A story of love

Love, Elizabeth von Arnim

The Enchanted April was my introduction to Elizabeth von Arnim last year, and she became one of my literary crushes.  I added several of her books to the TBR pile, but I've only now got around to reading this one.  From the back cover blurb of Love, I knew the basic premise: an older woman's relationship with a younger man.  From glancing at the introduction, I learned about Elizabeth von Arnim's own affair with a man thirty years her junior.  From reading some of her other books, I was expecting a comic, perhaps cynical version of a May-December affair.  But to my surprise, this book turned out to be nothing like what I expected.  As the title suggests, it is a story of love.

Catherine and Christopher meet at a play that draws small but fanatical audiences who learn to recognize fellow devotées.  The first time they notice each other, it is her fifth visit, and his 32nd.  Four performances later, Christopher moves to sit beside her, and in the intervals they talk.  He is half in love with her before he ever learns her name, or anything about her.  While he knows that she is older than he is, he takes no notice of that.  Catherine, who has a good idea just how much older she is, can't help but be flattered by his attentions.  A widow with a married daughter, she hardly takes them seriously, enjoying his company and his devotion, until she realizes that he has fallen in love with her.  When neither her true age (47 to his 25) nor the existence of her grown-up married daughter bring Christopher to his senses, Catherine tries to break things off with him.  But he simply refuses to accept that.  In a moment of passion, his kiss shocks Catherine into recognizing her own feelings, but also brings a sense of shame, of impropriety.

Fleeing both Christopher and her feelings, she seeks refuge with her daughter Virginia, now living with her husband Stephen at the family's home in Chickover, which she inherited on her father's death, and pregnant with her first child.  Stephen Colquhoun, the rector of the parish, is himself a year older than Catherine, making him thirty years older than his wife.  This May-December pairing is a happy and passionate one, with Stephen very much the dominant partner.  It is also a very private one.  While Stephen's mother lives in the village and is a frequent visitor, none of the three is pleased to see Catherine, who cannot explain why she has fled to her old home.  Stephen travels to London on the weekends to preach a series of sermons on Love, the focus of which is marital love, infused with his own late emotional development.  It is painfully obvious, though, both to Catherine and the reader, that whatever he or Virginia says about love, there is little room in their hearts or their life for her.  When Christopher rides unexpectedly to the rescue, on a motor-cycle with a side-car, Catherine cannot resist returning to London with him, however inappropriate Stephen and his mother may consider it.  This journey, seemingly such a simple one, will lead to their marriage, and further complications in their relationship, and in Catherine's with her family.

I was constantly surprised by the turns that the story took.  I was also surprised by how invested I found myself in Catherine and Christopher, and even in Virginia, how strongly I wanted things to go well for them.  I found myself peeking ahead, something I rarely do.  Catherine is a very sympathetic character, a good person who desperately wants to do the right thing.  She has spent her life caring for her husband and her child, cheerfully accepting her place in the background.  She makes the best of her widowhood, which under her husband's will left her only £500 a year and a London flat while her daughter inherited everything else, including her home.  In London, even in her reduced circumstances, she has re-discovered relations and found friends, and life seems to be opening out before her in a quiet way suited to her age and circumstances - and then she meets Christopher, who opens her life up in unquiet and unsuitable ways. 

In this book Elizabeth von Arnim is exploring more than just romantic love, though that takes center stage with the two very different couples and their relationships.  She also focuses on love between parents and children, from both points of view.  In addition, she considers how love is expressed, how it is made real, how it is lived.  The contrast between what Stephen preaches about love, and how he practices it toward everyone but his wife and mother, could not be clearer.  Virginia is torn between her love for her mother and her husband, particularly Stephen's disapproval of Catherine and Christopher.  They in turn face the challenges of most marriages, moving from the ecstasies of courtship to the practicalities of married life.

