Author Archives: Jessica

Second-hand Goods

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Caroline Dunford, A Death in the Hospital

I have a very bad habit of picking up any novel with a First World War or immediate post-war setting when I come across them in a second-hand book sale. My husband grumbles about my bringing yet more books into the house while, in my heart of hearts, I know that, more likely than not, I will spend most of the time I am reading them getting annoyed by inauthentic, not to say inaccurate, portrayals of the war which rely heavily on clichés. Yet I carry on doing it, in part in forlorn hope that I may encounter an original (and thus enjoyable) new author or series, and in part to remind myself of all the pitfalls to avoid when writing my own war-set fictions.

As painful as most of these are to read, in general I find there is enough to them, in terms of plot, characterisation or, very occasionally, setting, to keep me reading until the final pages. Certainly, I did manage to do this with Carola Dunn’s Die Laughing, in spite of its many short comings, and with Sulari Gentil’s A Few Right Thinking Men, which erred to much towards the thriller side of crime fiction for my taste, as including random fictional press clippings in a way that I found deeply confusing and off-putting. However, this cannot be said for my most recent acquisition, Caroline Dunford’s A Death in the Hospital (2020), which I picked up for 50 p. at our local National Trust property second-hand bookstall and which I abandoned about a quarter of the way through.

I had been vaguely hopeful about this novel, the 15th book in the Euphemia Martin series, which appears to still be going strong, with A Death at Christmas due out this year. After all, the war hospital setting was right up my street in terms of areas of historical interest, although this did risk a more than usual number of snorts at clichés about VADs and misuse of the term ‘field hospital’. What I didn’t expect, however, was a historical setting so inaccurate as to suggest that Dunford is not even familiar with Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, let alone any less ubiquitous representation of the British military medical services in the war. It was at the point where a hospital where the central character had gone undercover as a trainee nurse (not, apparently a VAD, although it remained entirely unclear what the character who made this distinction thought a VAD role entailed) was described as the first hospital of its type ‘since the Boer War or possibly the Crimean War’ that I gave up entirely. For the setting to have any meaning or interest, I did need to have evidence of some basic plausibility for the institution that formed that setting, including the awareness that the auxiliary hospital (which I think was what this one was supposed to be) was only one type of medical institution in Britain during the war. As well as the permanent military hospitals which treated the Regular army throughout the second half of the 19th and into the 20th century, at the outbreak of war, military hospitals were rapidly set up across Britain, usually in commandeered institutions. Where country houses were donated, these became auxiliary units, specialising in rehabilitation after initial treatment at a general hospital. The institution in A Death in the Hospital did not seem like any of these.

Which brings me to the second aspect that precluded my enjoyment of this book. In addition to the ahistorical setting, the question of timing made any suspension of disbelief I might have had impossible. The novel is, apparently, set in August 1914. Even if we assume that the book starts at the end of the month, in at most three weeks there has, apparently, been time for some sort of voluntary hospital to be set up and filled with wounded servicemen including at least one volunteer servicemen, although he just may have been a Territorial. It is also strongly implied that the military effort had achieved statis along the Western Front, although this wasn’t the case until the winter of 1914. In other words, the author attempts to invoke the war as historical context through clichés that ignore the somewhat atypical reality of the opening months of the war. This sort of telescoping of events is not just bad writing, it is terrible history.

I do like to think that I have a pretty high tolerance for inauthenticity in genre fiction set in the First World War, of which there is a remarkable amount. Yes, as I say, I do grumble about inappropriate uses of terms like ‘field hospital’ and conscientious objector, or assumptions about the incidence and understanding of executions and shellshock. But while reiterating worn tropes is boring and, for a historian, frustrating, I am aware that I bring a level of specialist knowledge to reading this type of fiction which gives me an unfair perspective. Where there is some evidence of basic historical research, some attempt to get to grips with the historic specificity of the world being depicted, I can usually suspend enough disbelief to at least finish the book. Here there was no evidence of any historicization, with events, ideas and innovations from at least three major conflicts mashed together in an ahistorical mess labelled ‘The First World War’ in a completely implausible time frame. It is the sort of historical fiction that makes me wish there were a way to certify an author’s credentials as a historical research before they are allowed to publish. Indeed, the only excuse for this sort of book, in my view, is the case it makes through absence for history, including that which informs creative products (films, television, art and games as well as literature) as an intellectual discipline that requires skill and rigour, not just a vague idea that the past is another country which might make for a romantic setting.

So A Death in the Hospital will return to the second-hand book sale table via my local charity shop, where I should clearly have left it in the first place.

The Book I Wish I Had Written

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The culture section of the Saturday edition of a major British newspaper runs a regular column in which celebrities in the arts are asked to identify subjects from their cultural life such as ‘The book I am currently reading’, ‘The instrument I wish I had learnt’ and ‘The last film that made me laugh/cry’. These lists are always fun to play along with but, while my answer to topics such as ‘My favourite piece of music’ has changed over the years, my answer to the regular question ‘The book I wish I had written’ has long remained the same: The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell.

