This weekend I was lucky enough to attend a couple of talks at the Bath Festival – a marvellous event in a beautiful, historical city in the West of England. The festival had a great programme, but we could only pay a flying visit so went to just two of the highlights – but what a perfect, unimprovable combination they were.
I was going to say theywere two modern heroines for my generation, but eventually realized I had to say three: we saw author Helen Fielding, politician and now-author Harriet Harman – and then have to add in Bridget Jones herself. And of course skittering round the edges was the ghost of Jane Austen, for whom Bath had a great importance, in two of her novels as well as her life.
So: first we went to see
Helen Fielding
talk in St Swithin’s church, where Jane Austen’s parents were married. Fielding was funny and charming, and explained away at least some of the mysteries of Bridget’s Choose-your-Own Adventure recent history – see this blogpost. She worried about swearing in church, she told funny stories from her own life, and said she collected anecdotes from all her friends to put into Bridget’s story. She didn’t explicitly say there would be more books about Bridget, but surely we can all hope…
Bridget has featured several times on the blog, and in my Guardian articles too – click on the label below for more. As I said a long time ago:
Bridget Jones was the first, the original, the best. To categorize her as ChickLit is just wrong – the first book is extremely clever, extremely funny, and a true satirical comedy of manners. It’s as if Edith Wharton re-wrote House of Mirth for the 1990s, with Lily Bart allowed a modicum of happiness in an unforgiving society.
The fact that her name is used as shorthand for a certain kind of ridiculous disparagement of women (see Mail Online) is infuriating, but, as Fielding says, it doesn’t matter in the end – the books are still in print still being read. Any woman with half a mind can see Bridget for the wonder that she is.
Our next engagement was with
Harriet Harman
- an event in the Bath Assembly Rooms, where Jane Austen and Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey both danced.
Harman is a British Labour politican who came to the House of Commons in 1982 and has been there ever since. She was young and good-looking and pregnant when she arrived, and if anyone thinks the trolling of successful women came with the internet age, her story proves the opposite. She has been condemned and criticized endlessly – commentators said she was humourless, she was a mad feminist, that she was obsessed with political correctness, a bad mother and (of course) that she should go back in the kitchen where she belongs.
She kept on fighting and working for what she believes in, refusing to be cowed. Her recent autobiography, A Woman’s Work, is far and away the best political memoir I have ever read. That’s not actually setting the bar very high – most of them are self-serving claptrap – but her book is honest, riveting, real, and shot through with moments of self-doubt, and moments where she says she did the wrong thing. I was very active politically during much of the time she covers, so it was very familiar to me, but I think anyone interested in recent history would be delighted by it.
She should have been leader of the Labour Party, she should have been Prime Minister.
She says there is still a lot to do, but the list of her achievements (she would always be collegiate and say they were achievements of a team, or the party) is astonishing. To take one small example: in her maiden speech in the House of Commons she spoke about the need of good childcare for working mothers. She was mocked and disdained for this (by, it must be said, her own side too): the then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher simply sneered at the very idea that such arrangements were any business of government. Harman was treated as an idiot. Well, we’ve come a long way since then.
She was electrifying to hear talk – she argued passionately and convincingly in favour of positive discrimination if necessary, using all-women shortlists for candidate selection as her example. At the end she had a standing ovation – very rare for such an event. She really is an inspiration to everyone, not just women. It’s just a pity she didn’t become party leader.
For those of us with daughters: a capsule library of Harriet Harman, Bridget Jones and Jane Austen will go a long way. Role models all of them.
published 1933
LOOKING AT WHAT GOES ON UNDER THE CLOTHES
[A fancy dress costume party at a country house. There are tensions and nefarious goings-on]
Eleanor appeared, dressed as the Family Ghost, in trailing white draperies, with diamonds in her hair. Nunn followed her, in his ordinary dress suit, carrying a table napkin. It was an ingenious dress, and a courageous one, for, with his square blunt features, the stolidity of his bearing and his general lack of distinction, he looked exactly like the head waiter he represented…
The rest of the party began to arrive. Hilary, in vivid silk pyjamas, carrying a Teddy Bear, came as Tantalising Tommy, though for most of the evening I think she was taken for Christopher Robin, with Pooh. The others showed a marked originality…
Mrs Ross stood at my side and commented on the arrivals. ‘Has it occurred to you how easy it would be to steal jewels at a party like this? Almost anyone could gate-crash. There’s that child Hilary in nothing but pyjamas… That child hasn’t got so much as a vest on, I daresay. Why, I remember being whipped by my father at 14 for running downstairs in a petticoat with bare arms and no stockings on. There’ll be no indecency in this house, he said.’
commentary: I (along with half my crime fiction fan friends) have been reading the recently published collection of Dorothy L Sayers’ collected crime reviews, edited by our good friend Martin Edwards. The book is called, pleasingly, Taking Detective Stories Seriously.
