Articles in “Books”

I had thought to move on to the living room after the hallway, but I have a feeling I should get the spare room over and done with: it’s a disaster area.

To be fair, the spare room is home to a couple of our more specific collections, namely Nick’s art books and my girls’ school stories, which are the books I’m dealing with below.

But it’s also the place where we store books that we have no other space for (namely, everything I’ve bought in the last eighteen months or so) or that we don’t re-read very often (like Nick’s New Adventure and Missing Adventure Doctor Who books). Almost every shelf is double-stacked to some extent, and finding anything is a nightmare.

(Actually, I thought my Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf—which I still haven’t found—was bound to be in there, but I couldn’t locate it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t in there, of course.)

So the spare room it is, but it will take a while: there are five bookcases in there, all heavily stacked.

But I’m starting with a small shelf, one of the few shelves to be limited to a single genre: girls’ school stories. It’s largely impossible to make out specific titles, but that’s fine. After all, many of the books are completely interchangeable in terms of plots and characters. Plus, I’ve added some close-up photographs, for reasons that should become apparent.

Yes, that is a bright-green wig in a fetching 1960s’ style bob over that flower vase. How I come to own one of those is a long and not very interesting story. Still, it makes an interesting objet d’art, in its way.

Nick’s X Files figurine, on the other hand, led to the following conversation the first time my parents came to stay with us:

MAM: What’s that on the bookcase?
ME: Alien corpse. Why?

(And if you think that’s geeky, bear in mind that this is only one of a matched pair of bookcases: the other one has, in relative positions, a baseball cap with a propeller on the top and a figurine of Deanna Troi.)

Really, though, the top of this bookcase just shows that these books are outgrowing the small space I allocated them, even though I haven’t been actively seeking to increase the collection in recent months. (I think part of the problem is that there were so many girls’ school stories published: it’s almost impossible not to find them in bookstores and sales.) I found an old photograph recently, when we’d first moved into the house, and there were only enough of these books for a single shelf: perhaps that’s evidence that I do need to keep a grip on my avarice?

Even though I say the books are more or less interchangeable, those paperbacks standing upright on the bookcase’s top are some of the most sought-after among girls’ school story collectors: the Chalet School series. Obviously, these are inexpensive reprints (mostly Armada paperbacks from the 1970s) not collectors’ editions, but the series itself is one of the most heavily collected, along with the Abbey School series two shelves down.

The Chalet School series ran for decades in the hands of Elinor Brent-Dyer: Wikipedia lists fifty-eight books by Brent-Dyer from The School at the Chalet (1925) to Prefects of the Chalet School (1970)—Brent-Dyer herself died in 1969— as well as eleven books by other authors that slot into the original series, and Merryn Williams’s Chalet Girls Grow Up (1998), which, they carefully point out, is not recommended for young readers, and caused enormous consternation among Brent-Dyer fans because of its representation of infidelity, suicide, and marital rape among characters from the original series.

(Actually, if you have time—and are interested—the debate about Williams’s book on the U. K. Amazon site is fascinating.)

The Chalet School books themselves are intriguing, although often in a disturbing way. I was fascinated, initially, by the discrepancy in numbers between English girls and local students in the school, by the fact that English was not the dominant language in the school, and by the focus on Austrian culture. And the late Austrian books, with the increasing encroachment of Nazism, both in terms of actual soldiers and in terms of the spread of Nazi ideology among German and Austrian students, were genuinely distressing.

But then the school moved the Guernsey (after the Anschluss in 1938), then to the England-Wales border, and ultimately to Switzerland in the 1950s. With World War Two, the school shifted noticeably to a more uniformly British institution, and by the time they moved to the Swiss Alps, the tone was more reminiscent of the Enid Blyton-style “teaching foreign students the English code of honour” approach than it was to the tone of the early books. I found that a shame.

Ah! There are the Abbey School books, on the top shelf to the far left. This isn’t nearly as extensive a series: thirty-eight books, from The Girls of the Hamlet Club (1914) to Two Queens at the Abbey (1959), although Elsie J. Oxenham was extremely prolific outside this series, as well.

These aren’t always school stories, strictly speaking: many include the term “Abbey School” in their title, but so few of them take place explicitly at school that they’re often referred to as the Abbey Series.

But they have two fascinating points. The first is Oxenham’s involvement in the revival of English folk dancing (which is also an element of early Chalet School books, but falls away fairly quickly). I have no idea how accurate the details are, but the accounts of folk dancing are extraordinarily detailed, right down to music and steps.

The second is the Abbey itself: two of the primary characters are cousins, one of whom inherited a manor house and one a ruined abbey. It’s the Cistercian abbey of Grace Dieu, which my sister-in-law (whose specialty is Cistercian nuns) tells me is an actual abbey. Reverence for the abbey is threaded through the books—which also foreground Christian faith far more than most school stories—including a focus on the daily lives of monks in an order far less prominent, to the average reader, than the Dominicans or the Franciscans. It may only be a hook to drag in new readers, but it’s fascinating.

More so, certainly, than your average Enid Blyton (which are on the bottom shelf at the far right), although I own to a sneaking interest in the construction of Whyteleafe school in the Naughtiest Girl series (which is also the basis of my favourite in-joke in Green Wing.)

But what I love most about these books is their sheer beauty:

They’re just gorgeous to look at; Jan of the Fourth, there, was the first one that I bought in this new cycle of collecting (back in 1999), and I bought it purely because I loved the original dust cover.

And look at Margaret Plays the Game! Although that one is interesting textually, as well; it’s written as a schoolgirl version of a Sir Walter Scott novel that the six-form girls are acting out, in a truncated form, as the end-of-year play, and the association between Scott’s nineteenth-century rewriting of mediaeval codes of honour and the codes of honour pertaining among schoolgirls is intriguing.

Even the ones that have lost their original dust covers are beautiful objects:

In fact, those two on the far left were part of Nick’s inspiration for the design of this site.

But if you want real beauty, you have to look at the covers of early Angela Brazil editions:

These are so stunning that it’s a shame I can’t display them with their covers facing outwards rather than their spines. Although they don’t always reflect the contents: Leader of the Lower Fourth is about a rather bolshy lower-school girl who doesn’t see why the upper school should run everything and organises a revolution among the younger girls, while the singer on the second cover is a rough-mannered New Zealand girl who is gradually civilised, apparently through some magic in the English air.

And it wouldn’t be a post on school stories if it didn’t end on a thoroughly bizarre note:

Why are those two girls climbing into a trunk? No idea. But don’t tell Matron!

I would love to fit more than three bookcases in the hallway but, alas, it’s only a thin hallway and a relatively short one. Odd, really: I would have thought the primary purpose of a hallway was for the storage of books. Well, that and to allow access to other rooms, I suppose.

The relative narrowness of the hallway is also the reason why these photos are also taken on a funky angle: artistic impulses don’t really come into it, compared to the pressures of a narrow space and a linen cupboard digging into your shoulder blades.

The picture on top of this bookcase is a photograph taken by one of Nick’s colleagues—or former colleagues, perhaps. I never met him, so I’m uncertain. I believe it’s a Shinto temple, but I’d have to ask Nick to be certain, and he’s otherwise occupied creating music on his iMac (meaning I’m writing this post with my own headphones on and, should I need to speak to him, would have to send him an instant message. Odd, but it works for us, mostly. Plus, I have a glass of a rather nice Peter Lehmann white—a riesling, I think—and the opportunity to update my blog, so I’m perfectly content.)

If I’d been able to take this photograph from the other side, the Georgette Heyers wouldn’t have been quite so prominent—but that’s a confession of weakness I’m going to leave for a lower shelf, which will speak for itself.

The Steven Brust is Nick’s: he’s always telling me to read Brust because I’d enjoy him—although his claims that “It’s The Three Musketeers! But with elves!” reminds me a little too forcibly of this Penny Arcade comic. I’m sure I would enjoy Brust, but somehow I’ve never actually got around to opening one.

Ooh, look: I Capture the Castle. I’d forgotten I had that. I really enjoyed it—which isn’t a surprise, since I loved One Hundred and One Dalmatians, far more than I enjoyed the movie. In fact, that book inspired me with a desire for my own Dalmatian, but I had to settle for an imaginary one in the end. Actually, I still don’t have a real Dalmatian . . . although I suppose, technically, that the imaginary one is still around, somewhere.

I bought the Noel Coward short stories at, of course, a Lifeline Bookfest, but have never read them. At the time—and we’re talking the dark reaches of last year, here—I felt it behooved me to move out of the nineteenth century, and read some of the great writers of the early twentieth century: I’d never moved past a small amount of Mitford and an enormous amount of Wodehouse. So now I have shelves stacked with Vita Sackville-West, E. F. Benson, Ethel M. Dell, Rosamund Lehmann, and the like, most of which I’ve not read (or only read half of, as with George du Maurier.) But I’ll get around to them, someday.