Love was published in 1925 but feels very topical in 2012.  May-December romances are of course common in stories, and now in celebrity culture, though an older woman-younger man pairing still draws more attention and comment than the reverse (I would be very glad if I never again hear the word "cougar" applied to a woman).  Reading Love reminded me of Dorothy Dunnett's Nicholas de Fleury, whose first marriage is almost as complicated and unwelcome as Christopher's.  Stephen made me think particularly of all the film pairings I find most uncomfortable, like Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon (she was so frequently paired with much older men, and Cary Grant was supposedly embarrassed by it in Charade).  There is something a little creepy about Stephen's history with Virginia:

"[He] had had his thoughtful eye on Virginia from the beginning.  When he went there she was five and he was thirty-four. Dear little child; he played with her. Presently she was fifteen, and he was forty-four. Sweet little maid; he prepared her for confirmation. Again presently she was eighteen, and he was forty-seven. Touching young bud of womanhood; he proposed to her." 

I couldn't help thinking of Mr. Knightley in Jane Austen's Emma, but after all he is a far different (and better) person than Stephen, and the difference in age and experience isn't as great.

As much as I wanted a happy ending, particularly for Catherine and Christopher, von Arnim doesn't give us one.  The ending is ambiguous, and we are left to write our own.  I do worry about the fate of one character introduced in the last pages; I fear his future at Chickover will be bleak.

Jane Austen and crime

Jane Austen & Crime, Susannah Fullerton

Jane Austen & Crime is one of those books that make me see Jane Austen and her works in a very different light.  Like Maggie Lane in Jane Austen and Food, or Irene Collins' Jane Austen and the Clergy, Susannah Fullerton explores an aspect of the Georgian period through Austen's life and her writings.  These books remind me that, as much as I enjoy the novels, the Letters, and the Minor Works, I don't know enough about the context in which she was was writing, the every-day things that made up her world and that inform the worlds of her novels.  Even more than the biographies of Jane Austen, these books enrich my reading of her books.

Before reading this book, the only crime I could think of in Austen's novels was the theft of turkeys in Emma.  I had read about her aunt Jane Leigh Perrot, who in 1799 was accused of stealing a piece of lace worth 20 shillings from a shop in Bath.  If convicted, she could have faced the death penalty, though it is likely she would have been sentenced to transportation instead, but fortunately she was found innocent.  A later Austen connection was not so lucky.  John Knatchbull, the brother-in-law of favorite niece Fanny Austen Knight, was hung in Sydney in 1844, for murder committed in the course of a robbery.  Fullerton doesn't tell us how this news impacted the Austen or Knatchbull families.  In 1811, Jane wrote to Cassandra, "I give you joy of our new nephew [Frank Austen's second son], & hope if he ever comes to be hanged, it will not be till we are too old to care about it."  By 1844, Jane had been dead more than 25 years; Cassandra would die the next year, perhaps before the news even reached England.

After introducing us to John Knatchbull, Fullerton goes on to a general discussion of crime in the Georgian period.  She then looks at several categories of crime, such as those against life and property, crimes of passion, social and Gothic crimes.  She ends with a discussion of punishment and the law.  She has chapters on specific crimes like murder and suicide (against life), adultery and elopement (passion), and poaching and dueling (social).  Much of the information was new to me, and the details are fascinating.  I had no idea that in Austen's time, half the prisons in England were privately owned and operated.  Among the owners were the Bishops of Ely and Durham, the Dukes of Portland and Leeds.  From the chapter on poaching I learned that there were strict controls on who could hunt game, including a property qualification that essentially limited shooting to the rich and landed.  There was also a qualification for owning sporting dogs, as well as a dog tax.  In Sense and Sensibility, Willoughby's pointer is actually a status symbol, as are Charles Musgrove's dogs in Persuasion.  Fullerton argues that Austen disagreed with the draconian laws against poaching, which cut the poor off from an important food supply.  She points to Mr. Rushton in Sense and Sensibility, who is fanatical about catching poachers, suggesting that by making "the most stupid character [Austen] ever created" the anti-poaching poster child, Austen was actually signalling her disagreement with his ideas.

Fullerton also argues that Austen dealt with crime much more lightly in the Minor Works and in her early letters, while the novels and later letters show a more thoughtful approach.

 "As a young writer she employed elopements for comic purposes - the juvenalia are full of hilarious elopements . . . The more mature Jane Austen however, puts eloping couples through serious tests of character . . . Sexual immorality and the deliberate flouting of social rules are no longer funny and characters can no longer escape unpunished after such behaviour."