I knew this would mean books obtained and read, and this is the first one. DLS has this to say:
[it] has at least one uncommon merit. It contrives to persuade us that something really serious and unpleasant is taking place at Feltham Abbey. So often in a detective story trivial irregularities like blackmail and murder seem scarcely to ruffle the placid current of domestic affairs… Here, the atmosphere of suspense and uneasiness really does pervade the household.
- and that’s a very good description. But I was already pretty much certain to want to read any book with that title – as I frequently say, I do love a fancy dress party. (Click on the labels below for proof.) Naturally, this one is going to end in a murder.
The plot is complicated and there are quite a few major characters: the narrator and his old schoolfriend, Jeremy, have come down to the country house with two intentions 1) to stop the young and beautiful Hilary from getting married to the wrong person and 2) to catch a wicked blackmailer who is terrorizing high society with implications for politics and international affairs and associated treason. Hilary is quite an unusual heroine in that she behaves very badly throughout. I relished this:
‘What does that girl remind you of?’ Jeremy asked, as the door closed.
‘A mouse,’ said Mrs Ross, promptly and unpleasantly. ‘It leaves its traces behind it wherever it goes.’
She does have reason for some of her activities, but dear me she is a handful. Various suitors pop up throughout the book, but you don’t exactly envy whoever is lucky enough to win her hand. But then, that does make her a refreshing change from most of the heroines of the era.
As DLS suggests, Gilbert was very good at creating an atmosphere and some tension. I’m not sure if it would have been possible to work out any solution till very late, but it was suitably surprising. An enjoyable book, and very much one of its time.
Anthony Gilbert (who was in fact a woman called Lucy Malleson) wrote a lot of crime books: a couple of them have featured on the blog.
Tantalizing Tommy (and obviously I had to look this up) is the heroine of a French play, a play in English, and a musical, all from the early 20th century. The small screengrab above is from a French film of the original (La Petit Chocolatiere), and the quote is presumably the source of Hilary’s costume. (‘bus.’ I think means – business. So the actress will be making something of her appearance in pyjamas.) The play – which I found and read online – is a farce, and Tantalizing Tommy (a woman) stays the night in a man’s cottage when her car breaks down. She borrows his pyjamas and sleeps in his bed - and this fact ruins his engagement. So naturally they become very angry with each other. Fill in the rest of the plot for yourself.
The ‘family ghost’ picture comes from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and can be found on Flickr. Used in the past – and truly I think it was one of my best photo-description matches – for Topaz’s evening dress in I Capture the Castle.
published 2014
[1968: the opening night of the musical Hair. Dennis and Sophie are attending together]
The audience for Hair was a surprisingly typical first-night crowd: lots of men in suits and their nervous-looking wives. Dennis was both disappointed and relieved. He would have enjoyed telling his mother that he’d spent the evening sitting amidst long-haired, bare-chested men and kohl-eyed, bare-breasted women, but many of the men looked as though they’d come straight from the City, and their wives straight off the 5.20 from Godalming. The men had a gleam in their eyes that might not have been there if they were about to sit through three hours of The Cherry Orchard, and there was a loud, and somewhat self-congratulatory, hum of anticipation before the curtain came up. But – and here was the relief – Dennis didn’t look out of place. He would go so far as to say that he looked rather young and bohemian compared to a lot of the people there – he’d decided, at the last moment and as a concession to the winds of change, to wear an open-necked shirt and a striped blazer.
Sophie looked extraordinary in a canary-yellow minidress and white boots, and the photographers in the foyer surrounded her.
commentary: Half the features in Funny Girl are tropes I regularly object to. The heroine has two names, Barbara and Sophie, and – she's an actress and comedienne – her role of a lifetime over several years involves playing a woman called Barbara. I can just hear myself: ‘how dare he assume the reader can be bothered to keep track of that?’ The viewpoint shifts all over the place – there’ll be a scene involving several characters, and we go into it with one of them and leave with another. Real-life incidents, such as this, the opening night of Hair, and people – Jimmy Page, Terence Stamp – are pushed into the book in minor roles. There are real black and white photos from the era as illustrations. (Actually I never mind that, no objections at all.)