Celebrity answers to this topic tends to be couched in terms of either a personally inspirational text or a best-seller that made the author a lot of money. In my case, the answer arises from a mixture of both. I first read The Great War and Modern Memory as a freshman, a first year undergraduate in my first semester at university. I thought at the time that I wanted to be an English major. By the end of the year, I knew that I would be a history major. This shift was only in part down to Fussell’s pivotal work of cultural history (Geoffrey Parker’s lecture on the possible role of sunspots in the development of early modern military strategy also had something to do with it), but what the book undoubtedly informed was my commitment to history that took fiction as one of its primary sources. This would shape not only my undergraduate module choices but the topic of my senior essay (an analysis of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy and R.H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm trilogy as representations of the Western Front), but also my master’s and doctoral theses as well as almost every major work I have published since.

Of course, my view of Fussell’s work has evolved since then but that ‘heady mixture of literary criticism and cultural and historical analysis’ [1] remains deeply alluring as a point of reference not necessarily as a cultural history of the First World War, but as a pivotal moment in the cultural turn in First World War studies. As Ian Isherwood and Steven Trout argue in their excellent recent review article, ‘But It Still Goes On: Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory at 50’, ‘the book is perhaps best approached as a an experimental study – a hybrid mixture … of  literary scholarship, cultural analysis, historical writing, and veiled autobiography.’ [2] This hybridity, if not Fussell’s argument about the centrality of irony to a Modernist paradigm shift in cultural expression, has gone on to inform the approach and ambition of major works in the field, including Samuel Hynes’ A War Imagined (1990) and Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995), as well as many of their students, among whose number I include myself. And, in ‘reigniting a debate from the late 1920s and early 1930s over literary treatments of the Great War and their portrayal of disillusionment supposedly shared by an entire generation’ [3], Fussell helped shape what we now define as the canon of British First World War literature as surely as any writer, publisher or critic of the ‘war books’ boom. We cannot understand not only how we in Britain and the US remember the First World War today, but how it is represented in contemporary cultural forms. Alice Winn’s almost constant references to Robert Graves’ Good-bye To All That in In Memoriam (2023) provides only the most recent testimony to Fussell’s historiographic influence.

It is, as Isherwood and Trout note, the representativeness of the authors selected by Fussell for analysis that lie at the heart of many of the critiques of his approach. Yet representativeness was never really the point: ‘Drawn … to highly literate, middle-class junior officers like himself (albeit members of a different army in a different war), he never intended to write a comprehensive study of British Firs World War literature or, for that matter, an exhaustive treatment of British culture before, during, and after the conflict.’ [4] But that debate, with its echoes of the critiques of Douglas Jerrold and Cyril Falls [5], highlights an issue that those of us who use fictional, semi-fictional and poetic sources in our research and analysis still grapple with today. No cultural history of the war can ever be comprehensive, either in breadth or depth, particularly when the conflict is considered in global rather than national terms. How do we choose which texts to focus on? How do we balance close reading of the symbolism of particular texts with broad claims about the culture in which they were produced and which they sought to shape?

It is here that Isherwood and Trout’s identification of the importance of autobiography to Fussell’s endeavour spoke most strongly to me. Unlike Fussell (or indeed Hynes), I am not trying to use my practice of cultural history to grapple with experiences as a former soldier. I make no claims to, as Fussell did, to sharing a bond of experience with the authors he selected for particular consideration. But I have always been aware of the extent to which my own personal preferences and youthful exposure to particular literary works has shaped the texts I have chosen to focus on (the work of Dorothy L. Sayers being the most obvious example), as well as my vulnerability to the critique levelled by Charles Carrington against Fussell, that the analysis of someone who wasn’t there can never be a true history of the war. Indeed, as a newly minted PhD, I was bluntly told by one ex-serviceman (himself too young to have served in the First World War), that my thesis on representations of wartime masculinities was worthless because I was not a man and had not myself served in the war. (My gender and age clearly trumped my nationality in this instance as my critic chose not to point out the fact that, like Fussell, I am an American.)

So I take comfort from Isherwood and Trout’s argument that ‘Fussell’s status as a cultural outsider … sharpened his insights … and emboldened him to say things that he might not have if he had been British…. [H]is distance from the war’s living memory enabled him to study the “troglodyte world” of the trenches and the mythology it produced with fresh eyes.’ [6]  Which is not to say that I necessarily take comfort from the text itself, which remains as challenging and provocative today in many ways as fifty years ago. For me today, the particular challenge of the autobiographical element is the most stimulating as I grapple with the ‘genealogical’ or ‘family history’ turn in social history, as exemplified by the work of Alison Light, Michael Roper and, most recently, Laura King. My family’s history doesn’t fit neatly with the history of the First World War, challenging cultural narratives of the war’s universality. But is this distance a handicap or a benefit? As I grapple with these questions as part of the process of writing my own book, The Great War and Modern Memory will continue to remain as much of an inspiration for my historical practice as it was when I first read it thirty years ago

[1] Ian Isherwood and Steven Trout, ‘But It Still Goes On: Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory at 50’, The Journal of Military History, 89 (January 2025): 155-170 (160).