I particularly enjoyed Fullerton's frequent citations and quotes from the Minor Works, many of which were unfamiliar to me - and really funny.  In the section on elopements, she quotes from "A Collection of Letters" one from a "Miss Jane," who confesses to a friend that after eloping she kept her marriage a secret even after her husband's death:  "My Children, two sweet Boys & a Girl, who had constantly resided with my Father & me, passing with him & with every one as the Children of a Brother (tho' I had ever been an only child) . . ."  Clearly, it's time for a re-read of the juvenalia, though Fullerton's book makes me want to re-read all the novels, looking for crime and the criminals.  As she reminds us in her conclusion, "The woman who once wrote: 'Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked' very deliberately included crime in her fictional world."

St. Winifred's bones

The Holy Thief, Ellis Peters

I was home sick yesterday and I just wanted a good comfortable book.  Ever since I read Abelard and Heloise's letters, I've been thinking about the medieval mysteries of Sharan Newman and Ellis Peters, since both series begin in monasteries in the 1130s.  Luckily I still had The Holy Thief on the TBR pile.  Set in 1144, this is the 19th book in the "Chronicles of Brother Cadfael."  I had a vague idea that the later books don't quite stand up to the earlier ones, but this one is as good as any in the series, in my opinion.

The story opens with the arrival of two monks at the Abbey of Sts. Peter & Paul in Shrewsbury.  They are from the Abbey of Ramsey, which was seized and despoiled by the Earl of Essex, her monks scattered.  On his death-bed, the excommunicated but repentant Earl returned Ramsey to the Church.  The brothers have come to beg alms and assistance in rebuilding their foundation.  Shrewsbury is generous, even in the midst of heavy rains that bring floodwaters into the Abbey church itself, forcing the monks to move their goods and treasures to higher ground.  Their greatest treasure is a silver-chased reliquary housing the bones of the Welsh St. Winifred.  It is only after the Ramsey monks have departed with their alms and donated supplies that the Shrewsbury community realizes their saint is missing.  They immediately suspect that she was smuggled out in the wagon-load of goods headed to Ramsey.  The reliquary will fall into other hands before it returns to Shrewsbury, and murder will follow theft.  As usual, Cadfael and his friend Hugh Beringar, the Sheriff of Shropshire, must work together with Abbot Ranulfus to defend the innocent and bring the guilty to justice. 

They are assisted this time by another earl, Robert Beaumont, Earl of Leicester.  Leicester rescues the reliquary at one point, which he feels gives him a claim to it.  The Ramsey monks are anxious in their turn to claim it for their house, since the presence of such a saint's relics will draw pilgrims and gifts to honor the saint, and not incidentally to rebuild the abbey.  Both Leicester and Ramsey argue it was no accident that took St. Winifred from Shrewsbury; clearly she was choosing a new home.  The polite tug of war over her is typical of the medieval period, with its fervent devotion to saints and their relics.  The theft of major relics was not unknown, nor was the outright fabrication of them.  St. Winifred's relics also tie this story back to the very first Cadfael book, A Morbid Taste for Bones, where he joins a group from the Abbey setting off for Wales, in search of this very saint.  But (spoiler alert) the reliquary they bring back will have a very different body inside.  No one but Cadfael (and the reader) knows this, and since through the saint's intercession miracles occur around the reliquary, no one suspects.  But what if the secret is revealed?  What if St. Winifred chooses to honor Ramsey with her reliquary, instead of Shrewsbury?  I think Peters really captures the medieval belief in saints and their relics, as alien or superstitious as it may seem to 21st century readers.  But there are also moments of supernatural presence, and action, which make me wonder just what Ellis Peters herself believed.

A welcome return to Lafferton

The Betrayal of Trust, Susan Hill

I had a very long wait for this book, the sixth of Susan Hill's Simon Serrailler novels.  Last year I read the five previous books over the course of several months, and I had just posted about the last (The Shadows in the Street) when I saw a new book advertised on her website.  I immediately put in an order.  This was in July 2011, the book was published in November, and due to some mix-up it arrived in the mail just last week.  Since it was on order last year I figure it still counts under the TBR challenge.