And in fact I loved the book without hesitation or reservation. The name business is perfectly reasonable, and one of the strands of the book is the parallels and confusion between a TV series, the cast and crew, a fictional family and a real family – so the name confusion is perfect. He does the changes of POV beautifully, and I liked the glimpses of real people.
Nick Hornby is one of my favourite writers anyway (see his books and mentions of him all over the blog) – but that wouldn’t necessarily mean I loved this: many of his fans were very disappointed by it. Reading the reviews on amazon was fascinating, because they were evenly distributed. You can always ignore a lot of the reviews (‘arrived in good condition’ ‘this is a really terrible book so I only read 30 pages of it’) but the thoughtful bad comments were particularly intriguing because the criticism were of the features of the book that I most enjoyed.
Hornby is an incredibly literate, well-educated and well-read person, but there are two ways in which his books are unusual: he writes as though he has heard novels described but has never read one, so he tells a story in strikingly unusual ways (it is no wonder he likes Nina Stibbe, of whom I said something similar); and he has overtly said he likes books, his included, to be entertaining and interesting and funny, no matter how serious and literary their purpose. He says: all books can (and perhaps should) be all those things. And he lives by what he says – his books are exactly that.
There is a certain inconsequentiality, a vagueness about it, and I loved that. It’s a book that will float over months and many events in a short time, then zero in on a short meeting or event and give it in great detail. He made that work very well, along with the characters moving in and out and being followed by the authorial eye.
The reviews I could not get on with for a moment were those (often from people saying that they were previously fans of Hornby) that said this book wasn’t funny. I thought it was hilarious, always witty and at times hysterically funny. There were pages and pages of incredible dialogue, that had me falling about – but at the same time those pages were wonderfully informative and convincing about the process of writing, the process of trying to be funny, about being part of a team trying to create something.
‘Where are you from, Sophie?’ said Dennis.
‘I’m from Blackpool.’
‘You see, that’s interesting,’ said Dennis.
‘Is it?’ Sophie was genuinely surprised.
‘Coming from Blackpool is more interesting than being a vicar’s daughter.’
‘Couldn’t she be a vicar’s daughter from Blackpool?’ said Tony.
‘She’s no vicar’s daughter,’ said Clive. ‘
I’m assuming that’s rude,’ said Sophie.
There was something in the room, Dennis thought.
Nick Hornby writes about being a reader better than almost anyone I know – he did a regular column for the magazine The Believer called ‘Stuff I’ve been Reading’, and they were collected into books that are a great read (although you end up with a list of books to find). Some of my favourite books have come from these collections. He wrote a wonderful description of that rare feeling of finishing a book and of loving it so much you can’t read anything else, you are still lost in the world of the book. I was so glad that he described that – I have had it with a very few books, including Hilary Mantel’s two Thomas Cromwell books. And although I didn’t feel Funny Girl was my favourite book ever, it didn’t change my world – but still, I was so lost in the book that I had to read through my favourite bits again rather than starting something new. I am certain this book is one I will re-read more than once.
An absolute topclass book – though not for everyone.
The pictures show Girl in a Yellow Dress by Wayne Thiebaud, and the singer Diana Ross in Courreges from a website pleasingly called c PleasurePhoto
published 1930
[Aged aunts Letti and Berthe are entertaining young relations from England in their Paris apartment]
Letti staggered in with the albums, busily dusted them, and they were plumped down in front of Val, Berthe sitting beside her to explain, Letti leaning over her other shoulder, Helen poised nonchalantly on the table, surveying her ancestors upside down….Val flipped over page after page, stopping every now and then for a luscious explanation from Berthe, or to give a shout of recognition at the sight or Truda in a particularly dressy blouse… Pretty little Susan Lake, the first Goyisher girl to marry into the Rakonitz family, looking sweet and modest and religious under a hat that had practically everything on it that a hat could possibly hope to have in this or the next world…
[Helen] pulled off her hat, and held it, a fantastic two-cornered shape, flat and black, across her knees… With her Punchinello nose, her black and…white Chanel jumper cut into lozenges and diamonds, each posture as though it were snipped by a pair of flashing scissors, she might well have been a figure from an ultra-modern form of harlequinade.
commentary: I’ve already done an entry just about corsets in this endlessly rewarding book. The hats also are overflowing in Mosaic – there’s a nice 1885 mention of a ‘high bonnet with a bird’s wing on one side’, and endless trouble arises from the fashion for directoire hats ‘whose crowns were one inch in depth, very disconcerting for the Rakonitz ladies with their heritage of thick hair.’