The naked woman at the end is the illustrated spines of Casanova’s memoirs. Unfortunately, I could only buy half the set in this rather lovely Johns Hopkins UP edition, so I only have half a naked woman on my shelf. It’s the top half, but I don’t know if that’s better or worse.

I hadn’t realised how much of the next shelf was devoted to Nick’s books: I’ve never read Robert Heinlein, Piers Anthony, or Robin Hobb. I have read Neil Gaiman’s Stardust—and loved it, of course, despite the rather melancholy flavour—but even that’s Nick’s copy.

But the second shelf here is all mine, and while I’m an admitted fantasy fan, this is more specifically what I love: classic children’s fantasy. I’m not sure there’s much that’s truly classic missing from this shelf (except Lewis Carroll, who’s in the living room), although it’s not a complete collection of any of the authors.

But look at these lovely things!

Running from left to right, I have on this self alone

• George Macdonald (including At the Back of the North Wind, although my personal favourite, by far, is The Princess and the Goblin)
• Susan Cooper (we’ll just skip over the recent film adaptation, shall we?)
• L. Frank Baum (I think I made my passion for Baum fairly well understood in the comments thread to this post)
• Lloyd Alexander (but not, alas, a complete series)
• Alan Garner (I adored The Owl Service and Elidor, particularly)
• Mary Stewart (I don’t know how widely her children’s fantasy is read these days, but I’ve cherished my copies of The Little Broomstick and Ludo and the Star Horse for at least twenty years: these are still those original editions)
• Hugh Lofting (although I wonder, sometimes, whether I’d let children of mine read them, especially the first one, where they visit Africa. I’d certainly not stoop to the bowdlerised versions, though)
• C. S. Lewis
• Elisabeth Beresford (ah, would that we all could womble free)
• Madeleine L’Engle (more sci-fi, I know, but A Wrinkle in Time is still one of my all-time favourites. I think the others in the series are on a lower shelf of this bookcase)
• E. Nesbit

In fact, I should have more Nesbit. I’m sure I just bought The Would-Be-Goods, Five Children and It, and The Phoenix and the Carpet. I wonder where I put those?

Even the non-fantasy books on this shelf are classics, like Richmal Crompton and Helen Cresswell.

Oh, look, an entire shelf of Georgette Heyer books. I wonder how they got there? Let’s just move on, shall we?

In my own defense, can I just say that the Anne McCaffrey and Warhammer books are absolutely Nick’s? I’ve actually never read any McCaffrey, which is a little odd for a fantasy reader my age. At least, I’m fairly certain that I haven’t read any. I wonder?

Mind, many of the other, more obscure books on these shelfs are also Nick’s, including the Ken MacLeod and Snow Crash; that’s my copy of The Diamond Age, but I’ve not read it yet. And, sadly, those are my copies of David Eddings at the end. I have neither bought nor read any of his books in years . . . but I have read up to the end of the second Sparhawk series, which is what’s on that shelf.

On the other hand, there are my Scarlet Pimpernel books! I haven’t read those in years: I don’t think I have all of them, but I’m not certain how necessary it is to read them in order. I really must pull those out again, although they’re an unfortunate mix of inexpensive and fragmentary paperbacks and one fascinating, plump little hardback that’s been roughly treated and poorly rebound.

Most of these are Nick’s too, especially the Will McCarthy: I’ve not read McCarthy, but Nick swears by him, having read Bloom. He writes just the type of science fiction that Nick adores.

At the opposite end of the shelf, there are my Glen Cook novels. I have a number of the novels from the Black Company series—and must get back into them, actually—but what really fascinated me was the Garrett, P.I. series, the hard-boiled detective working in an insane fantasy world. I’m not sure why they appealed to me so much; I’ve never been an enormous fan of hard-boiled detective fiction, because of the complicated gender politics associated with thinking of women as broads and dames (the main reason, actually, why I never got into Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber), and the plots are sometimes rather incoherent right up until the parlour scene. They just thoroughly appealed to me. I might re-read those, actually, once I’ve finished this journal article.

I’m past apologising for the carpet, since this photograph makes it quite clear that I really should have vacuumed. But at least this shelf shows some slightly more high-brow reading tastes. (Not that I’m ashamed of my low-brow tastes.) I mean, look! There’s Kurt Vonngeut (honestly, I really must gather my entire collection together: they’re scattered all over the house), Vikram Seth, and Umberto Eco (now there’s another book I must re-read: I’ve not read The Name of the Rose in at least ten years.)

Sure, there’s also Helen Fielding, but she is funny. I’ve not read the Olivia Joules book, and haven’t the faintest idea what it’s like, though: I picked it up in a Lifeline store, figuring I’d get around to it sooner or later. That was only six months ago, so I’ll probably read it sometime within the next four or five years. (There are, perhaps, some disadvantages to organising your house as though it were a small lending library.)

And my Anne Tylers! I can’t even say what I like about her, although The Accidental Tourist is wonderful . . . and devastating. I think it’s the evocation of the minutiae of life that appeals to me, but I won’t deny that I need to be feeling fairly emotionally robust to deal with some of them, especially Breathing Lessons.

Perhaps that’s why they’re on the bottom shelf, near the grubby carpet.

Don’t worry: you can still skip over these posts if they become too boring. But I have tried harder this time to make the title of the books visible, which—whether my purpose is solipsistic or practical—seems a key concern.

Mind, the pictures in this case are on a funny angle, because this is the middle bookshelf in the hallway, and I couldn’t get far enough back from the shelves to take a straight shot. But, really, it all adds an illusion of artiness to the project.

This is the most recent of the shelves, which Nick’s father made over the last Christmas holidays. I think it was this past Christmas, anyway. It had to be made narrower than the others so that all three would fit in the hallway without blocking any doorways (which didn’t bother me, but Nick claimed would be highly inconvenient).

Oddly, it was only after this shelf went in that I told Nick that I was slightly worried that the house was starting to look like a slightly disreputable secondhand bookshop. (It’s odd, because prior to that I’d always secretly hoped that the house would one day look like a disreputable secondhand bookshop.)

The painting on the top of this bookcase is a print of one of Sydney Lough Thompson’s paintings; he was a New Zealand-born Impressionist, and also Nick’s great-grandfather. Coming as I do from a line of anonymous peasants, I find it quite fascinating that Nick’s great-grandfather has his own Wikipedia page. (I mean, sure, it’s Wikipedia. But it’s still cool.)

(In case anyone is really interested, some of his paintings are here, although the site’s in French, and—even more astonishing to me than Wikipedia—there’s even a Youtube video, also in French but with some nice images of his works. See, the blog is educational!)

I’ve managed to retain most of this shelf, although that is Nick’s copy of Charles Stross’s Halting State lying horizontally up there—horizontal books on these shelves are a sure sign that space is desperately short elsewhere.

The copy of the Brothers Grimm I bought down in Sydney as a necessary tool for the thesis. I mentioned back in March that I ended up with multiple copies of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales: the Grimm tales were part of the same process, in that my author also rewrote several of these tales for her own journal. But the tales that she chose were fairly obscure ones, often not reprinted in incomplete collections, so I bought this complete edition. It’s good to have on the shelf, but it never actually made it into the bibliography for the Ph.D.; I defaulted to a late-Victorian translation by Margaret Hunt that I found on Project Gutenberg, as a more contemporary version of the tales.

How cool is The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, though? Everyone should have this on their shelf! No, seriously. Of course, this isn’t the most recent edition, but it’s still a fairly comprehensive survey of a wide range of authors.

It would also make a useful doorstop, if I were inclined to treat books in such a cavalier fashion.

But the books on this shelf that I love the most are those three slim, green volumes on the right: those are volumes seven, twelve, and fourteen of All the Year Round, conducted—as they point out on the spine, and the front cover, and the title page, just in case you didn’t see it the first two times—by Charles Dickens. Actually, all the volumes at that end of the shelf are Victorian periodicals, but these are the most exciting. Because of Charles Dickens, really.

Certainly, it’s far from a complete set—though I hope to pick up more in time; I bought these ones at the wonderful Berkelouw’s Book Barn in Berrima, the most alliterative antiquarian bookshop in Australia—but they’re fascinating. Volume 7, for example, has the fabulously titled “The Wicked Woods of Tobereevil,” by the Author of “Hester’s History” (seemingly, based on a quick Google search, by a woman called Rosa Gilbert, but don’t quote me on that) while volume 14 has “A Charming Fellow” by Frances Trollope. I could go on, but I won’t—I just never cease to be fascinated by how inexpensively one can buy some Victorian periodicals (although I did just pay a lot more than I did for these for a pair of much rarer volumes. But that’s another story).