[2] Isherwood and Trout, ‘But It Still Goes On’, 158.

[3] Ibid., 160.

[4] Ibid., 160.

[5] Douglas Jerrold, The Lie About the War: A Note on Some Contemporary War Books (Faber & Faber, 1930); Cyril Falls, War Books: A Critical Guide (Peter Davies, Ltd, 1930)

[6] Isherwood and Trout, ‘But It Still Goes On’, 168

In the Garden

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Several months ago a package arrived from Amazon containing a book. This is not an entirely unusual occurance in our household, although when we do buy books on line, it is more likely to be from bookshop.org or World of Books (my husband is a sucker for an ex-library edition). This package, however, was not an impulsive or accidentally overlooked purchase, but rather an unexpected un-birthday present from my stepmother, a copy of Olivia Laing’s much-praised The Garden Against Time. A few months later my husband gave me, as an actual birthday present and at my request, a copy of Penelope Lively’s even more critically acclaimed Life in the Garden.

Although I read them separated by several months, these two volumes have worked together in my head as part of a single genre of literary garden reflections. Both Laing and Lively write as both gardeners and writers, using the act of hands-on cultivation as a jumping-off point for reflections on the representational significance of gardens in predominantly Western, mostly British, culture. Both are erudite and both are beautiful objects (even the ex-library paperback edition of Life in the Garden), illustrated by a similary style of woodcut horticultural illustration.

Laing’s book is ostensibly structured by the story of her acquisition and reconstruction of a historic Suffolk garden, a process disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Lively’s volume is, at least superficially, more academic than biographical, formed of series of essays on themes ranging from ‘Reality and Metaphor’ to ‘Time, Order and the Garden’. Yet it is Laing who spends signficant space in detailed analyses of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and the life and poetry of John Clare in terms which would not be out of place in an academic essay. Lively, meanwhile, ranges more widely in her references, with less critical depth but with a lightness of tone and analytic incisiveness that gives the book an immediatcy that is immensely engaging. As a result, I could see Lively’s Oxfordshire garden, created with her husband Jack, and the Egyptian garden of her childhood memories in ways that I could not with Laing’s restored greenhouse and pond. Although perhaps it was Lively’s early (and entirely accurate) identification of Tom’s Midnight Garden as one of the great works of 20th-century children’s literature that informed my sense of recognition and familiarity with her world and world view in ways that Laing’s work, for all its accomplishment never achieved. I have never read Sebald, and have only engaged episodically with Milton and Clare, whereas some of my most cherished memories of my mother revolve around her reading Tom’s Midnight Garden to me, first as a bed-time story and then on to audiotape, a process that, in the 1980s, was a true labour of love and dedication. I still have those tapes, the audio now preserved in digital form by my husband, although even now, over six years after her death, I am still not ready to listen to them and hear my mother’s voice reading to me again.

Nor are the intellectual contexts of the two books the only key differences which shaped my enjoyment. I found Lively’s writing much funnier than Laing’s, and was constantly reading out snippets of Life in the Garden to my husband. At no point was I tempted to do this with Laing, who also has a distancing literary tic of listing plants, many of them unfamiliar to a less-experienced gardener, without providing enough context to make them visible or meaningful to the reader. I think the idea is to evoke the poetry of gardening as well as the garden, but ultimate they just left me bored and confused. Laing’s discussion of John Clare’s life and work as a rural poet at the cusp of the industrial revolution was far more moving and effective, and has prompted me to seek out the poet’s autobiography, just as my husband, who read The Garden Against Time after I did, has purchased a (inevitably second-hand) copy of The Rings of Saturn.

I’m not a great reader of gardening books, and I read enough non-fiction for work that I tend to avoid such books as leisure reading, even when the genre overlaps with my own leisure interests. There is inevitably a lot of cultural history, often relevant to my own research, which precludes using such work as a way of fully switching off. But I am glad that I read both these books, not least for their many seredipties, and will certainly be dipping into Lively again, although I not so sure about Laing. In the meantime, with the snow falling outside, I will use them less as inspiration for the garden than for further reading, not only John Clare but also Lively’s fiction.

Oh Dear

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I was so looking foward to Juno Dawson’s Her Majesty’s Royal Coven. Modern witchcraft set in Hebden Bridge, which came highly recommended by both a friend whose taste I trust and the local bookstore that sold it to me? What could be better as escapist reading? In fact, I anticipated enjoying it so much that I bought the sequel before I even started the first volume and savoured my anticipation of losing myself in the West Yorkshire equivalent of Deborah Harkness’s All Souls series (recommened by another friend whose taste I trust and which I enjoy enormously).