But all the clothes descriptions are wonderful throughout.
And then there is this on mourning, after a rather distant connection has died:
Papa did not think it necessary to go into full mourning… he went into Peter Robinson’s and asked for grey gloves, and the shop-walker, a very polite young fellow, said to him: ‘Grey gloves, sir? That will be in our Semi-Bereavement Department.’ We simply couldn’t stop laughing…
Me too.
On another semi-bereavement occasion – light purple colours are the key - the bridesmaids at a wedding:
were quietly dressed in mauve taffeta; but for the dinner and dance in the evening, they changed into full evening dress, white satin with broad mauve velvet ribbon running round the edge of the bodice, and a fringe of violets, and mauve cotton stockings with lace-work up the front, and mauve leather shoes… and mauve suede gloves - right up the arms.
Which sounds rather festive, but then ‘nobody cared very much for the elderly Czelovar-Bettelheim relation who had recently died’.
(The picture, by Giovanni Boldini, via the Athenaeum, shows a dress that is probably far more revealing than those of the bridesmaids, but is nicely dashing, and all those chairs in the way of the dancing looks exactly like a wedding…)
The characters are described as fully as their clothes, and their (many) foibles are treated with kindness. Berthe, one of the key characters in the book, whose adult life is followed throughout, is the kind of person you can recognize completely – as she gets older she is forever boasting about the great singing career she could have had, and about all the men who were in love with her.
On her 67th birthday she finally made a stand at ’20 years ago’ and did not depart from it: ‘Helas, it is too late to start now!’
The descriptions are funny, Berthe is sharply skewered, and the descriptions of her singing are absolutely hilarious. But there is a kindness that is missing from, for example, George Eliot’s dealing with the singing of Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda, or the despised music of a character in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows.
And I am, always, endlessly grateful to Hilary McKay (someone else who writes so well about families) for telling me about the books. There are multiple earlier entries on the first two books, The Matriarch and A Deputy was King.
The harlequin photo is from a much later date than the extract, but the hat and diamonds seem right, and Helen was always way ahead in fashion…
The Tuesday Night Club is a group of Golden Age crime fiction fans, writing on a different theme each month. A frequent contributor, and one of our founder members, was the wonderful Helen Szamuely, who died in April. There’s an obituary for her here, and a personal memory from someone who obviously knew her well here. And there's more of an introduction to her in my previous posts.
We have decided to nominate May as a tribute month:
Helen's Month
Posts might feature an author or a character called Helen; or be involved with her great interests in life: Europe, History or Russia; or any other connection that works.
Bev Hankins has done the splendid Helen logo for us.
My first post for the month was on a book Helen Szamuely recommended to me - Murder a la Mode by Eleanore Kelly Sellars; then I looked at crime writer Helen McCloy’s Two Thirds of a Ghost. Last week I looked at John Le Carre’s classic Our Game - about the aftermath of the Cold War, about what happened to the now redundant spies: a true subject for Helen.
This week I’m looking at a brand-new book (it will be published on 1st June), but one that is set in 1961, and looks at the fate of spies who defected to the Soviet Union. Again, right up Helen’s street.
Defectors by Joseph Kanon
published 2017
[1961. Simon Weeks is visiting his brother Frank in Moscow: Frank was a Soviet spy who fled to the USSR when he was about to be uncovered]
Red Square. A place he’d seen in a thousand photographs, filled with tanks and military saluted and politburo members who disappeared from the pictures a year later, airbrushed from memory. He’d always imagined a gray ceremonial square, boxed in by Kremlin towers, but instead it was open and bright, flooded with light, the onion domes of St Basil’s at the far end swirls of colour, GUM department store frilly and ornate, something a child’s illustrator might have dreamed up. People hurrying across to work. Anywhere. He looked at the high fortress walls. Where Stalin had sat up at night putting check marks next to names on a list. Names he knew, names other people knew, names that struck his fancy. Terror had no logic. Check. Gone. Night after night.
[Simon attends a lunch party at a dacha, attended by a number of defectors]
Joanna had sun for her party, a spring day warm enough for summer. A long wicker table and chairs had been set up on the lawn, something out of a tsarist era photograph, the family posed around an outdoor table… revolution just a thundercloud away. Now there were bottles of Georgian wine and Hanna Rubin in a dowdy sundress.
commentary: Often spy novels are quite sprawling, spanning a long period of time, perhaps a double timeframe, and travelling with the agents from one place to another. This book is the opposite: it almost resembles a Greek drama in its unities. It takes place over the course of a couple of days in 1961, and 90% of it is set in Moscow. There are tempting memories for the characters, but Kanon refuses to go in for the usual flashbacks.