Frankly, the first thought that springs to mind when I look at this shelf is a sense of surprise that I own two hardback James Herriot books. He’s a fun read, especially in the early days, but I didn’t think I bought him in hardback.

Most of these are Nick’s books, though—including the rather embarrassing Masters of Doom, although I admit that I did buy that for him. But there’s Tunnels: since I’ve written not one but two posts on that book, it seems only fitting that its picture should turn up on here at some point.

And I do love that Louisa May Alcott hardback: it’s mostly short stories, which I hadn’t read before. Some of them, of course, are intensely saccharine; I imagine that they were originally written for children’s periodicals or Christmas giftbooks and, while Alcott never patronised her child-readers, she did write some intensely sentimental works. Still, I’ve always loved Little Women—though the final book, Jo’s Boys, both bewildered and devastated me—so it’s delightful to come across a whole pile of her works that I’d never read before. Another Lifeline Bookfest find, of course.

Hey, Jasper Fforde! I love those books—and he’s so prolific, there’ll probably be another out before long. But those are exactly my cup of tea, and I’ll keep reading them as long as he keeps writing them. They remind me—in a circuitous fashion—of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but with less sex.

(Mind, Nick and I were watching Press Gang recently, and in the episode “UnXpected”—which deals with the illness of an actor who once starred in a Doctor Who/James Bond-style TV show—the character explains that he once spent two weeks inside The Hound of the Baskervilles thanks to a “fictionalising ray” but he escaped with another minor character. When the man he’s talking to says, “There’s no character of that name in Hound of the Baskervilles!” he urbanely responds, “Not now.” Nick turned to me and said, “Hang on, did Steven Moffat just invent Jasper Fforde?”)

I’m going to skip over everything else on this shelf (I’ve already expressed some concerns about the Twilight series, twice) except to note that I’m fairly certain that’s my copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology over there on the left.

Ah. No, that’s not a book called Who’s Who in Enid Blyton. It’s some sort of highly specific mirage. No, honestly.

On the other hand, that book next to the mirage is a gorgeous facsimile reprint of the stories from The Return of Sherlock Holmes as they appeared in The Strand Magazine. I’m a sucker for facsimile reprints, but the loveliest ones—a growing collection of Victorian and Edwardian children’s fantasy novels—are in the living room.

I also find that collection of Alcott’s sensation fiction two books down from the Conan Doyle absolutely fascinating: I know Alcott herself was rather ashamed of her “pot-boilers”—as was Jo March, in Good Wives—but they’re good sensation narratives, and a far less idyllic account of the opportunities available to women than the Little Women series is.

Oh, dear: I seem to have truncated Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. That’s a shame. That’s the book that taught me that the ancient Sumerians—to whom I once referred as “Numerians,” to which my brother responded, “I suppose they were very good at arithmetic?”—called librarians “Ordainers of the Universe.” I have aspired to that title ever since.

I think that’s a complete set of L. M. Montgomery, too, although I may be lacking some of the short stories. The Anne books do get rather irritating after a while, but Anne of Green Gables remains utterly delightful every time I read it. And down towards the end is a copy of The Blue Castle: I never read that as a child, not until I bought it (at, surprisingly, the Lifeline Bookfest) a couple of years ago, and was quite astonished. It’s a fairy tale, of course, with a happy marriage to end things, but the fascinating aspect of it is the monotonous horror of the heroine’s early life—the sheer drudgery of being poor but of “good family,” thoroughly devalued for being an unmarried woman in a family that sees spinsterhood as the ultimate failure, unable to do anything independently, not even reading. It’s devastating, in a way.

But then Montgomery is often most interesting in the back stories of minor characters and in short stories: the women with illicit sex lives, with illegitimate children, with dark secrets. Little of this comes through in her best-known works, but some of the short stories show a much darker side to late-Victorian and Edwardian life than you’d ever imagine from the Anne books.

I’ve become overly prolific in my love of books, again—but I should point out Nick’s pride and joy, The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction. He’d wanted it for years, but baulked a little at the price. I found that one in a Lifeline store in Narellan for $5, and thus cemented my position as best girlfriend ever.

$5 is a small price to pay for such a honour.

Well, technically, this is stage one of three, one side of the hallway being entirely lined with shelves. Oh, it was a happy day when I realised the hallway would sustain bookshelves! Lucky for Nick, it’s a narrow hallway, or there’d be shelves running down both walls. I did suggest it, actually, but Nick vetoed it on the grounds that it would be inconvenient to have to walk down the hall sideways.

The hallway bookcases, though, are the very shallow ones that my father-in-law made for us. Well, three of those—the original two are still in the living room. I love those bookcases: they just swallow books, and they don’t attract dust as obviously as ready-bought bookcases. Honestly, do the people who design bookcases not actually own any books? They make the shelves such inconvenient sizes.

(Actually, that’s just reminded me: I took the idea of putting shelves in the hallway from Who Magazine, back when I used to read it. I’d forgotten that. They briefly ran a page in the back of the magazine with allegedly fun ideas for each month: one example I remember was “take an embroidery class, then scatter silver butterflies over your skirts and T-shirts,” which I thought was an oddly specific use of your newfound skills. But on one occasion they recommended buying cheap bookcases—I wish they’d told us where to find those mythical creatures, the cheap bookcases—then paint them bright red and put them in the hallway, filled with colourful paperbacks. I was slightly appalled at the expense and effort involved in using books as set decorations—at no point did they actually suggest you might already own the books—but it did remind me of my hallway’s bookcaseless state.)

What I mainly like about this picture is how beautifully the Chagall print has turned out. (Ignore the matting: I know it looks like the print is by someone called “Marc Caoall.” I’ll fix that at some point.)

(The print was a Christmas gift, and I had to undergo a brief but intense battle of wills with my three-year-old nephew when he wanted to open it himself. I even tried misdirection: “Look, there’re the presents Auntie Treena bought you! Look, they’ve got ribbons and everything!” There’s something about preventing a child from opening a Christmas present that makes you feel like a cad. Luckily, his fingers were too small to get the top off the tube.)

(Does that anecdote make me look like a total monster?)

This top shelf’s a weird mixture of my books and Nick’s, but what I really want to know is why I don’t have those Iain M. Banks books together. That’s unusually sloppy. The Banks books are Nick’s; I don’t read him, having unfortunately started with Complicity, which scarred me for life. It doesn’t matter how many times Nick points out the difference between Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks, I’m still not reading more. Although I suppose I should consider myself fortunate that I didn’t start with The Wasp Factory.

I also note some of my Kurt Vonnegut books are on this shelf, over to the far right: I haven’t read Timequake in years and I only recently read Deadeye Dick. But the strange thing is that I have almost a complete collection of Kurt Vonneguts—I don’t have A Man Without a Country, though I’ve read it—so I wonder where the rest are. Why aren’t they on this shelf?

Ditto Sylvia Plath: I can see the copy of The Bell Jar that I bought for a third-year course on women’s writing and Ariel next to it, but I own another copy of The Bell Jar, surely? And her diaries? Why aren’t they all together?

And just to give you an even lower opinion of my classification system, I seem to have lodged The Prime of Miss Jean Brody next to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. I’m sure there was a reason for that.

For some reason, the next two shelves are mostly Nick’s books. (Which reminds me: I wonder if he’s ever going to read those Alastair Reynolds? They look pretty, and all, but I might shift them into another room. Maybe then I can fit some more Kurt Vonnegut on there, if I can find them. And I still haven’t spotted my copy of the Heaney translation of Beowulf. Where is that?)

But I am building up a nice collection of Victorian detective fiction. Almost all of them are about male detectives: I do have a collection of stories of early women detectives, somewhere. I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s not here.

And I really must buy the next in Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes saga. Actually, the fourth must be out now, although maybe not in paperback.

Hmm. My main intention here was to remind myself what I already had, not to make a list of what I still need to buy.

Hey, look, Agatha Christie! Some part of me thinks it would be nice to have these all in one binding, but I’m resisting the impulse to rebuy what must amount to forty-odd books.

But those numbered black-and-white books to the left of the shelf below the main Christies are brilliant. I found those at a Lifeline Bookfest, and they’re collections of old-school detective-fiction novellas, divided into themed collections: Women Sleuths, Police Procedurals, Locked Room Puzzles, and Great British Detectives. The books are oddly narrow and the binding crackles ominously when you open them—you can’t read them in bed, but have to sit up to do so—but they’re so cool. And pretty. I wonder if there are more than four books in the series?

Ooh, Ivanhoe. I don’t think I’ve ever read that—I find Walter Scott a real slog for the first hundred pages or so, before the narrative really grabs you—and I have a sneaking suspicion that I own more than one copy. I have read The Three Musketeers, though—which is one the next shelf down—and thought it was hilarious. (Except for the bit where Athos hanged his wife. That was well weird.)