So it is with great regret that I must inform you that Her Majesty’s Secret Coven is the lastest of my very rare ‘did not finishes’, and this was after I got over 150 pages in. Usually if I make it past page 50, I will keep going with a book, even if only out of pure bloody-mindedness. This, however, felt like too much of a slog. The characterisation was remarkably flat, particularly of the women who were portrayed as archetypes rather than indivuals. Given that this is a story predominantly about women, with a plot centring on female identity, this is a serious problem, one reinforced by a confusing plot with gaping holes in it. I spent most of the time struggling to understand what was happening or why characters were choosing to act in the ways described.

But the biggest disappointment was the aspect I had been anticipating most eagerly – the setting. As a Hebden Bridge resident, I freely admit to being an ‘offcumbden’. But the town and its surrounding villages have a unique enough personality for me to feel, even after only seven years of residence, that I know them at least a little bit. And they are definitely not the town depicted in this book. Yes, they form a small pocket of liberalism, not to say radicalism, enfolded by the Calder Valley in the more generally conservative rural West Yorkshire. And yes, the 1960s hippie vibe which is central to the town’s identity is being diluted by an influx of the professional middle classes (of which I freely admit to being one). Sitting halfway between Leeds and Manchester, even the vaguaries of Northern Rail cannot detract from the attraction of the town to commuters. But for all that, Hebden Bridge is still very much Happy Valley, not Nappy Valley. I don’t recall ever meeting a yummy mummy, as asserted in one description of a local café, and this is after five years of schoolgate attendance. Dawson appears to see Hebden Bridge as a version of Brighton in the north, which it is not. It is its own distinct place, with its own unique, often contradictory, always fascinating character, one which Dawson fails to capture.

The geography also doesn’t make sense. The book is full of descriptions of characters’ homes, but I was unable to locate any of them in my mental map of the area. The actual map that forms the frontispiece is no help, drawing as it does on the imagery of maps in fantasy novels. By the time I gave up, I found I was lost, not in the story but rather in confusion. I kept longing to find my way back tot he real world, rather than continue to make my way through a fantastical vision of the placy I call home, peopled by unreal phantasms, not people with recognisable conflicts and motivations. My recommendation is, if you want to discover the complex magic of Hebden Bridge through fiction, try the work of Sally Wainright rather than Juno Dawson. Happy Valley is on iPlayer and Riot Girls is due for broadcast this year. Or better yet, come visit, and experience this darkly enchanting place for yourself.

Accountability Revisted

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Having reflected on the recovery of the past year on New Year’s Eve, the start of the new year seems a good time to revisit and report back on the plans I made a year ago. I have also updated with some plans for the coming year.

Writing:

  1. Reviews: I completed and submitted both book reviews due in early 2024, and both have been published. I now have a review (over)due that was supposed to be written by September, but I didn’t receive the book until October. This will be completed in the next couple of weeks.
  2. Conference papers: I had to pull out of the conference on military welfare history as my injured knee made travel too complicated. The paper at the Academic Archers conference was well received, and I am contemplating proposing a follow-up (although not for this year’s on-line conference, sadly). I gave papers at a different conference on military history and, joyously, at the Dorothy L. Sayers Society annual symposium and helped organise a conference on military welfare history. In the coming year, I am already scheduled to give public lectures in February, June and November, and a conference keynote in February. I am also hoping to get to Austria for the Military Welfare History Network conference and to Greece for the International Society for First World War Studies conference, although I am not sure what, if anything, I will be writing for either.
  3. The big one: The book. Definitely did not get finished this year. In fact, I have made very little progress, with the one chapter that I have worked on significantly currently is a state of chaos that terrifies me. I have done some initial work on other chapters, and do have a clearer sense of what I am trying to do, but I need more space to sit with this work than I have at the moment or am likely to until the summer at least. Work continues.
  4. And the new project: The article on ambulance drivers never materialised, but in the spring I was approached by a publisher interested in a global history of masculinity and warfare. I have written a proposal and received encouraging feedback. I will be redrafting the proposal in the coming month. Should it be accepted, writing this will be the focus of my forthcoming research leave.

Knitting:

  1. The cardigan that I started as a lockdown project still doesn’t have button bands, but I have bought the required wool from the supplier. It is next on the knitting project list. This may require another ball of wool from the supplier.
  2. Three family sweaters were all completed in 2024, although my son’s was finished in a huge rush on 27th December. Only my husband received Christmas wool this year, as he has requested a replacement sweater for one he has worn to death. I have already made a start on this and am making good progress as I still can’t ski due to the knee injury.
  3. And the new projects: I still haven’t come up with a project for the reclaimed wool from the baby blanket, but I have just offered to make a non-knitting friend a cable sweater. I will be knitting some swatches to test the gauge when I get home, and hoping she likes the colour. If not, I have a large stash of other colours, hopefully something suitable will be found. I also bought myself a copy of Margery Allingham’s Mysterious Knits (coincidentally by the same designer as my friend’s requested sweater) for my birthday and have bought myself a Christmas present of wool for one of the sweater patterns. So it looks to be a year of Kate Davies knits for me this year.

