence in which Powlett-Jones' nemesis, the new headmaster who has taken over from the previous fatherly dispenser of wisdom, dies of an apoplexy rather than write the letter admitting he was wrong to disagree with Powlett-Jones over a school matter. In his private life he is also supplied with women who make things easy for him - there is a tragedy involving his first wife, but again there's an odd lack of ongoing consequences and responsibilities, especially with regard to his surviving daughter, and the letter from the dying ex-girlfriend who refused to marry him informing him that she's sent his (previously unknown) son to his school was also just a tiny bit belief-stretching.
I did enjoy this at times - Powlett-Jones' mining upbringing and the stuff about the general strike was particularly interesting - and I do find the anger over the losses of the war (the book ends with WWII ongoing) convincing, and something I empathise with. I would like to read something else covering the same sort of field, ideally more contemporaneous (this was published in 1972), though.
Pamela Frankau, Slaves of the lamp. Starts in 1937, finishes 1939 (and published 1965); Thomas Weston works at an advertising agency, but has scruples about what he will and won't work on; his brother is a famous actor, his sister a writer traumatised by a recent failed marriage, and Thomas himself has a history of possible psychic powers, connections (via his girlfriend) to faith healers, and a boss with osteoarthritis of the hip prepared to do anything rather than have an operation. Rather self-consciously adult in parts (discussions of heterosexual sex, a possible lesbian relationship that part of me would really rather read as appalling clinginess, because it has that whole inherently doomed dysfunctional ring to it that you get around this time) and yet oddly judgemental in terms of what actually ends up happening to its characters. Interesting social history. And the title had been bothering me with its familiarity - google brings up the Stalky & Co. chapter, which is almost certainly one of the reasons, but I think I may have heard of this specific book before, although I'm not sure where.
Anyway. These three books are also British, also interesting, and also, as with Heartbreak House, indelibly marked by WWI, but I don't think any of them will linger the same way as the play did - they're smoother, somehow, and my attention slides off them.
A.S. Byatt, The children's book. Three children meet in what will become the Victoria & Albert museum, in 1895; the book ends in 1919, with one of those children on-stage, another alive but distant, and the third gone forever… In between, the book follows three families, and those they pull in around them; the central parents are Olive and Humphrey Wellwood, a children’s writer and her socialist/Fabian (and appallingly selfish) husband. Olive writes fairy stories, English fairy tales, and also writes a story for each of her children, kept in their own private book. Some of her stories make their way into the text, and some of the children’s private stories are picked over for her other deadlines and commitments, with problematic results.
A lot of this is about art – writing, pottery, puppetry, the museum’s collections; the crafts movements of William Morris and others, with their focus on getting back to a particular sort of nature. House parties are elaborate but informal, with costumes and plays, and a casual incorporation of the children into activities while they are allowed to run wild at other times – there are explicit references to Edith Nesbit’s books, and Kenneth Graham’s The Golden Age, about a similar group of children. But adult concerns, and adult secrets, shoulder into the narrative far more here, particularly round issues of family identity and sex, and all the sanctuaries the children create are eventually destroyed.
Bits of this work better for me than others – I enjoyed reading it, it’s well-written and there are some really nice moments, but it never really blew me away. I really liked Dorothy’s meeting with her father, and how this plays out for all of them, but Violet’s story gets lost (I know this is part of the point, but it still made it hard for me to care) and Tom feels too doomed – I would prefer this sort of character to have at least a chance of finding some escape that then gets crushed (which is probably nastier of me, but I was thinking of the schoolboy in Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy as a comparable but more emotionally involving character). Philip and his sister Elsie I liked, but some of it's just having them as something different. Also, what I like about Nesbit's stories is the groundedness of her characters, about how they have to fit magic into their everyday lives (particularly in the stories set in London) - the stories here are in unspecified rural areas, and the magic similarly woolly.
The rapid recital of deaths in the closing segments, as we go through WWI, also felt rushed and voyeuristic. I suppose that for anything that chronicles the fall from a golden Edwardian age, the first world war has to act as an end, but it felt a bit under-served here. I would have liked more of Dorothy as one of the women’s medical corps (possibly influenced by my earlier reading about Dr Elsie Inglis) or else less – catching up with each character for a few paragraphs or pages, at the end of which they were either dead or injured, felt obvious in a way that telegrams or newspaper announcements mightn’t.
I like the entangling of the family with German characters, and how this plays out, but it means there’s a slightly odd gap in terms of Empire – Geraint gets offered a job in India, but doesn’t go, and the Boer war is presented largely in terms of white vs white. Japanese art gets the occasional mention (and there are other “exotic” countries exhibiting in Paris), but all the activism is internal, focussing on England’s own (presumably white) poor.
The point of view is interesting – I suppose it’s technically third person omniscient, but it only really pulls back to discuss historical progress, and then only at very restricted places (e.g. section beginnings). Mostly, otherwise, it’s head-hopping, but in a controlled enough fashion that I don’t feel jerked around.
R.F. Delderfield, To serve them all my days. I like British boys' boarding school stories, and I like WWI literature, so realising that this was about a teacher who takes up a post at a boarding school after being invalided out of the army in WWI rather than, as I'd hazily guessed from the title, being about a small town priest, got me very interested. Unfortunately, David Powlett-Jones, the teacher, is one of those perfect characters who can not only do no wrong but is truly impressive in the amount he does right. He saves boys from burning to death in the obligatory school fire sequence *and* then rescues another boy from sinking in mud during an inadequately sign-posted cross-country run; I was waiting for the rescuing from drowning section to complete the trifecta, but had to settle for the rehabilitation of an unfairly expelled student instead, as well as the really rather unbelievable sequence in which Powlett-Jones' nemesis, the new headmaster who has taken over from the previous fatherly dispenser of wisdom, dies of an apoplexy rather than write the letter admitting he was wrong to disagree with Powlett-Jones over a school matter. In his private life he is also supplied with women who make things easy for him - there is a tragedy involving his first wife, but again there's an odd lack of ongoing consequences and responsibilities, especially with regard to his surviving daughter, and the letter from the dying ex-girlfriend who refused to marry him informing him that she's sent his (previously unknown) son to his school was also just a tiny bit belief-stretching.
I did enjoy this at times - Powlett-Jones' mining upbringing and the stuff about the general strike was particularly interesting - and I do find the anger over the losses of the war (the book ends with WWII ongoing) convincing, and something I empathise with. I would like to read something else covering the same sort of field, ideally more contemporaneous (this was published in 1972), though.
Pamela Frankau, Slaves of the lamp. Starts in 1937, finishes 1939 (and published 1965); Thomas Weston works at an advertising agency, but has scruples about what he will and won't work on; his brother is a famous actor, his sister a writer traumatised by a recent failed marriage, and Thomas himself has a history of possible psychic powers, connections (via his girlfriend) to faith healers, and a boss with osteoarthritis of the hip prepared to do anything rather than have an operation. Rather self-consciously adult in parts (discussions of heterosexual sex, a possible lesbian relationship that part of me would really rather read as appalling clinginess, because it has that whole inherently doomed dysfunctional ring to it that you get around this time) and yet oddly judgemental in terms of what actually ends up happening to its characters. Interesting social history. And the title had been bothering me with its familiarity - google brings up the Stalky & Co. chapter, which is almost certainly one of the reasons, but I think I may have heard of this specific book before, although I'm not sure where.