Nick and I once had an argument about the Lord Darcy stories, which are on the third shelf here: I really enjoyed them, but Nick unexpectedly came over strongly republican and said he couldn’t stomach all the kowtowing to the Plantagenets, which I’d largely skipped over. I suppose that’s why he doesn’t read much fantasy fiction: there’re far fewer kings in science fiction. And two down from Lord Darcy is William Morris’s North of Nowhere: I haven’t read it, but I’m not the woman to turn down the chance to buy an obscure Victorian novel.

Oh, and hey! There’s my copy of Sylvia Plath’s diaries: last time I read those, I was completing my Honours year. I think it’s best to draw a veil over my resultant state of mind.

Okay, I realise this picture makes the carpet look really grubby, but it’s not, I promise.

Also, Nancy Drew! I love Nancy—she was feisty. In some of the books, anyway. Not the ones where she let Ned do all the dirty work. (One bookshelf over I have a “Nancy Clue” novel, which is slash fiction involving Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames—as Cherry Aimless—who was a nurse in her own series of books. Not usually my cup of tea, but I found it in the children’s section of an Alumni Book Sale. I’m all for children having an open view of life, but this was perhaps a little too explicit to sit next to Lucy M. Boston and Helen Cresswell. Plus, it makes a good anecdote.)

This has to be the geekiest pair of shelves in the entire house: my Nancy Drews—with some random Ray Bradburys propping them up at the end—and then Nick’s entire collection of Doctor Who Target novelisations. And that’s not even including his New Adventures and Missing Adventures, which are all in the spare room.

Still, I suppose you never know when you might want to read that one about the giant maggots again.

And that’s sequentially upload images of my bookshelves on to the blog.

I do actually have some quite good reasons for doing this. Some are just solipsistic (example: I just like looking at books. Preferably other people’s books, but my own will do if there are no others available) and some are practical (I don’t have a decent catalogue of the books, which worries me slightly).

But the main impulse is practical. I love my books, and I’m radically running out of space. People do tell me that I should stop buying them (or worse: my mother once suggested that I throw a book away for every new book I buy) but the short answer is that I can’t.

I do restrict myself to the best of my ability, but it’s more than flesh and blood can stand to walk past a bookshop without looking in. And once you look in, you inevitably find something you want. And . . . well, the end result is you start posting pictures of your bookshelves onto the Internet just so you can be sure what you actually own.

So this might be dull. Might be exciting. Who knows?

But it’s rather a big task, and I’m not going to devote every entry to it for the next two weeks. That would be dull, no question.

What is it about Jane Austen that prompts so many people to take her world as the basis for their own works?

(Admittedly, that’s largely a rhetorical question. I don’t know the answer. I don’t even know if there is a single answer to that question; I doubt there is.)

But it fascinates me. What is is about that England that Austen created—an England hovering somewhere in the thirty years that made up the late eighteenth century and the Regency, an England that, excepting some encamped soldiers and Anne Wentworth’s vague fears for her husband’s future, seems so isolated from the Napoleonic Wars—that so fascinates authors seeking a world in which to place their own characters?

Make no mistake: I revere Austen, but not without some reservations.

Pride and Prejudice I will say nothing against: I don’t know how many times I’ve read that book, and it delights me every time. I see no flaw in it. (Excepting, perhaps, John Sutherland’s apt question in one of his books of Victorian literary puzzles: who does betray Elizabeth Bennett? Who tells Lady Catherine of the likelihood of her marrying Darcy? But that’s a small question.)

When Nick and I watched the recent BBC adaptation—I’d seen it before; Nick had not—I thought at first it would be a failure; the first installment failed to draw Nick into the narrative. But when, at midnight, we got to the end of the third episode and I suggested we go to bed, he looked at me as though I’d suddenly gone insane: “But she’s just rejected Darcy’s proposal!” It took us until 3 a. m., but we watched it all. Apparently, Austen can even amuse a man who won’t buy a book that doesn’t have a spaceship on the cover.

Sense and Sensibility I re-read quite often, as well, despite the fact that Elinor is really too sensible and Marianne too much a victim of sensibility—and that the marriages are rather unsatisfactory.

Northanger Abbey is hilarious, and I’m partial to Persuasion, as well—it’s gentle and melancholic, but the heroine is delightful and the happy ending satisfying.

I’m less enthusiastic about Emma, although I’m aware that that’s rather an unpopular opinion. It just seems to me that Emma is less lively and intelligent than she is callous in her prosperity and actively cruel to the less fortunate. I find it difficult to re-read Emma without skipping over that final act of wanton unpleasantness to poor, dependent, scatter-brained Miss Bates.

The one that causes me real problems, though, is Mansfield Park—I can’t stop reading it, and yet it drives me mad. I feel as though there must be a key to it that I haven’t yet picked up; I can’t quite believe that the woman who created Elizabeth Bennett created weak, passive-aggressive Fanny Price and expected us to sympathise with her.

(Janet Todd’s Women’s Friendship in Literature—although almost thirty years old now—has a fascinating section on critics’ responses to Fanny, which she divides into “the hostile critics who find her distasteful or nauseating,” “the approving critics, who find Fanny the true embodiment of the ideals of the novel,” and “the ironic critics who consider Fanny fatally flawed, an ironic creation of Austen” (246-47 n.1). The debate, indeed, is analogous to that which raged around Pamela’s marriage to Squire B. in Richardson’s novel. While I can’t say that Fanny thought to make a small fortune through her face but now thinks to make a large one through her vartue—a paraphrase, since I can’t find my copy of Henry Fielding’s Shamela—I certainly think she plays her cards very cleverly. It’s what I’ve seen elsewhere called “the tyranny of the weak,” and it works—but how will Edmund stand living with a wife who becomes faint every time she’s faced with something she doesn’t fancy doing?)

But my interests aside, what is it that prompts so many authors to use Austen’s settings and characters for their own works?

I don’t even know how many have done so, but consider this—a certainly incomplete list gleaned from Amazon.com:

• Skylar Hamilton Burris has written a sequel to Pride and Prejudice called Conviction, which focuses on the marital opportunities for Darcy’s sister—and I sincerely hope that it is only in the Amazon blurb, and not in the novel itself, that her name is mis-spelt as “Georgianna.”
• Helen Halstead has written a sequel to Pride and Prejudice as Mr Darcy Presents His Bride.
• both Pamela Aidan and Amanda Grange have “rewritten” the novel from Mr Darcy’s perspective, the former as a trilogy under the umbrella title Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman and the latter as Mr Darcy’s Diary.
• in what to my mind is the most disturbing of these examples, Linda Berdoll has carried on the original novel in two sequels: Mr Darcy Takes a Wife and Darcy and Elizabeth: Days and Nights at Pemberley. Does that second title give anything away? Does it help if I mention that the first key term that Amazon lists under the title is “physical congress”? I’m sure I wish Darcy and Elizabeth all the happiness in the world—but I don’t want to read about it.

I’m quite sure that’s not a full list—and that’s only the Pride and Prejudice spin-offs.

I don’t imagine that Austen alone is subject to this type of response: I shudder to imagine how many times Wuthering Heights has been re-written from Heathcliff’s perspective or provided with a sequel.

But I do wonder why.

I’m not interested in these re-writings and sequels. I’m not entirely immune to the attractions of the world; I’ve read a completion of Sanditon that, while not Austen, was smooth and enjoyable; I wouldn’t be adverse to reading Stephanie Barron’s Jane Austen Mysteries; and I read and enjoyed the first in Carrie Bebris’s Mr and Mrs Darcy Mysteries, which is what prompted this post.

Is Bebris’s work Austen? Of course not.

Do I think Elizabeth Bennett would ever have said “it’s a really shiny stick” (46)? Probably not: that use of “really” is too colloquial, it seems to me, for the period.

Is the strong supernatural aspect to the mysteries in keeping with Austen’s world view? No: but, then, this isn’t Austen.

I have no real point to make here: just some confusion to express about the proliferation of works that adopt, manipulate, or radically rework Austen’s individual version of English society in the production of modern narratives.

Certainly, Austen is marvellous. But do people do this with Charles Dickens? And if not, why not?

It never fails: I no sooner actually write a post about how I have nothing to post about than I think of fifteen different possibilities for entries.

In this case, though, I was sitting this afternoon desultorily flipping through the rats’ packs in Packrat—hoping a raincloud would pop up for me, but it never did—when I kept focusing on Judging A Book By Its Cover, a collection of essays edited by Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody that I recently reviewed for M/C Reviews.

I’m fascinated by reader-response work—though frequently horribly frustrated by it, as well—and it formed a key element of my thesis.