Quilting:

  1. Autumnal quilt. I have not touched this this year.
  2. Alice’s Wonderland quilt: Completed, long arm quilted, bound and given to its intended recipient. I am enormously proud of myself and of it.
  3. Aurora Stars Tricolour quilt: Last year’s new project. I haven’t quite completed the quilt top, but hope to be able to do so in the next couple of months, having just ordered the backing and binding fabrics. However, there are…
  4. The new projects: Instead of wool, this year I gave my children the materials for their quilts, a full kit for my son, a BOM for my daughter. I have also built up enough of a fabric stash to start compiling the materials needed for my nephew’s quilt top. I will have a significant period to focus on these during my period of recovery from surgery, which will hopefully happen in the spring, but we will have to see how far I get with these.

In the kitchen, the garden and the house:

As ever, the annual events of the kitchen and garden recur.

  1. Marmalade. Successfully made, in spite of my impairment. The kits for this year’s batch are on order.
  2. Germination: One of the great achievements of last year was the completion of two big house renovation projects, an update to the family bathroom and the complete redesign of the utility room and office, a project that involved replacing the roof over that part of the house. This has given us not only a lovely space to work in (with, miraculously, enough shelf space for all our books!) but also a large space for potting and germinating. As the greenhouse still doesn’t exist, this will do for now.
  3. The front bed has been dug over, although too late to plant the intended bulbs. I will be putting in shrubs, including a gift from an old family friend, in the spring, Then I need to work out what to do with all the rocks that I removed as part of the process.
  4. Plant-based baking: The cinnamon rolls never did happen. I may try again this year.
  5. And the new project: Having completed the bathroom and office space, the next challenge is redecorating the rest of the house. I am hoping my husband will get around to laying the wood floor in the living room. My goal is to paint the front hallway so that we can finally hang the artwork that is currently occupying a corner of the spare room.

As with last year, these are ambitious goals which will not be completed, but I fully intend that this year shall be different in terms of the pattern and pacing of my work across the different categories. There will be changes this year, some them scary, but all, I think, necessary to enable me to tackle the goals outlined above.

The Recovering Year

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I started 2024 in a hotel room in Italy in a full-leg brace, unable to walk. I am ending it in a hotel room in Colorado, still unable to ski and with an aching arm due to what I think may be tennis elbow. In between, I have swum 5 kilometers very slowly, spent more time in hospital than I really wanted, failed to make significant progress with my book projects and lost the ability to sleep through the night.

So no, 2024 has not been an easy year. Much of it has felt wildly out of balance with long periods when I felt like the Red Queen in Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, running very fast to remain in one place offset by some blissful periods of doing very little other than reading Georgette Heyer novels. But it has been a year of recovery. This recovery has been physical. I am now back on both feet and even running again. It has taken a lot of physiotherapy on my ham string to get me there, with a lot more in prospect as I am now due to have surgery to repair my ACL in the spring.

But there have been other things that I have recovered as well this year. One of them, thanks in part to those period of reading Heyer (among others), is my enjoyment of reading for its own sake. I never fully lost this, but this year I recovered the ability to read for pleasure without feeling guilty about all the other things I could or should be doing with the time. As the year has progressed, I have found more time for reading outside of holiday periods. This has been a gift, helping me to restore some of that balance that I have lost over the past few years.

The other thing I have recovered, somewhat to my surprise, is my desire to write. Granted, I have done less writing for the books than I might have hoped. But in the final third of the year I wrote 60,000 words of lectures, an intense and oddly energizing project, particularly in retrospect. I wrote, and started to rewrite a book proposal, and wrote and submitted an ultimately unsuccessful fellowship application. Combined with the reviews I have been writing for this site (which I will post in the new year), I have started to feel as if I have found my voice again after a prolonged period of not being sure if I had anything to say, if I had the ability to say it, or if anyone would listen if I did.

Those doubts do still assail me, particularly at 2 am and in relation to the big book project. The process of recovery is not complete, any more than the process of recovery for my knee is. It may never be, fully, but here, at the end of 2024, it does feel at least that I can see the direction I need to head. The current level of imbalance is unsustainable, just as the continuing instability of my knee is for the sort of life I want to live. There will have to be some big changes in the coming year to ensure that my recovery, physical and psychological, continues. These still feel a bit tentative. I am waiting for the exact date of my surgery and my other plans will have to wait until after that, probably for the second half of the year. But changes there will be in 2025, that I can promise.

So here is to the recovered year just gone and a year of change and progress to come. Wishing you and yours all health and happiness for whatever the new year may bring.