And I have to say, this book was worth the wait.  It opens with a storm sweeping through Lafferton and the surrounding areas, flooding the streets and bringing down trees.  In clearing the storm debris washed down from the Moor, a clean-up crew finds human bones.  They are quickly identified as the remains of Harriet Lowther, a school-girl who disappeared sixteen years ago.  Then another set of bones are discovered in the same area, another female.  Simon is set to working what is a very cold case, though no one has forgotten Harriet.

Susan Hill does two things differently in this book.  This is the first in the series that doesn't involve a serial killer.  As I mentioned in my review of The Shadows in the Streets, Lafferton has had an unusual number of them.  Here Hill has written what I think of as a more traditional mystery with a central case to solve, and she does it brilliantly.  We really get to see Simon investigating, and to compare how investigations have changed in the years since Harriet disappeared.  For one thing, budgets have been slashed, leaving Simon without a team, forcing him to take on much of the work himself.  This means we get to see much more of Simon than in previous books, with more access to his thoughts and feelings.  Though these books are referred to as "Simon Serrailler novels," to my mind this is the first book that really focuses on Simon.  In addition to the case, the determinedly-single Simon meets someone, and he is more open with this person than with anyone else, even his sister Cat.  The relationship faces some major obstacles, including I think Simon's own state of mind and heart, and I am very interested to see where Hill takes it.  I do hope it won't be like his last attempt at a relationship, the fate of which we learned from a postcard sent to his sister (a disappointing anti-climax).

Simon and his case are not the only focus of the book.  In the first chapter, in addition to Simon, we see Cat at her farmhouse, worrying that her lodger Molly is caught out in the storm.  Molly, a medical student, helps care for Cat's three children, in addition to shadowing Cat.  We also meet a patient of Cat's, Jocelyn Forbes, an older woman living alone.  Jocelyn has developed some troubling symptoms that are later diagnosed as motor neuron disease (better known in the US as ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease).  Her father died of this at a young age, and she is determined not to suffer its effects as he did.  In between chapters on Simon's investigation, and the progress (or not) of his relationship, we follow Jocelyn as she looks into options for assisted suicide, and Cat in her work at the hospice she helps run.  We also meet Lenny, a retired teacher, who must find care for her partner Olive, suffering from dementia, who is finally placed in a new care facility near Lafferton.  There is a lot going on here as the story shifts around this large cast, with chapters from their different points of view.  Hill carries us through it on her characters, which I think is one of her greatest strengths as a writer.  She makes these people three-dimensional, and I came to care about them.  I had no idea how Jocelyn would connect to Simon's case - though I had a good idea about Lenny - but I wanted to find out what happened next, what decisions she would make.  I did miss Cat, my favorite character in the series, who plays less of a role in this one.

I have only one real quibble with this book: the ending.  Simon solves the case, but he decides there is no case to answer.  "There are no witnesses and it's too long ago for there to be any forensic evidence," he tells one of the perpetrators.  This person has just confessed, though, and there is in fact a witness, whose belated evidence cracks the case.  The families of the two victims presumably have to be told what happened, what Simon discovered, as do his superiors.  In a case that garnered national publicity, it is hard to believe that he could make that decision, that it would even be possible.  An amateur detective like Peter Wimsey could - though Peter would never let a murderer go free - but an officer of the law can't, can he?  Isn't that the decision of the courts, the Crown Prosecutor?

A baker's holiday

Cooking the Books, Kerry Greenwood

When I signed up for the TBR Double-dare, this was the only new book that I claimed an exemption for. I found out too late about two other books published the very same day, both eagerly-awaited, C.S Harris's When Maidens Mourn  (the latest in a series of Regency mysteries)  and Naomi Novik's Crucible of Gold  (the latest in a series sometimes described as Patrick O'Brian with dragons).  Both are now sitting right here as I type, tempting me.

It's been a long wait for Cooking the Books, the sixth in Kerry Greenwood's series of Corinna Chapman books.  The last, Forbidden Fruits, came out in 2010, and the North American release of this new book comes months after it was published last year in Australia.  Having to wait for this book made me realize again how spoiled I have become, with the global reach of internet buying.