I’m also fascinated by the marketing of fiction, though not quite in the same way as the essays covered in Judging A Book By Its Cover, which focuses largely on twentieth-century publications: my nineteenth-century interests have more to do with advertising and networks of authorship than with graphic design.

But the book did make me realise that I have some books with truly hideous covers on my shelves.

(Of course, I also have a wide number of books with gorgeous covers; I may do a companion post once I’ve finished this one.)

These aren’t the worst, but they’re all fairly awful.

Of course, picking a 1970s reprint of an Agatha Christie novel is rather like shooting fish in a barrel; they’re all dreadful, really.

But this is one of the worst:

That poor owl.

I haven’t actually read this novel, I’m ashamed to admit (I only picked it up in May this year, judging by my inscription) so I have no idea whether a brutally murdered owl is central to the plot, but it’s certainly not something you want to look at on your bedside table as you’re dropping off to sleep.

Of course, I picked Endless Night over two others, which I think have much more revolting covers: Lord Edgeware Dies shows the back of a man’s head with a knife sticking out of the nape of his neck, while By The Pricking Of My Thumbs gives prime position to the broken, dirty head of a porcelain doll.

(That latter instance may not freak out other people as it does me, but creepy dolls are right up there with clowns in the terror factor, as far as I’m concerned.)

Either way, neither of them were images that I wanted on the blog.

If 1970s’ Agatha Christies are too easy a target, so are 1980s’ Rex Stouts. At least Endless Night probably never stood a chance. The image above is from a 1971 reprint, but the novel itself was published in 1967, and would almost certainly have always had a hideous cover.

But this cover of Some Buried Caesar is a 1982 reprint of one of the earliest Nero Wolfe mysteries, from 1938:

By all rights, this should have some lovely, elegant typography and minimalist artwork. Instead, we have a grimacing man about to be speared by a pitchfork (if it helps, he’s already dead. Spoiler!) and a fairly ugly font.

It doesn’t really seem fair, for one of the funniest and cleverest of the Wolfe mysteries.

But then, I revere Stout, so perhaps I’m taking up the cudgels on his behalf a little too readily.

But then, I also revere Sayers, and I’ve included this in the list:

This, like Stout, is a 1980s’ reprint of a 1930s’ novel: in this case, the 1988 edition of 1937’s Busman’s Honeymoon. They’re dreadful editions—the type of paperbacks where the glue shatters after a decade, so every time you read it subsequently there’s a constant gentle rain of yellowish fragments into your lap.

Really, it doesn’t look as bad as the preceding examples. The font is rather pretty and period appropriate, and I rather like the portrait of Wimsey, although I suspect it flatters him.

But it gives away vital information.

Sayers’s (or rather, Wimsey’s) technique comes down to this: when you know how, you know who. This cover, then, gives away the murderer, if you read it the right way. And that always irritates me. (My copy of Ngaio Marsh’s Grave Mistake does the same: it’s as though they were designed by people who went on to write programme promos for Channel 7. But then Marsh’s title is a dead giveaway, as well.)

Still on the crime theme, how about a late edition Trixie Belden? This one’s from 1984: there’s no evidence that it’s a reprint and it’s a late title in the series, so it looks as though someone deliberately marketed a new title with this cover.

I mentioned in my second post on Tunnels the widely popular belief that boys won’t read books with girl protagonists—I wonder if that’s behind the androgynous image of Trixie in the middle of the cover.

I mean, I know she’s a tomboy, but honestly. She looks like Jimmy Olsen.

She’s more feminine in the bottom picture, assuming that’s her in the bottom-left corner next to Honey Wheeler.

Still, I’ve saved the best for last. This, I suspect, is the worst cover on my entire bookshelf:

This is a reprint—undated, alas—in the Abbey Rewards series, a series of reprinted novels sharply divided on gender lines: the list of “Girls’ Fiction” on the back includes Rosamund Takes The Lead, Sidney Seeks Her Fortune, and Polly of Primrose Hill, while “Boys’ Fiction” encourages them to read Adrift in the Stratosphere, Wreckers’ Bay, and Berenger’s Toughest Case.

The book itself is an inoffensive if unoriginal school story, but the cover is nightmarish.

No—I’ve unwittingly told a lie.

What Katy Did Next (1886) is the third of Susan Coolidge’s five novels about the Carr children and their lives in New England in the 1860s.

What Katy Did Next, actually, shows Katy travelling to Europe and meeting a handsome naval lieutenant with whom she could live happily ever after.

Some time in the distant past, I bought a copy of What Katy Did Next from this Abbey Rewards series.

If I hadn’t subsequently removed it from the house on the grounds that the enormous eyes and hideously disproportionate heads scared me witless, that would certainly have been the gem of this list.

I sometimes claim to collect girls’ school stories. But, deep down, I know “collect” is far too grand a term: it also implies some degree of discretion and selectivity. Really, I just buy whatever I come across and then read it.

But, collector or not, I do have an entire bookcase filled with girls’ school stories—only a small bookcase, but still—ranging from Sarah Fielding’s The Governess; or, Little Female Academy (1749: said, in the introduction to my 1968 Oxford reprint, to be the first full-length novel written explicitly for children and, therefore, the first girls’ school story as well) to a much more modern series in which the girls all have boyfriends from a local boys’ school (unthinkable, in the Enid Blyton model!) and in which the hockey team is rather unfortunately called the Trebizon Tramps.

(Apparently, the Trebizon books were published between 1978 and 1994, but the few volumes I have are all from the 1980s.)

One argument that could be made against girls’ school stories as a genre is that they have a tendency to be formulaic. The same argument is often levelled against detective fiction, and it can be countered in the same way: certainly, the banal ones are formulaic, but a clever author working in an established genre can do much to subvert the reader’s expectations.

But that’s not really the point. I just like reading them, much as I like reading stories about plucky girl detectives, and therefore own a scary quantity of Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden novels.

And I have, over the years, culled a number of valuable life lessons from my reading of girls’ school stories, which will allow you to navigate life in a girls’ boarding school, should such a thing be necessary.

1. Midnight feasts must always include boiled eggs, sardines, biscuits, cake (preferably left over from somebody’s birthday, the celebration of which is the best reason for holding a midnight feast), boiled sweets, and tinned pineapple.

It may include bottled ginger beer, which allows a certain enjoyable hysteria to infiltrate the party through the fear that a mistress may hear the tops popping off and come to investigate. However, a midnight feast has more cachet if you manage to coax the cook into making fresh lemonade.

But a midnight feast should never, ever involve cooking sausages. This can only lead directly to disaster.

2. Midnight feasts should never be held anywhere near a swimming pool. This will also end in disaster. Plus, schoolgirls are hearty enough, without needing to hold swimming races at midnight.

3. If you develop a passionate friendship (or, more accurately, a “pash”) with another girl in the school, the object of your affections is significantly more likely than her schoolfellows to die in a freak cross-country skiing accident.

(Seriously. I wish I could remember the name of the book in which this was the main life lesson, but they all blur into each other after a few years.)

4. Mysterious men who hang around the school for no apparent reason are invariably either

a. planning to steal the school’s silver tennis trophies, in which case the school’s rebel should thwart his purpose and thus transform herself the school’s heroine, or

b. the long-lost and extremely wealthy relative of the girl who has just arrived at the school from somewhere in the Antipodes, and is busy not only shocking the school with the freedom of her colonial manners but also winning all their cricket matches through her mysterious power of “spin bowling.”

5. If an unusually tall and strong girl arrives at the school, another student will almost certainly fall over a cliff or be trapped in a burning building at some point during the coming term.

This outcome is inevitable if the unusually tall girl has a famous mountaineer for a father.

6. Unusually tall and strong girls also have problems with anger management. Why bad tempers are associated with physical strength is never explained in the books.

I suspect steroids.

7. School bullies are always motivated by jealousy of the other girls’ prettiness, because they themselves invariably have poor complexions and greasy hair. Their bullying can be stopped if you tell them firmly to stop eating chocolates and brush their hair one hundred times before bed every night.

8. If the school is divided into different houses for sporting events, one house will always be subject to the scorn of the others. This will stop when the members of the disdained house show an unusual talent for handicrafts, thus saving the school’s annual charity sale.

9. French mistresses are always either plump and cheerful or thin and cranky. In either case, they are the best subjects for practical jokes, because French mistresses are thoroughly credulous, and can be made to believe in anything from imaginary odours to self-propelled crockery.

If you have more than one French mistress, the two will usually be fierce enemies. You can use this to your advantage in practical jokes.

10. Most schools have girls who fall into the following categories: a skilled artist; a mathematical genius, who is often an excellent musician as well; a clever writer; a talented sportswoman; a practical joker; and a skilled needlewoman.

All of these will come in handy when you inevitably have to put on a pantomime in your fifth year.