Unreal City

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Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety

Having swallowed down Human Croquet and Normal Rules Don’t Apply in a gulp, I took a bit more time over Shrines of Gaiety, which is probably a good thing.  I enjoyed it – I think it is probably impossible for Atkinson to write a book that I don’t find totally immersive and enjoyable to read – but, in retrospect, I’m not sure it was as entirely wonderful as I had hoped. I don’t really expect anything to live up to the wonder of A God in Ruins, a book which speaks to so much that I love, am interested in and have dedicated my intellectual life to, or Life After Life, a literary and imaginative life raft which I clung to in the days after my mother died. But his is a book that had the potential to speak to me as strongly as either of these, a story of a time and people who are, in part, the subject of the (non-fiction) book I am writing at the moment, as well as being crime fiction-adjacent, touching on another of my great passions.

And there certainly were elements of this book that I loved. Nellie Coker, Gwendolen Keeling and Freda Murgatroyd (what a name!) are all wonderful creations – rich, complex, engaging women whose attitudes and actions I could deplore and root for in equal measure. I also loved the character of Niven Coker, a man shaped but not defined (except perhaps in the eyes of others) by his experiences of war. The ambiguity of the ending of his and Gwendolen’s story, so typical of Atkinson’s play with multiple narratives and possible outcomes, was one of the great pleasures of the novel for me.

And yet… And yet… I did not love this book the way I loved even Transmission, a novel that I know many critics struggled with. The problem for me was two-fold. In the first place, there were too many characters and storylines introduced, with the result that several of the plots and characters felt underdeveloped. Ramsey Coker in particular, who gets a considerable amount of space in the book, never came fully alive for me, and I never truly believed in his (strategically important) relationship with Freda. Similarly, the murdered girls whose disappearance I think is intended to be a central plot device, merged into one in my mind, which was a problem given the centrality of the moral imperative that drives Inspector Frobisher’s desire to name them individually. And to leave one major plot strand (the disappearance of Florence Ingram) entirely unexplained may be considered artistic license. For there to be a second (the murder of Vivian Quinn) feels like authorial carelessness.

Secondly, and relatedly, the book is weakened by the attempt to coral all 73 characters and their interlinking storylines into small a social and geographic space. There are any number of coincidences – Frobisher’s presence on the bridge when Freda goes into the river, Freda and Florence rooming in the house of the abortionist employed by Maddox, Niven Coker passing by when Gwendolen is mugged. One of these would work to help drive the plot but, like the unexplained plot points, their accumulation over the course of the novel feels contrived. The appearance of Gertie Bridges as a deus ex machina and virtual twin of a central character feels particularly in artistic, violating as it does the tenth of Ronald Knox’s commandments of detective fiction for the period. Having invoked Eliot and his unreal city, the imagery of the nameless crowd flowing over London Bridge, undone by death, is undermined by the boundaries these coincidences put in place.

Ultimately, then, this in really a novel about the aftermath and legacy of the First World War as I had hoped. The decadence of the clubland setting, with its corrupt police, violent gangsters and privileged patrons, could belong as easily to the fin de siècle, with Wilde rather than Eliot as muse. The experience of the horrors of war are part but not the entirety of the life the characters, something which does ring true, particularly in the case of Niven, but this raises questions about Atkinson’s stated inspiration for the novel, as discussed in the Author’s Note. Unlike her Second World War novels, which do so brilliantly, this one fails to fully capture the uniqueness of the historical moment of its setting. Possibly this is a specific problem of the interwar period, which does seem to have a certain ubiquity in historical novels, although Sarah Waters undoubtedly managed to capture the unique flavour of changing times and social mores in the period in The Paying Guest.

None of which is to say that I don’t recommend Shrines of Gaiety. Anything by Atkinson is worth reading and Nellie Coker is far too good a character to refuse introduction to. I am very glad I met her, and her elder son. But this novel won’t haunt me the way that A God in Ruins and Behind the Scenes at the Museum do, enriching my life and scholarship in the process. However, this slight disappointment certainly won’t keep me for eagerly anticipating the paperback publication of Death at the Sign of the Rook, Atkinson’s latest (and apparently last) Jackson Brodie detective novel, an homage to Golden Age detective fiction. I live in hope that it manages to capture the feeling of the interwar – this elusive, infuriating, enthralling period that continues to fascinate me as both a historian and reader of fiction. I do so in the certainty that even if it does not, it will still, like Shrines of Gaiety, be a great read.

Enough is as Good as a Feast

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Kate Atkinson, Human Croquet

Kate Atkinson, Normal Rules Don’t Apply

It may have been a mistake, saving my stash of Kate Atkinsons to take with me on holiday over the summer. Not because they are not wonderful; they absolutely are. Reading Human Croquet, which I did in a day, gulping it down in a way I haven’t done with a book since the height of the pandemic, was a joy, an immersion in language and characterisation and intricately intersecting plot lines that took me to another place as only a great book can.

But oh! they are so rich! Coming to the end of the book after a day spent reading like that felt a bit like getting up from the table after an overly rich meal, or waking up with a hangover. It was almost too much, to the point where I felt lethargic and slightly headachy. So following such overindulgence with more of the same may, as I say, have been a mistake. Yes, Normal Rules Don’t Apply was, as a collection of short stories, briefer and lighter, but the collection of linking characters, locations and storylines required work, the language was just as intoxicating and the emotions evoked were, if anything, even more quietly devastating.