Cooking the Books is a welcome addition to the series.  Set in Melbourne, they feature Corinna, who gave up a career in accounting to become a master bread baker.  She has a very successful bakery called Earthly Delights, and in her spare time she solves crimes with her stunning Israeli partner Daniel, a private investigator.  Corinna lives above her shop, which is on the ground floor of Insula, an apartment building modeled on one from ancient Rome.  The other tenants, some of whom also own businesses in the ground-floor shops, are sometimes clients and sometimes partners in investigation.  They form a surrogate family, and it is always a pleasure to meet them, and their cats, again.

This book actually takes Corinna out of her familiar setting for much of the story.  It opens just after Christmas, when the bakery is closed for a month-long holiday.  A request from an old school friend, which quickly turns into friendly blackmail, leads Corinna to accept a temporary job as a baker for a catering company.  The company is providing the food for a film crew working on a TV soap about a wedding planning business.  Daniel, meanwhile, is helping a young intern at a financial company who has mislaid a set of bearer bonds worth $1 million.  When Corinna discovers that someone at the studio is playing vicious pranks on the Joan Collins-esque star, Daniel is brought in to investigate that as well, and as usual the cases begin to overlap.  In addition to the familiar characters, there is the cast and crew of the soap, as well as the caterers, and all the backstage drama they bring.  Corinna and Daniel also spend a lot of time out and about in Melbourne, tracking a mysterious set of clues, based in nursery rhymes and songs, to locate the bearer bonds.

I have enjoyed every book in this series.  I suppose they would qualify as cozy, since there is little violence, though the urban setting is anything but pastoral.  Corinna's apprentice Jason is a former street kid, a recovering addict, and in this book as in others the city's homeless play an important part in the story.  On the other hand, the surrogate family of the tenants makes Insula a refuge.  Corinna, a zaftig woman comfortable with herself, is someone I'd love to sit down and have a cup of tea with, and I'd really like to wander into her shop for some of her bread.  I am always hungry reading these books (Greenwood includes recipes in the afterwords and on her website).  We could definitely chat about books over tea, since Corinna is a fan of Georgette Heyer, Patrick O'Brian and Terry Pratchett, among others (not to mention Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who).

A Most Unforgettable Character

Auntie Mame, Patrick Dennis

When Auntie Mame was published in 1955, it spent 112 weeks on the best-seller lists.  As I was reading it, I kept thinking, "Could he say that in 1955?"  The fact that Patrick Dennis could, and the book would sell more than 2 million copies in the next four years, challenged some of my ideas of America in the 1950s.  What in the world did those readers make of Mame saying, "I could be out at Fire Island with some of the most amusing boys..."  or a character who is described as having "laid everything but the Atlantic Cable" ?  I couldn't find any mention of bans or boycotts of the book, though I can't imagine it made too many church-sanctioned reading lists.

I also can't imagine how I missed reading this book for so many years.  I've watched a few minutes here and there of the 1958 film version.  While I love Rosalind Russell, no actress could fully capture a character like Mame, and here again I have to advance the Purist Principle that "The Book is Always Better."

As the story opens, Patrick Dennis is inspired by an old issue of Reader's Digest, which included a regular feature on the Most Unforgettable Character the writer had ever met. 

"That stopped me. Unforgettable Character?  Why, that writer hasn't met anybody! He couldn't know what the word character meant unless he'd met my Auntie Mame. Nobody could. Yet there were certain parallels between his Unforgettable Character and mine. His Unforgettable Character was a sweet little New England spinster who lived in a sweet little white clapboard house and opened her sweet little green door one morning expecting to find the Hartford Courant. Instead she found a sweet little wicker basket, with a sweet little baby boy inside. The rest of the article went on to tell how that Unforgettable Character took the baby in and raised it as her own.  Well, that's when I put the Digest down and got to thinking about the sweet little lady who raised me."

Patrick, who becomes an orphan at the age of 10 when his father dies in 1929, is left to the care of a guardian, his aunt Mame Dennis, under the supervision of the Knickerbocker Trust Company.  The trustees are there to ensure that Patrick is "raised as a Protestant and . . . sent to conservative schools."  He travels with the family's Irish servant Norah from Chicago to New York.  They arrive at Mame's apartment in the midst of a party, but when Mame finally works out who they are, her welcome is instantaneous: "'But darling,' she said dramatically, 'I'm your Auntie Mame!' She put her arms around me and kissed me, and I knew I was safe."  Patrick says later that "For both of us it was love, and the experience was unique."