If your school was founded by Enid Blyton, you stand a good chance of finding that one of your classmates used to ride bareback in a circus. She may also be of Spanish or gypsy ethnicity, and will therefore have a fiery and uncontrollable temper, even if she is not unusually tall.

11. Occasionally, a school will allow in a girl whose working-class father has made an enormous amount of money. She will not, of course, “fit into” the school, and may spend most of her time boasting about what her father can afford to buy.

If this is the case, it is in no way repellent for you to respond, “Really? Can he afford to buy himself a few hundred hs?

In fact, your classmates will ignore the egregious classism and applaud your quick wit.

Of course, the girl will almost certainly be expelled for bringing the school into disrepute—the headmistress will describe her as a “failed experiment”—so you need to make that remark early in the term.

12. If any of your classmates run away from school, there’s no need to be alarmed: they will certainly have forgotten to check on local public transport, and can easily be collected from the local train station.

13. One of your classmates will sleepwalk. This is usually a sign that they’re being pushed beyond their endurance by ambitious parents or ignored by parents who blame them for the death of a favoured sibling. These parents will be in no way affronted if you send them a letter pointing out the flaws in their parenting practices.

14. If your school has an unusual location, be aware that this is a sign that you may face certain challenges. Schoolgirls in Austria, for example, need to be prepared for everything from attending the Passion Play in Oberammergau to facing down Nazis. Schoolgirls who live in a former Cistercian abbey, on the other hand, face the threat of becoming entangled in the English folk-dancing revival.

I leave it to you to decide which is worse.

15. Finally, if your best friend is unusually beautiful and generally beloved, beware: she will almost certainly not “play the game,” and you will have to jeopardise your own place in the school to protect her from the consequences of her folly.

For once, I haven’t doubled up any of books at the Lifeline Bookfest, not even The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as I initially feared.

And, as I alluded in my earlier post, buying Phineas Redux did complete my collection of the Pallister series; I’ve now found the other five—which were, naturally enough, stored far apart from one another, on completely different bookcases, and, in fact, in completely different rooms—so I can assert its completion confidently now.

Of course, they’re largely different editions, which is annoying in a series of books: half of them are Oxford paperbacks, but in two different versions, and another two are inexpensive Wordsworth reprints.

But the one I’m thinking of replacing is the Panther edition—a television tie-in edition from 1975—of the first novel, Can You Forgive Her?

But not because it’s a television tie-in; I don’t particularly like that, but it’s not sufficient cause to replace the book.

No, it’s because of the introduction by Simon Raven, who had a hand in the adaptation of the series for television.

More specifically, it’s because of this quote about Alice Vavasour, called in the blurb “one of the most striking heroines in Victorian fiction”:

Alice, though keen on sexy men, is terrified about what is going to happen on her wedding night, and keeps shuttling from George to Grey and back, not so much because one cheats and the other is a bore, but because she funks consummation with either. How the matter is resolved, I leave you to read for yourself; with this caveat, however, that while you will be interested you will not be wholly convinced, and that well before the end you will long for Alice to be hit on the head with a mallet and then raped (which is not, I hardly need to add, what happens). (xix)

Well, that should certainly cure the poor girl’s wedding-night jitters! So that’s a relief.

I suppose you do have to admire the confidence with which he inscribes that horrific desire to the entirety of his readership—and to think I wasted all that time pondering the complexities of various reader-response theories.

I have never read any of Simon Raven’s novels—although I understand, and the quote can be found here on the Wikipedia page, that his Shadows in the Grass was called “the filthiest cricket book ever written,” which, frankly, is quite an achievement.

In fact, the quotes on the Wikipedia page make both broad and specific use of the word “cad” in a density I haven’t seen since I last read T. H. White, while even his obituary claimed that his characters are “guaranteed to behave badly under pressure; most of them are vile without any pressure at all.”

Whether the quote about Alice is meant to be taken literally or ironically, I think the same can be said of Simon Raven as of his characters.

Since I’m marking the work of writing students for the next couple of weeks, this quotation leapt out at me during this evening’s leisure reading of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Clouds of Witness.

(Note that I’m careful to call it a quotation, since my supervisor once mentioned that when he read my chapter all he could hear in his head was the voice of an old school teacher saying, “Quotes are what plumbers give.”)

Wimsey looked with a new respect at the lady in the Russian blouse. Few books were capable of calling up a blush to his cheek, but he remembered that one of Miss Heath-Warburton’s had done it. The authoress was just saying impressively to her companion:

‘—ever know a sincere emotion express itself in a subordinate clause?’

‘Joyce has freed us from the superstition of syntax,’ agreed the curly man.

‘Scenes which make emotional history,’ said Miss Heath-Warburton, ‘should ideally be represented in a series of animal squeals.’

‘The D. H. Lawrence formula,’ said the other.

‘Or even Dada,’ said the authoress. (135)

As long as I never receive assessment written in a series of animal squeals, I should perhaps stop complaining about inability to accurately punctuate a subordinate clause.

It’s never occurred to me question the sincerity of whatever emotion it might contain. But then, as my students keep saying, that’s academic writing for you.

So today is one of the two greatest days on the Brisbane calendar: the Queen’s Birthday long weekend Lifeline Bookfest.

(The other greatest day is, of course, the Australia Day long weekend Lifeline Bookfest. And, yes, technically they take place over more than one day, but Nick is strangely resistant towards allowing me to go on more than one day, so as far as I’m concerned they’re one-day book sales.)

I love the Lifeline Bookfest.

The Lifeline Bookfest is, in fact, almost the sole reason why I will probably end up like that professor—I think he was Italian?—who spent a week trapped under one of his own bookcases while everyone assumed he was on sabbatical. Which I suppose he was, in a way.

As a book sale, though, it is variable; you won’t always find books that you absolutely have to buy (although, to be honest, I’ve never come away empty handed.)

But I’ve found some treasures: the Lifeline Bookfest yielded my lovely hardback facsimile reprints of a couple of Baum’s Oz books; a little copy of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; a fat little copy of Keats’s poems bound in puffy, disintegrating, orange suede; a tiny Victorian copy of Clara Reeve’s early Gothic novel The Old English Baron; and girls’ school story after girls’ school story, often with their original dust cover.

I wouldn’t miss the Bookfest for the world.

But this one was bad timing: with a Doctor Who night last night and a party tonight that involves dressing as vaguely Victorian sideshow freaks, we were always going to be a little pressed for time.

But then the Doctor Who night turned out to be unusually convivial, thanks to the need to open a bottle of champagne to toast success and then, obviously, having to drink the rest of the bottle so it didn’t go flat. So Nick and I dragged ourselves off the bed somewhere about 1 a. m., knowing the Bookfest opened at 8 a. m.

The night was slightly punctuated by snoring, but mostly by me waking up regularly to think, “My head really hurts, and I bet it will hurt worse by morning.”

Next thing I know, Nick’s shouting, “Get up, get up, the alarm didn’t go off!” and we’re rushing to shower and dress without the benefit of coffee or breakfast (but thanks to the magical power of Nurofen.)

Still, a successful morning of book shopping will cure even the worst hangover: and not only was this not a terrible hangover, but it was a great sale.

I don’t know whether someone had liquidated an entire, jealousy guarded collection of Victorian novels, but I found some lovely things: a copy of Margaret Oliphant’s ghost stories and her gothicky novel Salem Chapel; a pile of Anthony Trollopes, including the fabulously titled Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite and Phineas Redux, which I’m pretty sure completes my Pallister series (only I can’t remember where I put the others, so I can’t check); some Oscar Wilde short stories; Wilkie Collins’s Basil; and even a copy of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame De Paris (I checked: it is a translation, despite the misleading title.)

The latter led to me making the following disclaimer to Nick: “This really is an essential book. In fact, it’s so essential that I may already have a copy, but I’m pretty sure I don’t.”

I was also able to thoroughly indulge one of my other main hobbies, which is early crime fiction, thanks to a couple of Dover reprints of 1930s detective stories (one set in Oxford—the murder of an unpopular tutor in the Dean’s study! Horrors!—and one set on one of the Channel Islands), a collection of Edwardian stories of cosmopolitan crime called More Rivals to Sherlock Holmes (which leads me to hope that somewhere out there there’s a book called Rivals to Sherlock Holmes; I already have one called In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes), and 1913’s The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu—how could I turn that down?

I didn’t just stick with books of at least seventy years’ vintage, either: I was going to cite Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop here, but of course that is exactly seventy years old. But I did buy Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, some Italo Calvino, and Umberto Eco’s Reflections on The Name of the Rose.