To recover, I gave myself a palate cleanser of Georgette Heyer’s The Quiet Gentleman, which was light and funny and straightforward in terms of plotlines and the emotions aroused, although not, perhaps, overly memorable. But it did leave me slightly out of time to tackle Shrines of Gaiety, which I had been keeping to savour,before the end of our stay in the US. I was left with the choice of starting it on the plane ride home or saving it for the long weekend trip to Scotland scheduled for the week after we returned. The former option risked my staying up all night reading, followed by jetlagged exhaustion on arrival. That was how I read Life After Life, but I wouldn’t have slept on that flight anyway, In the depths of grief following my mother’s death the week before, that book saved me from going mad, a life raft in the ocean of suspended time that flying back to my family in the UK entailed. This time I anticipated no such need, just the prospect of houseguests to prepare for, making the prospect of exhaustion compounded by jetlag a less than enticing prospect.

Saving it for Scotland, meanwhile, would give me something to look forward too when my husband and son headed off to climb Ben Nevis without me, a challenge to far for my torn ACL, which had been playing up even in the slightly less strenuous context of the hills of Western Massachusetts. So that is was I decided to do, planning to balance the intensity of Atkinson’s rich literary vision of 1920s London with the anticipated jeu d’esprit of Juno Dawson’s Hebden Bridge-set witchcraft novels.

Catching Up

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Carola Dunn, Die Laughing, 2003

Louise Penny, The Long Way Home, 2014

Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind, 2018

After several months (indeed years) of accumulation, over the summer I decided to make one of my periodic concerted efforts at putting a dent in my to-be-read shelf, which then stood at thirty-five books and counting. I started with wth collection of second-hand books from part way through various contemporary series that that have been recommended to me but which I have been motivated to buy unless I came across a used copy. I haven’t been entirely successful in completing this endeavour (a volumen of Sulari Gentil’s Rowland Sinclair mysteries is next on my list), but I did manage a couple of volumes from Louise Penny’s Armand Garmache series and a Daisy Dalrymple mystery by Carola Dunn.

The Dunn series is one that has been hovering at the edge of my consciousness for a number of years now. When I was reading my way through Frances Brodie’s Kate Shackleton series and Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series (recommended to me by the late, great Dennis Showalter, who knew whereof he spoke), Daisy Dalrymple regularly popped up in my on-line recommendations. So it was with interest, although not necessarily great expectations, that I started Die Laughing, the tenth book in the series. Unfortunately, these expectations were definitely not exceeded. One of the blurbs on my copy states that the book is ‘For lovers of Dorothy L. Sayers’, but like so many so-called ‘cosy’ crime novels with a British interwar setting, the only Sayers-like attribute that the book has is the fact that the detective (or at least one of them) is an aristocrat (although we are told multiple times that her title is ‘only’ an honorary one).

The problem is that the novel doesn’t work as either a classic detective novel, with a focus on the puzzle element, or as the sort of social reflection that makes Sayers (and many of the other classic queens of Golden Age detective fiction) such good source material for the social historian. By splitting the detective work between an amateur who doesn’t really want to be detecting and her professional husband and his team, the novel rejects the structural formality of classic detective fiction storytelling. Sherlock Holmes explaining his reasoning to Watson and Japp or Poirot collecting the suspects in the drawing room for the unveiling of the criminal may be the stuff of cliché, but such scenes work to construct a narrative with tension by making the unravelling the work of a single intelligence. Even where the sidekick or professional assistant makes as great a contribution to that unravelling as the detective, the sharing of information needs to be integral to both the plot and laying the evidence before the reader. For a masterclass in the approach, you only have to look at the conversations between Peter and Harriet in Have His Carcase (1932), which are used to convey any facts gathered separately as well as interpret them as part of the satisfying working out of the mystery. Not so in the world of Daisy Dalrymple and Alec Fletcher where each undertakes their own investigations and the sharing of clues is perfunctory, with little reference to either the plot or the character developments

So much for the structural form of the detective story. What about the novel as a reflection of society in the interwar period? Dunn has clearly done a certain amount of research into the period, but her representation of class is clumsy to the point of farce. The middle classes are almost uniformly snobbish and racist, with the exception of Daisy’s two female friends, who are only distinguishable from each other by the fact that one is Indian (and therefore the victim of racist prejudice). The working-class characters are distinguishable by their entirely generic vernacular, with a Scots policeman apparently speaking in almost exactly the same way as a Cockney charwoman. The theme of the ‘servant problem’ is shoe-horned into the book, with little relevance to the central crime or its investigation, and drawing on debates from the late nineteenth century, rather than those being articulated in 1924. The result is that, while the reader is told multiple times that the war changed class relationships, but we are never effectively shown this. I finally lost patience with the representation of a character, introduced to late in the book to be fully fleshed out, as a Second World War-style spiv, whose service with the Army Service Corps was used as shorthand for his not having served overseas during the war. Given the the extensive work of men of this unit as motor ambulance and lorry drivers on all fighting fronts, this misrepresentation smacked, like far too much else in this book, of superficial research and lazy historical cliché.

