Funkyfacecat’s #CBR5 Review #05 The Matchmaker by Stella Gibbons

Reading The Matchmaker (1950, set just after WWII) is like sitting by a fire-side on a wintry day – it’s beautiful to see the flames and the shadows they cast, it’s warm and comfortable, overlaid with a sense of smugness that one is indoors rather than battling the elements, but occasionally there’s a shower of sparks that wakes you from your indolence and makes you remember that fire can be dangerous, and occasionally it’s just too hot and soporific and you find yourself drifting off with eyes itchy from the smoke.

It’s just after the Second World War in a Britain of rationing and deprivation. Alda’s husband is stationed in Germany, and she’s living in the Sussex country-side in a small cottage with her three children, her few neighbours decent enough people but eccentric to varying degrees. The farmer living down the road has a tightly wound wife, two home-sick Italian prisoners of war working on his land, and then is assigned a Land Girl named Sylvia who dreams of being an actress and dyes her hair. Of these simple enough characters Gibbons built a story that mostly enchants and occasionally irritates, lit with occasionally acidic but mostly empathetic insight into human nature and appreciation of landscape. Alda is the titular match-maker, secure in her thirteen-year marriage with a comfortable sense of being able to manage grown-ups (with the best of intentions) as well as she does her children (who are given their own characters rather than relegated to scenery). Yet people somehow manage slip beyond her plans and forge their own destinies – a grand term, perhaps, for the small sphere of love and country-matters and farm-work that The Matchmaker revolves around, but the characters’ choices matter intensely to themselves and therefore to the reader. Well, me.

The few mis-steps, I think, that The Matchmaker takes (and I’m assuming the novel in general will appeal to people who like English novels set in the country-side which proceed at a leisurely pace) are in the frequency of its descriptions of nature in bloom or in shadow, as seasonally appropriate, and in the descriptions of the deep soulful link some characters have with the earth – Gibbons veers perilously close to the sort of thing she mocks so brilliantly in Cold Comfort Farm at times. Her treatment of class and nationality, as well as her assignation of traits such as melancholy or artistic sensitivity to heredity, can also seem somewhat stereotypical to the modern reader. While Gibbons shows a decided preference for middle-class upwards, she does compare the aristocracy to highly-bred dogs at some point, and the Italians are peasants driven by emotion rather than intellect and the Land Girl is working-class and has a confused notion of socialism, for instance, while one character’s lover is well-bred but fickle and brittle.

It must be remembered that the novel was written six decades ago, however, and there is much to enjoy in its warmth and humour, as well as the poignancy that pervades some scenes of remembering and confusion.

 

“Firelight, and curtains drawn against the rain and deepening twilight, and four laughing faces, framed in hair as palely golden as the flames. The mean, tastelessly furnished room is hidden in kind shadows; they play over the ceiling and bow and waver as if dancing an accompaniment to the story Alda reads aloud. Five hundred miles away, the father driving through a dark, sighing forest of pines near Oldenburg imagines that group gathered about the fire, as he has so often seen it, and amidst the black night and dreary confusion of the journey, he smiles.

(…the mighty George Eliot once commented with acerbity upon those readers who “demand adultery, murder and ermine tippets on every page,” and we ourselves, confronted whenever we open a volume of contemporary fiction by explosions, lust, perversions and despair in every line, join our feeble voice to hers. Though often tempted to show that we, too, know all about That–yes, and That, to say nothing of the Anglo-Saxon Words (all nine of them) we refuse to be bounced into writing what we do not enjoy writing. Our themes are gentle, it is true, but

We do but sing because we must

and pipe as the linnets do,

and our final decision is that enough is going on everywhere without us starting in.) (37-8)”

Gibbons, Stella. The Matchmaker. London: Vintage Classics, 2011. (1950).

Funkyfacecat’s #CBR5 Review #04 Penelope by Rebecca Harrington

Penelope O’Shaugnessy is a freshman at Harvard. Unlike most of the people she comes into contact with, she has no particular academic, financial or family standing. So far this could go in the direction of either Legally Blonde or The Secret History. Thankfully, it does neither. While Penelope is not interested either in obssessive networking or obsessive studying , her efforts to find a place for herself are hampered by both the exclusivity of the various cliques, and her own bafflement as to why they are important. This sense of dislocation is the result of result of naïveté rather than taking a stand against pretension and entitlement; Penelope’s point of view, honed by the works of Noel Coward and Hercule Poirot films, would be overly whimsical were it not grounded in genuine anxiety.

