Tag Archives: book review

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.

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.

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.