So I will not be seeking out any more of the Dalrymple series. I am, however, more ambivalent about Penny’s Gamache series, although I can’t say I was overly enamoured of either of the two volumes I read. I know many people love this but, like Elly Griffith’s equally loved Ruth Galloway series, I found the tone too knowingly whimsical for my taste. These series are, apparently, part of a genre now marketed as ‘character-led’ mysteries (presumably as opposed to action-led thrillers) but, for me, the characters were oddly flat. The reader is told, over and over, who these people are, and even what they are thinking, but this is rarely matched by them then acting in psychologically convincing ways. The criminal in one of the stories barely registers as a character in their own right, and certainly not as the magnetic character that we are informed they are. There is also a dissonance in tone between, for instance, constant references to an aged, sweary, alcoholic poet who keeps a pet duck and is loved (inexplicably) by her neighbours, and plotlines around the distribution of carfentenil and its brutalising effects on the homeless population of Montreal, that is jarring to say the least.

Penny’s writing is good enough to make me mildly curious about how she introduced her recurring characters in the first novel in the series, Still Life (2005). However, I can’t say I feel compelled to read any more, certainly not at the moment when unregulated holiday browsing in second-hand bookshops has my to-be-read shelf to closer to forty volumes. I am glad that I finally gave these popular series a go, but equally glad that neither captured me to the extent that I will now be adding any more of their work to that shelf.

Summer Reading and Future Plans

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Somehow, it is the August bank holiday weekend, and thus almost the end of summer. I am back at work (which means hundreds of emails and frantic lecture writing and lesson planning for a month before teaching starts) on Wednesday and the kids are back at school the following week. This summer seems to have gone by in a blur, over before it barely began, but it has seen two important developments, at least as far as this blog is concerned.

In the first place, I have managed to to a lot more fiction reading this summer than I have for the past couple of years. Returning to immersion in fiction as a space for relaxation and recuperation has been a joy, and I hope to carry on with this habit even as the busyness of the academic year accelerates. My-to-be read shelf has not noticeably contracted, as holiday travels have involved many bookshops and and I appear constitutionally unable to enter a bookshop without purchasing something, particularly second-hand bookshops, and there is also the list of things I want to read but haven’t quite got around (or found a good excuse) to purchase yet.

The second development of the summer was my decision (along with many others) to finally cut ties with the social media site formally know as Twitter and move my micro-blogging onto Threads, where I go by @thehistorianskitchengarden. As I originally joined Twitter to publicise this blog, in the days when there was a 180-character limit, this transition feels like a good excuse to revive and revise what I am doing on here.

My initial enrolment with Threads was due to the fact that I have an Instagram account, where I mainly post pictures of my cooking and gardening endeavours, as well as views from my morning runs and holiday walks. However, I have also been intermittently involved with the #bookstagram hashtag, primarily through posting stacks of books prompted by a theme. However, I also enjoy reading reviews of books posted on the site, and have considered posting my own, thwarted only by the incovenience of writing a detailed review on my phone keypad. Given the regularity with which I post typos due either to fat fingers or the vagaries of auto-correct as it is, attempting this on a regular basis seemed like a bad idea.

I did flirt with the idea of launching a Substack, something I may do in the future depending on the direction my writing career develops in the future, but adding an additional platform at this stage, when I already have this one at my disposal. So how I will be using this blog will change over the next few months. In addition to publicising my posts on Threads, I will be posting more (and hopefully more regular) book reviews. These will mainly be fiction, moving this site away from its focus on the First World War, although there will be some non-fiction reviews as well.

I don’t want to move entirely away from the role that this site has played as a research diary, not least because I am now working on not one but two book, a history of men and war in the modern period and a history of the returning British servicemen of the First World War. Both of these are now at the proposal stage and starting to have both argument and form. All that is lacking is sufficient time for me to write them. I will be trying to carve this out over the next year and the practice of working through ideas on this blog can only help make the process more efficient. Again, I will use Threads to help disseminate my writing, highlighting the historian as much as the kitchen and the garden of my handle.

So there will be quite a lot going on on here, I hope, and I will be updating the look of this site as part of that. There will be separate pages for the reviews and the two book projects, as well as an updated profile. There will be more photographs integrated into my posts, reflecting how I have developed my use of Threads in conjunction with Instagram. There may be some publicity for my other project, the podcast on the intersections of the First World War with popular culture, that I co-present, although I am not clear what form this will take. Finally, there will, I hope, be more scope for comment and discussion both on here and on social media, particularly relating to the book reviews. All of this may take some time, not least because, as of next week, my priority will be writing and creating the presentation slides for the eleven lectures I am due to deliver in the current term. But there will be reviews of at least some of the books I have read this summer before then, and before the start of the new year catches up to me.