It’s a great setup: Simon and Frank Weeks are brothers, sons of an important and highly respectable (and one guesses rich) American political family. They were born to rule. But 12 years earlier, Frank had been exposed as a Soviet spy, and only just managed to escape to Moscow, where he’s been living ever since. Simon’s own diplomatic career was ruined, but now he is a publisher. And he has been given the chance to publish his brother’s memoirs, and has flown in to go over the MS with him, to sort out the details. It turns out that Frank’s wife Joanna (who is in Moscow too) has some history with Simon. Of course both brothers are under constant surveillance.
It is a most winning assembly of circumstances: you know it’s not just going to be about copyright and the royalties – something is going to happen. And Kanon turns it all into a great, enthralling and very tense book: this is a fabulous read.
Frank is an amalgam of some US and British spies – but has a lot in common with Kim Philby: not so much the history (though anyone familiar with the story will be substituting ‘Albanian’ for ‘Latvian’ at certain points), as the attitudes and the positioning and the post-defection life. Frank’s book is to be called ‘My Secret Life’, Philby’s very similar book is called ‘My Silent War’.
Significantly, Philby is just about the only real-life spy of the era not mentioned in the book – several of them have walk-on roles. Then there is the lunch-party at the dacha (weekend house in the country) in the second extract above – other (fictional) defectors attend, and it is a particularly compelling scene, I wished it would go on forever.
But I also loved many of the other scenes as they travelled around Moscow, and later the then-Leningrad, and the occasional fascinating comments. Frank points to
‘Gorky Street… Everybody wanted to live here then. You know, Moscow’s still medieval that way – people want to be close to the castle, to the center.’
Perhaps even un-American rather than mediaeval?
There’s quite a dreamy atmosphere to the first half: to describe it as ‘slow’ would be quite wrong, but it skims along nicely as you try to work out what is going on. It explodes into action around half way through, and becomes almost unputdownable. It is extremely well-plotted, and full of unexpected events, right through to a strangely touching ending.
Throughout the book, the Americans are referred to as the Agency (CIA) and the Russians as the Service (KGB). I (not being a spy) did occasionally have to think which was which. And a point was made in the book that I’ve often thought: ‘Defectors’ is the title of the book, and I have used the word in this post, but:
‘It’s a funny word, defector. Latin, defectus. To desert. Lack something. Makes it sound as if we had to leave something behind. To change sides. But we were already on this side. We didn’t leave anything.’
It’s not an overlong book, but it also fits in, alongside the tense and compelling plot, considerations of the life of a Western spy resettled in the USSR, the meaning of being an agent or a spy, the moral considerations, the philosophies involved.
Anyone who likes spy fiction will love this book… I have read and enjoyed several excellent books by Joseph Kanon, and this is the best so far.
The top picture shows the British spy Guy Burgess in Red Square Moscow, with Tom Driberg, a British politician who visited him there.
The painting is by Aleksandr Gerasimov showing a young woman at a dacha in 1912. I found it on Wikimedia Commons: it had been picked up from this site.
published 1980
LOOKING AT WHAT GOES ON UNDER THE CLOTHES
Father works in the Southern Railway in their Head Office at Waterloo Station. He loves his job because trains are his life. He can recognize rolling stock from its shadow on a wall. And his free season ticket in its celluloid holder allows us to live here where there are catkins and butterflies, away from London.
Mother is a self-effacing smiling lady who thinks that, outside her own home, everyone is better at everything than she is. Her dairymaid prettiness which Father carried in a sepia photograph through the war, is becoming contentedly plump so she has taken to salmon-pink corsets with laces. Now and again, when she has made sure that no-one will be calling, they glow on the washing line like a bright cotton sunset and the bones creak in the wind.
commentary: This is a gorgeous book. I got the tipoff from blogfriend Daniel Milford Cottam, who’d seen a reference to it elsewhere - that description of the corsets on the line was what grabbed the attention of all of us.
It looks like a children’s book – text on one page, an illustration facing it - but I don’t think it is particularly. It is a memoir: Jean Metcalfe, a very well-known broadcaster in her day, is talking about her childhood in Reigate, south of London, and has painted beautiful watercolours to accompany her thoughts. Sunnylea is the name of her childhood home.