That bond endures through the adventures and the mishaps that follow over the next fifteen years, including lengthy separations.  Mame, ignoring her brother's directions as to schooling, enrolls Patrick in a progressive school where the students and teachers wear no clothes, and the day often ends with a game where the boys play male fish fertilizing eggs laid by the girl-fish.  Unfortunately Patrick's trustee Mr. Babcock arrives one afternoon in the middle of the game, yanks him out of that school, and after blasting Mame ("No more fit to raise a child than Jezebel!"), drags Patrick off to a hellish private boarding school, St. Boniface Academy in Apathy, Massachusetts.

Some of their adventures are hilarious and quite racy, as when Mame takes in an unwed mother and decides to spend the last months of the pregnancy in Apathy, so Patrick will be on hand to run errands and make a fourth at bridge.  She allows her guest to register in the small town's most prominent hotel as "Mrs. Patrick Dennis."  In another escapade, as a college student, Patrick starts a torrid affair with a waitress from New Joisey, Bubbles, who insists that he take her to the Junior Prom at his Ivy League university.  Trying to keep Bubbles under wraps, Patrick is horrified to find Mame also in attendance at the Prom, the date of one of his friends (twenty years her junior).  There is also an emotional depth, though, in large part because of the bond between Mame and Patrick. Some of the adventures have a serious side, as when Mame loses her fortune in the Crash of 1929.  Her attempts to find work alternate between hilarious and heart-breaking, and I was reminded of Betty MacDonald's Anybody Can Do Anything, which also chronicles a search for work in the depths of the Depression.

"Patrick Dennis" is the nom de plume of Edward Everett Tanner III, who was a pretty unforgettable character in his own right.  There is a biography of him called Uncle Mame that is going on my post-TBR reading list, and I'll be looking for the other novels that he wrote as Patrick Dennis.

The Classics Challenge: March with Henry Fielding

Tom Jones, Henry Fielding

This is the third month of the Classics Challenge, hosted by Katherine at November's Autumn.  The prompt this round involves the setting, with questions like "How has the author introduced the setting?" or "If this particular setting was changed how would it affect the course of the story?"

I am just over half-way through Tom Jones.  As I mentioned elsewhere, when I found myself starting to count the pages left to read, I decided to take a break from it.  But I do want to get back to it, and I'm hoping that writing about it will remind me what a great, entertaining book it is, and get me reading it again.

The setting of this story shifts constantly, as it follows different characters.  Though Fielding will sometimes describe a setting in some detail, he seems much less interested in his settings than in the characters who inhabit them.  Fielding spends most of the second chapter in Book I introducing us to the wise, noble and fatherly Squire Allworthy, who discovers the infant Tom Jones in his own bed.  His house in Somerset, where much of the early action takes place, is described in greater detail than any other setting, but only from the outside:

"The Gothic style of building could produce nothing nobler than Mr Allworthy's house. There was an air of grandeur in it that struck you with awe . . . It stood on the south-east side of a hill . . . In the midst of the grove was a fine lawn, sloping down towards the house, near the summit of which rose a plentiful spring . . . The left-hand scene presented the view of a very fine park . . ."

The story soon moves to a village where Tom's mother Jenny Jones lived prior to Tom's birth, then back to Mr Allworthy's house.  Next it shifts to the house of the neighboring Squire Western, where we learn much more about him and his daughter Sophia than about the house, though Tom is actually in residence there for some time.  When a misunderstanding with Mr Allworthy, and a conflict with Squire Western, force Tom to leave his home, to make his own way in the world, the story takes a picaresque turn as he decides to follow the drum as a soldier.  Traveling north to fight against the Jacobins, he meets various adventures with a large and colorful cast of characters.  Here again the characters and the action are the focus of the different episodes, rather than the settings.  I see from the next book that Tom is headed to London.  It will be interesting to see what Fielding makes of that setting.  In Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, his detailed descriptions of the areas where Moll lived and worked made me feel like I was following her through the streets.