Penelope is written in a strangely formal style that actually begins to suit both the novel and its heroine; the author rarely uses contractions, and the chapters are titled things like “In Which Penelope Reaches the Zenith of Her Literary Ambitions” that somehow reminded me of The Royal Tenenbaums as well as the more light-hearted Dickensian novel. Penelope is a Wes Anderson-type heroine, I think–she plans out interesting factoids and personal anecdotes to quote at people, and she gets inveigled into situations of increasing complication. She’s complex and well-portrayed–we enjoy Penelope’s uniqueness until we start to wonder what exactly lies beneath it, to what extent do Penelope’s quirks replace assertiveness and agency?

I’ve made this sound like a somewhat sombre coming-of-age tale, but despite its more aching moments, it’s really not–Penelope is delightful, the skewering of university and particularly freshman pretensions is immediately recognizable and highly amusing to anyone with any experience of an academic environment, and the problems of transitioning from adolescence to adulthood are dealt with in a way that relishes the absurdity as well as the sweetness of all the awkwardness involved.

Harrington, Rebecca. Penelope. London: Virago Press, 2013. New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 2012.

On rehearsing a stage production of Caligula: “In this scene, Caligula killed a senator and then subsequently destroyed all the pianos in the room by beating them with belts. The latter stage direction was an invention of Henry Wills-Mather, who, when he saw there were two Steinway pianos in the theatre that could not be moved, said to the cast, ‘The piano is a bourgeois convention. This is the theatre of the absurd! The only thing to do is destroy them with belts.’ Then he stuck to this idea, which was the truly amazing part.” (188)

SPOILER ALERT

“Penelope felt like jumping up the stairs. She could not believe this night had happened. Gustav, the man who was the closest to Hercule Poirot she had ever known (and although Poirot was the ideal, Gustav was much more handsome by classical standards), had kissed her. Suddenly, Penelope could not remember why exactly she had said goodbye to him at the door. It had something to do with fear but she hoped it would be mistaken for strategy.” (186)

Funkyfacecat’s #CBR5 Review #03 The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones

The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988) is a fun romp through a series of worlds where magic is present in some quantity, but it’s also about growing up and taking responsibility for both yourself and others and learning to find and deal with your destiny.

Christopher Chant is the son of two aristocratic magic practitioners who ignore each other at best and fight each other at worst. Christopher has a strange habit of getting through seemingly fatal accidents unscathed, but the only grown-up who ever pays any real or friendly attention to him is his Uncle Ralph – pronounced Rafe – who seems just a bit too interested in experimenting with Christopher’s talent for slipping into other worlds in his sleep…

The world(s) the Chrestomanci books are set in have an interesting mixture of magic and science, with a touch of the Gothic at times. Christopher is an engaging hero – fundamentally likeable despite his flaws, he’s clever but a lot of stuff happens that he doesn’t understand or refuses to accept, he’s rebellious but develops a sense of responsibility, he’s brave but still scared. So much happens in The Lives of Christopher Chant that I feel I wouldn’t be able to describe the plot further without spoiling it – suffice to say there is a sacred cat called Throgmorten, an unpredictable Living Asheth who is also called Millie and loves reading and wants to go to boarding school, magic-learning, magical battles, cricket games and various other hi-jinks.

I recommend the novel and other Diana Wynne Jones books for children above the age of about nine, and the sort of grown-up who likes reading Harry Potter between dealing with tiresome grown-up stuff.

List of books

Reviewed for Cannonball Read 5

The Lives of Christopher Chant (Diana Wynne Jones)

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society (Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows)

The Silver Linings Playbook (Matthew Quick)

Read

The Hobbit (J.R.R Tolkien)

The Mystery of Mercy Close (Marian Keyes)

To be read

Home Improvement: Undead Edition (ed. Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner)

The Bolter (Frances Osborne)

Funkyfacecat’s #CBR5 Review #02 The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick

I really enjoyed the film The Silver Linings Playbook (I don’t necessarily think it’s the Best Picture, but it’s certainly a very good one, with excellent performances), and so I thought I’d check out the book. The book is a bit darker in mood but similar in content (and most of the changes for the film make sense to me) – a romantic comedy about broken people, about family, and learning about saving yourself.

Pat has been released from a psychiatric institution into his mother’s custody. He and his wife separated a while ago over an incident that Pat can’t quite remember and refuses to think about. Instead he focuses on fixing himself in order to win back his wife. He narrates this journey of  self-improvement as a sort of love letter to her, but it gradually becomes more of a document of his own survival and tentative re-connection to the rest of the world, including his court-mandated therapist, own family and the mysteriously promiscuous widow Tiffany. Tiffany inveigles him into committing to something he has never done before, and in doing so causes him to awaken in some ways – not always with immediately positive effects.