Even the children’s books were worth perusing this time; they’re often not, unless you’re looking to complete collections of Babysitters’ Club or Sweet Valley High books. But I dragged out a couple of later Wombles books, and two new (to me) Dana Girls Mysteries: the Dana Girls books—private-school girls who solve mysteries in their spare time—were written by “Carolyn Keene,” the “author” of the Nancy Drew Mysteries, and are essentially exactly the same books but with an additional detective.

But my crowning delight from this sale was a beautiful—still dust-jacketed!—copy of Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopaedia. I’ve said before that Benet’s is perhaps the only book that could challenge Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable as my go-to reference book, but now I don’t have to chose between them.

On the downside, I think my double-strength coffee and the Nurofen are wearing off simultaneously.

On the plus side, I have forty-five lovely new books to try and fit onto my shelves this afternoon.

I’ve literally just finished reading Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams’s Tunnels and, far from proclaiming this the new Harry Potter, I find myself rather frustrated by the experience.

That’s not to say it’s a bad novel; it’s not. Oh, there are some clanky moments, such as the following image of an underground cavern:

It dwarfed any of the Colony’s caverns with its scale, and brought to Will’s mind the image of a gargantuan heart, its chambers criss-crossed by huge, heartstring-like columns. (352)

This isn’t great writing; though it’s not necessarily representative of the book as a whole, I wasn’t convinced by the fairly awkward combination of the metaphor and simile (and perhaps another metaphorical term: is “chambers” referring to the chambers of the heart or literally to the chambers within an underground cavern?). Nor is this the only instance where the prose clanked a little for me.

Nevertheless, I can see small boys responding eagerly to the book, the sequel that it seems to be leading towards, and the movie that is apparently slated for release in 2010.

But that’s part of my problem; the book is intensely . . . boy-focused, for want of a better term.

I’ve heard the arguments that young girls will read books with male protagonists, but that young boys won’t read books about girls.

I don’t buy it for a minute.

Oh, certainly I imagine that the number of young men who bought and read Meg Cabot’s rather funny—in the early stages, anyway—series The Princess Diaries would be significantly outweighed by their female counterparts: those books were clearly marketed for a prepubescent female readership, whoever else read them.

But I don’t believe that Garth Nix’s lovely Abhorsen series, or Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, or many of Terry Pratchett’s recent books, including the Tiffany Aching series, weren’t read by boys because they had girl protagonists—or, going further back, that the same fate met fully half of Diana Wynne Jones’s oeuvre, or C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which Lucy Pevensie is the stand-out character.

So I don’t accept that as a reason.

It may be that Gordon and Williams deliberately aimed this at a specifically male readership, as I’ve suggested that Cabot did with young girls. There’s nothing wrong with that approach.

But the focus is unmistakeable.

The novel has three significant female characters: there are other women—two of whom are given names but are entirely ineffectual from a plot perspective and another who is named but never actually present in the text—but the three primary ones are the only ones given any significant space within the text.

Of these, one is psychopathic. Literally.

Another is drugged into a stupor by an addiction to television that is maintained by two constantly active video recorders: although she nominally occupies the positions of wife and mother, she abandons these with no argument and no justification. When she does break away from the television stupor, it is only to enter an alternative stupor created by pharmaceuticals.

The third does rise to a moment of pathos but is also stupefied; in her case, it’s a combination of cigarettes, cheap vodka, and council housing. I can certainly believe that the conditions of council-housing life in a rough suburb of London would generate a desire to slide into forgetfulness, but I’m less sympathetic towards this character when she’s part of a pattern of ineffectual female characters.

But, just in case this seems nothing more than the futile protestations of a feminist reader, it’s not the only concern that the book raised.

In Tunnels, there are two worlds: one above ground and one below. I’m not giving much away with this information: a cursory glance at the cover and the blurb in conjunction will tell you that.

The above-ground world is ours, not an alternative Earth, so little needs to be said about that.

My other concern, then, is with the evocation of the below-ground world, which seems uneven.

I should perhaps state here that, as a reader, I’m rapidly turned off by a book if the world-building is inconsistent, implausible, or just plain silly.

None of those are the case here, but it is the case that the world-building is uneven.

We are given, for example, a great deal of information about the day-to-day life of the underground world, but no information at all on how it can operate as an economy, how such an authoritarian social structure can maintain itself—about, essentially, how this community can possibly be self-sustaining. In fact, we get hints that it’s not self-sustaining, which only add to the confusion.

The book also drops hints about how this community came about: once again, none of these points are addressed in the text, so the reader is left to wonder if the 260-year time frame we’re given is sufficient to create what we see.

I’m sure that some of these questions will be answered if the book runs to a sequel, or more than one sequel.

But they’re not presented in such a way in the text as to invite further thoughts about what the sequels might reveal. The questions that Tunnels raises are closed off; the reader simply isn’t encouraged to speculate, when the information presented is so scanty.

Since this novel has been talked about as “the new Harry Potter“, I feel justified in making the following point: even when Rowling withheld information, she made it quite clear that information was being withheld.

Whatever can be said about the quality of Rowling’s writing at the sentence level or about the tautness of her narratives—and I’m saying nothing about either point—she cleverly managed the blocking of future plot points, whether it was by the Agatha Christie method of “Hey, look what my other hand’s doing!” or by having a powerful character simply stop potential enquiries.

Tunnels doesn’t have the same feel of through-plotted development. It feels, rather, as though the authors themselves are slowly working their way forward.

It may be that the putative sequels, should they emerge, will make me rethink this position.

But for now, I’m sticking with my original point: this, ultimately, is a rather frustrating book.

I’ve already written a piece on my love of Agatha Christie novels, so I felt that this might make an appropriate companion piece.

I’ve been breaking my heart this weekend—again, fool that I am—over Busman’s Honeymoon, which never ceases to strike me as a tragedy, even with the later short stories about Lord Peter and Harriet’s married life, collected in Striding Folly.

It always seems a shame to me, after the events of Strong Poison, the underlying tension of Have His Carcase, and the partly frustrated yet oddly celebratory mood of Gaudy Night, that we should come to this: a honeymoon couple uncertain about whether the marriage can survive the exigencies of the very interests that brought the two of them together.

But then, I say that as a Sayers fan. I’ve always felt that the quality of her writing—but then, you have to stop there, don’t you? Because to say that “the quality of her writing is far higher than that of the average crime novel” leads into a morass of assumptions about what popular fiction is, where it fits on an entirely arbitrary scale of perceived literary value, and whether we can judge it against “proper novels.”

Take Julian Symons, for example. I understand him to be a leading exponent of British crime writing—according to the Wikipedia article to which I’ve just linked—but I’ve never read any of his books.

But, to go back to the Wikipedia article again, take this quote on Symons, which is apparently from the introduction to The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:

He turned to crime writing in a light–hearted way before the war and soon afterwards established himself as a leading exponent of it, though his use of irony to show the violence behind the respectable masks of society place many of his books on the level of the orthodox novel.

Many of his books are on a level with the “orthodox novel,” eh? Because they’re ironic?

Fair enough.

But why that entirely arbitrary dichotomy between “crime fiction” and “orthodox fiction”? Yes, I know I used the term “popular” to describe Conan Doyle as a writer in this post, but I stand by it. Compared to say, Thomas Hardy, he was a “popular writer”; I’ve never heard that people in their thousands were in a state of hysteria and high distress when Hardy killed off Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

But then, why bring Julian Symons into this debate at all?

Because Symons didn’t like Sayers.

When he published Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel—A History (Penguin, 1974), he made a point of emphasising that “[it] is from a point of view very short of idolatry that they [Sayers’s novels] are discussed here” (112). And by “very short” he doesn’t mean that he’s close to the idolatry end of the scale.

But why? What on earth does Symons have against Sayers?

He starts by outlining the ways in which she is to be lauded:

• she has a “clear and incisive” intellect and was widely read in crime fiction (112).
• she was the first writer to include five Poe stories in the canon of early crime fiction, rather than the usual three (113).
• similarly, she recognised Sheridan Le Fanu’s contribution to the development of the genre (113).
• “it is impossible not to admire the careful craftsmanship with which they [her stories] have been made” (113).
• she took great pains over the accuracy of her stories (113).

So why doesn’t he like her? Apparently—and there’s no padding here, no attempt to soften the verbiage—because “she was pompous and boring” (113).

Well, all right then. There’s not much I can say to that, is there? Especially since Symons emphasises that this is “the same evidence that admirers would cite in her favour” (113)—the style of her writing, as opposed the craftsmanship of her plotting.

And, oddly, it’s often the craftsmanship of her plots with which I take exception. I mentioned in a previous post that I tend not to re-read Have His Carcase, because it’s blatantly obvious to me that one of the primary characters was a haemophiliac, which knowledge spoils the slow development of the plot for me, and has since the first time I read the novel.