It’s just a straightforward picture of life in the 1920s in her family: simple, but immensely enjoyable, memorable and affecting. She remembers the arrival of their first wireless – she wasn’t impressed – and that this was an era where you wore your best clothes to go to the beach for the day. The book covers the 1920s – she was born in 1923, and in 1930 a little brother was born, bringing her memories to a close.
It is a beautiful, enchanting book, and someone should reprint it.
And of course this section covers two of Clothes in Books favourite things: hanging out the washing and corsets. (Readers’ favourites too – that hanging out the washing item was by far the most popular post of 2015, and corsets are perennial winners.)
The top left picture is by John Sloan and can be found on Wikimedia Commons. Next to it there’s one of Jean Metcalfe’s own illustrations for the book, and the two lower pictures are an advert and a photo from the era.
published 2015, but with complex publication history, see below
I remember thinking Dr Hilary Quinn was not a bit like I’d been picturing her for the previous six months. I’d had visions of a rather frail, older woman with her hair up in a bun. Don’t ask me why; maybe my brain’s casting director lumped all bookish characters – professors, libararians, authors, bookstore clerks – into one type. All I knew is that Central Casting had to do a massive reshuffle when the office door swung open.
Dr Quinn was just average height for a woman in her late 40s or early 50s, but she held herself with such amazing posture that she seemed taller than me. She had shoulders I’d have killed for, the Joan Crawford kind but without the padding, and short dark hair that resembled anthracite with a few strategically-placed veins of silver running through it. She wore a large red sweater over a black and red tartan skirt. I was going to have to fire my casting personnel; Dr Quinn was altogether the quintessential professor.
commentary: There’s all kinds of interest in this apparently routine book. First of all, I came to it via my good friend Bill Selnes over at Mysteries and More. He said it was
The most unusual academic mystery I have read. Another Margaret is a nice surprise which will confound your expectations.
--so I was hooked at once and ordered copy. It’s a Canadian book, and was not easy to get hold of in the UK, but I managed it. And then (quel surprise) failed to read it, it sat on the shelf along with all the other tempting books. But Bill recently returned to Janice MacDonald, and with specific reference to me: in this blogpost he strongly urged me to read another book by the author, one with fascinating clothes references. So that finally forced me to pick up this book, and I was so glad I did: I agree with Bill that this is a splendid author, with a lot to say and a good line in detectives and crime. (I have downloaded his second recommendation, and will read it, and blog on it. Soon. Honest.)
The book has a Preface, to be read first, in which the author explains that Another Margaret is a rewrite of an earlier book by her (then called The Next Margaret) and she explains her reasons for doing this: apparently the first book is unavailable, and so she incorporated the plot into a new version of the story more than 20 years later… Most unusual.
As a result, the book has a dual timeline: We read about Miranda (Randy) Craig as she takes her first steps in academia, anxious to write about a new and marvellous Canadian author, Margaret Ahlers. MacDonald does a terrific job of creating the life, persona and work of the fictional Ahlers and (as Bill says) really makes you want to read her books. There is a fascinating story which ends in high drama. The book then takes us back to Randy’s current life: there is to be a reunion at her university, and some of the participants in the first story will be there… obviously, trouble is the result.
I loved many things about the book: I always like an academic setting, and this was a good one. We heard a lot about Randy’s life, followed her through her day in a way that reminded me of the much-loved Gail Bowen books (also Canadian, coincidence?) and the great (but very British) Cassandra James in Christine Poulson's books. Randy's interest in, and studies in, literature featured in a readable and intriguing way. There is a plotline concerning the mysterious Ahlers’ books which would be of particular interest to crime fiction readers. And there is much discussion of the difficulties of getting tenure, the culture of ‘publish or perish’, and the almost-arbitrary way in which works of literature (and non-literature) are divided up, and judged, and found either worthy or wanting.
The book is thought-provoking, but also funny and very entertaining. I liked the reunion party which is ‘just classy enough to show us we’ve come along, and still makeshift enough to feel grad-studentish.’ And I learned a new phrase:
This weekend was going to be a minefield of emotions, or as my students said, this would be a time of ‘all the feels.’
My only complaint would be that there was a giant plothole at the end, something left completely unexplained. But I enjoyed the rest so much I forgive her, and will move on to the next book.
Anyone who enjoys an academic mystery will like this one (you know who you are, Margot, Chrissie, Lucy, Bev).
And thanks very much to Bill for the tipoff.
The book frequently mentions another Margaret, the Canadian grande dame of literature Margaret Atwood, who has featured on the blog here.