Pat is an endearing hero – lost, lonely, but optimistic, with a faith in the future that is inspiring, even if it is misguided. The only thing that slightly bothered me about the book was the register of his voice – he was a history teacher in a high school before his breakdown, but he sometimes writes in a childish and simple way. I suppose this could be the result of his mental illness, but it’s never explained, and it just occasionally seems as if the author went too far, for example with the repetition of the phrase “apart time” for Pat’s separation from his wife. I don’t know; I don’t know enough about bipolar disorder or amnesia to determine how realistic it, and indeed the rest of the novel is. But this is just a minor quibble – over all, The Silver Linings Playbook is sad but hopeful, and funny in a warm sort of way.

Funkyfacecat’s #CBR5 Review #01 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

There are several favourable reviews of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society on Cannonball Read 4. To some extent I agree with them – this is an enjoyable enough read that sheds some light on an aspect of World War II that is often neglected in the historical novel. However, the reviews and the premise set me up for wanting more. For some reason, it reminded me of Julie&Julia and how much I wished that it had been just Julia – there are deeply interesting environments and conflicts and passions hovering around the edges of the book, but they are filtered through a somewhat uninteresting narrator trying to decide what to do with her own life. It’s as if the author didn’t want to fully commit to trying to see a community and a person from the inside, so they create a main character out of their own hesitations as a sort of escape route – to provide the easy laughs and easily relatable problems and distraction from the serious and the depressing. Here concentration camps and evacuated children sit uneasily beside the main character’s romantic dilemmas. I’m not saying that all books about wars need to be completely heavy going, unrelieved bleakness interspersed with horror, or that there is no place for love and romance and laughter amid suffering (after all, Anne Frank wrote about her crushes and daydreams as well as her ever-present fear) just that perhaps the writers who write the best fiction about horrible circumstances immerse themselves, letting the humour emerge naturally from within the situation and the characters, from human nature confronting the inhuman and the terrible and the absurd, from the life that goes on in the middle of the darkness. Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (probably anything by Graham Greene, come to that) and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day spring immediately to mind as examples of the sort of thing I mean. I say this, of course, never having written a novel, or lived through anything like Britain or the Channel Islands of the Second World War.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is centered around Juliet, who wrote a humorous column under the name Izzy Bickerstaff during the war, and now looks to sink her teeth into something a bit more serious. The Occupation of Guernsey becomes her pet project due to a coincidence (the first of many unlikely ones). It doesn’t take long before she goes there for a visit, encountering stories of hardship and cruelty that are heart-rending and some that are humorous, of islanders exhibiting various shades of bravery and cunning to outwit the Nazis. The almost universally beloved and heroic Elizabeth, who left behind a small daughter, and her fate, come to be the centre of the book Juliet decides to write, but unfortunately they are not the centre of Potato Peel Society – Juliet and her love life and the lessons she is learning take over the narrative, and while they are sweet and amusing enough, they left me thinking thinking that a novel focused solely on Elizabeth, during the Occupation, would have been absolutely fascinating.

24th May 1946

Dearest Sophie,

Yes, I’m here. Mark did his best to stop me, but I resisted him mulishly, right up to the bitter end. I’ve always considered doggedness  one of my least appealing characteristics, but it was valuable last week.

It was only as the boat pulled away, and I saw him standing on the pier, tall and scowling – and somehow wanting to marry me – that I began to think perhaps he was right. Maybe I am a complete idiot.

[...]

I’m back indoors. It’s hours later – the setting sun has rimmed the clouds in blazing gold and the sea is moaning below the cliffs. Mark Reynolds? Who’s he?

Love always,

Juliet

(143)

Cannonball Read 5 Ahoy!

I will again be attempting to read and review 52 books this year, for Cannonball Read 5, as a personal challenge and means of relaxation, and perhaps in a small sort of way contribute towards fighting cancer. I managed 31 reviews last year, although I read about 50. It’s already February 2013, so I have some catching up to do.

Here is where I think I went wrong last year:

* overthinking the reviews – this year I will keep them short and simple

* putting off writing them until I had enough time to write long elaborate criticism (see above)

* thinking I could write twenty in a week. No.

These reviews are not intended to be academic, rather as a way of unwinding from my day “job”, and are based on personal, subjective impressions and, I am sure, will often be hastily thought out and mis-spelled.