Similarly, the novel that Symons singles out, The Nine Tailors, is something of a dull murder mystery, because the nature of the victim, the cause of his death, and the identity of the perpetrator are quite obvious from relatively early on.

But, really, does one read The Nine Tailors solely for the murder mystery? Doesn’t much, perhaps the majority, of the joy that one obtains from that novel come from the evocation of a curiously English form of campanology: change ringing.

Consider, for example, the nine deep tolls that mark the passing of a man of the parish. Consider the twelve tolls at New Year’s midnight for the dead year.

And consider this:

The bells gave tongue: Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul, rioting and exulting high up in the dark tower, wide mouths rising and falling, brazen tongues clamouring, huge wheels turning to the dance of the leaping ropes. [. . .] Out over the flat, white wastes of fen, over the spear-straight, steel-dark dykes and the wind-bent, groaning poplar trees, bursting from the snow-choked louvres of the belfry, whirled away southward and westward in gusty blasts of clamour to the sleeping counties went the music of the bells — little Gaude, silver Sabaoth, strong John and Jericho, glad Jubilee, sweet Dimity, with great Tailor Paul bawling and striding like a giant in the midst of them. (34)

Really, what does the ready identity of the murderer mean, compared to that passage?

Or, on a smaller note, consider Harriet Vane’s memories of her undergraduate days in Oxford in Gaudy Night, when she recalls climbing Magdalen Tower with a friend and feeling “it swing beneath them with the swing of the reeling bells” (3).

What does it matter if, as Symons says, Lord Peter Wimsey is unbearably affected—I myself struggle at times with both his and Harriet’s automatic assumption that servants, excluding Bunter, need to be treated in a certain way—when the author can produce lines that read like something out of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem?

But, then, I am a fan, so according to Symons I have no choice but to eulogise Sayers’s writing style. From Symons’s approach to her novels, it seems that an appreciation for her prose prefigures an inability to critically appraise her work.

Perhaps that’s so—but I don’t think so.

I think, rather, that some of us don’t necessarily see “detective fiction” and “orthodox novels” as sharply divided categories in a “never the twain shall meet” sense.

Some of us just enjoy the prose, even while muttering “haemophiliac” under our breath.

I have so far failed abysmally in locating Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, but in my futile search I did come across another book that I bought months ago, read, put away carefully, decided to blog about, and completely failed to relocate: Elliot Engel’s A Dab of Dickens and a Touch of Twain.

This is a collection of biographical readings of authors ranging chronologically from Chaucer to Robert Frost. Despite the early debates about my Leavisite tendencies—and the fact that I found the book buried under fictionalised biographies of Lady Caroline Lamb and Byron’s other troublesome woman, Annabella Milbanke—this is not my usual reading material.

Certainly, I think biographical material is important to literary analysis—since I believe strongly that the conditions of production have a direct influence on the works produced—but I prefer to obtain this material from direct sources—letters, receipts, contracts, and so forth—as and when it is necessary to my work. When I read biographies, I want them to be about someone fun and unrelated to my research, such as courtesans. (Ah, Harriette Wilson—publish and be damned, indeed.)

But I picked this up at a secondhand store when I’d taken my car in to Woolloongabba at the crack of dawn for a service, and thought it would be as well to wait to collect it. (Note to self: that was a mistake.) I was bored and over-caffeinated, and thought this would do well to pass the time.

I know nothing of Elliott Engel, although I understand he works at an American university. More importantly from the perspective of this post, he give “popular” lectures on literature, from which these pieces were derived.

That word “popular” is always a problematic one when it’s applied in this type of context, and I have taken it directly from the blurbs in the front of the book: here, I think we can take it to mean simply “lectures given outside the academy.” I don’t propose to speculate about the types of audiences that such lectures would draw, because I don’t think it’s at all relevant—there is no reason why literary analysis should be deemed the sole province of the academy.

But it does mean that these pieces are almost entirely without referencing—barring an extremely short list of biographies at the end, which troubles me slightly, because I disagree with Engel’s contention that “one fine biography is all you’ll need for each author” (347). But then, as I say, these are not academic pieces: they’re narratives.

And Engel is, as he says, “a proud member of the school of biographical literary criticism and [has] always been truant from the Freudian, Marxist, deconstructionist, poststructuralist, and other literary schools that seem to concentrate on illuminating the supposed genius of the critic while all too often ignoring and distorting the real genius of the famous writer” (xii).

There’s much with which I could dispute in this passage, but I’ll settle for suggesting that working from a single biography might well lead to as many patterns of distortions as any poststructuralist or deconstructionist reading.

(It also seems to me a little disingenuous to apply these potentially exclusionary academic terms in a non-academic text, but that’s another point I don’t want to address in detail.)

From my own perspective, it also seems that biographical readings that ignore the perspectives offered by Marxist-based criticism run the risk of being readings divorced entirely from any awareness of the socio-economic climate in which the works were produced.

But then, this is a book that centres on the Western canon. It does include some women writers whose addition to the canon is more recent than, for example, that of Chaucer or Shakespeare, but even then the women are fairly conventional choices: Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. It makes a nod towards including more “popular” writers—to use that problematic term again—but even here it makes a conventional choice, with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Generally, however, the authors are the names you would anticipate in this type of book: William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence.

And that’s fine and, really, the book’s fine—except that it gave me an odd feeling that behind the text was an exclusive and exclusionary method.

I couldn’t put my finger on why—until I came to the following passage in the section on Shakespeare, describing the behaviour of the relatively impoverished “groundlings” standing in the cheapest spaces at the foot of the stage:

But when the play would begin, the groundlings, an unsophisticated lot, would become so excited and so caught up in the action that their mouths would hang open; they would be gaping up at the actors, slack-jawed, watching the play unfold. This rapt attention was not what bothered the actors, but when the play became exciting and suspenseful, as in the early fight scenes in Romeo and Juliet, the groundlings would start to salivate. The saliva would drip down their chins and eventually fall onto the stage, where it made this little rivulet at the actors’ feet. (34)

This is a grotesque image.

It is also, Engel tells us, the origin of the term “break a leg,” which he translates, in the fictional voice of an imagined actor, as “Perform so the groundlings become so enthralled that they slobber on the stage; may you slip in it and break your leg” (34).

This seems an improbable and mean-spirited expression of good will, even for a more brutish age. It is also in direct contradiction to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which suggests—albeit via the speculative phrase “is said to relate”—that it arose as black humour after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and John Wilkes Booth’s subsequent breaking of his leg as he leapt onto the stage to escape.

Brewer’s version seems far more plausible to me.

Engel cites in support of his argument an anonymous actor’s diary—which, given his minimalist bibliography, is impossible for the reader to verify for themselves—which allegedly reads “I feared when it was time for me to give my soliloquy and step to the edge of the stage, I was in grave danger of slipping in the drool left by the groundlings” (34).

But I can’t be the only one who suspects that this anonymous actor was indulging in hyperbole, perhaps tempered by a distaste for the patrons occupying the cheap seats.

This image of drooling groundlings bothers me in ways that I can’t quite articulate. But first and foremost, it seems so improbable—even assuming that it is possible to “gape up” at the actors and yet drool to such an extent that the players’ limbs are at risk, without somehow drowning in the process.

These standing seats, Engel tells us, cost a penny, compared to four pennies for an actual seat. But a penny is a lot of money to the vast majority of the working population in Shakespearean England.

So Engel’s image has us imagining a large number of audience members willing to regularly pay a relatively high fee to see linguistically and artistically complicated plays that, apparently, they are too unsophisticated to comprehend. So unsophisticated, in fact, that they lose all control over their salivation.

If all they want is the unsophisticated violence of the fight scenes, surely they could obtain that at any nearby tavern—with a greater probability of gore—and get drunk at the same time?

And why assume that poverty automatically translates into a grotesque, slavering inability to interpret the primary form of entertainment of the times?

Elizabethan theatre is not my field, and I know no more about it than any other B.Arts graduate who enjoys reading Shakespeare for pleasure.

But this passage does suggest to me something concrete about the dangers of relying too uncritically on biographical material at the expense of an understanding of the socio-economic factors of the time, their influence on the modes of production of a text, and the ability of the common reader to interpret the texts presented for their amusement.

Where do most people keep their copies of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf?

Because I’ve completely lost track of mine, and I wanted to blog about it.

It’s not where I suspected it would be—which was, logically enough, under a pile of P. D. James novels that I’ll never read again because Adam Dalgleish induces near-homicidal levels of frustration in me.

And I’ve pulled books off all available shelves—finding, in the process, forgotten novels by Mark Rutherford, Victoria Glendenning, and Anthony Trollope, and my copy of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood—and I still haven’t found it.

So I’m stumped.

First person to make a suggestion that leads to that elusive book wins my trademark prize: a shiny but completely invisible and intangible trophy.