The House on the Strand

by Daphne DuMaurier

What an extraordinarily wonderful book this was.  Devotees of DuMaurier already know that she never fails to write something entertaining.  I found it a thrilling read.  From the beginning I was interested to see where the story would go, and it became more exciting and engaging as I went along.  The best praise came from a member of the reading group who was very disappointed to read a DuMaurier, but did, and was delighted by the book.

DuMaurier wrote this book, which is essentially about experimental drug-taking, in the 1960s, when there was a lot of it going on, both medically and recreationally.  In this book, the outcome of the drug taking was given a twist – the drug not only produced hallucinations but appeared to take the user far back in time to be witness to events that were taking place in the very spot in Cornwall that the main character was staying.  Not only the main character went back in time, but his friend also found himself ‘tripping’ to the same time and the same events: events that could be later proved as having taken place.

When the friend is killed crossing a railway line after taking the drug, one has to question whether the hallucinations are real, or even, what reality is.  The railway line did not exist in that place at the time he ‘tripped’ back to and so, in his ‘trip’ he was simply walking across a valley; or was that the hallucination.

Both the present day story, and the historical events that the characters went back to, became page turners in their own right; a great story within a great story.

Living in the West Country and having visited parts of Cornwall in the book, gave an added frisson to the book.

The fly in the ointment was the descriptions of the relationship between the main character and his wife – a woman he lives apart from while he sorts out what job to take.  He was trying hard to hide his drug taking when she comes to visit with her two young sons from the U.S.  Even though he seems to be trying to keep things as normal as possible between them, it is as if she is dead to what is really taking place with him and between them.  This was less believable than the hallucinations.

Two American friends come for a short visit en route to somewhere else.  After an evening of drinking, they seem intent on doing some wife/husband swapping – possibly something else that was beginning to be experimented with more openly in the culture of the 1960s.  This couple seem to have more of a sense that all is not as it should be with the main character than his wife does.

That said, it is a great book, highly recommended with a score of 8 out of 10.

Agnes Grey

by Ann Bronte

I want to start with a reminder: our Reading Group books come from Devon Library Reading Group service.  Each year we make a choice of 24 books from a long list.  The library then choses a book for us off that list and I collect it from the local library.  If there is not a book available from our list they send us a ‘wild card’.  So, even if we don’t like the book, most of the time, we chose it as a group.  That does not stop my over-worked sense of responsibility for what the group reads.  This book was no exception.  Initially I found this a difficult boring read.  Once I got past the first couple of chapters, I was hooked, but in the same way I used to get hooked on the Archers.

This book is essentially a 19^th century soap opera.  Financial ruin dictates the future of Agnes, one of the daughters of the ruined family; she gets a job as a governess, has a terrible time, comes home, gets another governess job, has a different sort of terrible time, sticks with it for what seems like years and years and years.  Eventually, a love interest comes on the scene, but being 1847, there are no pubs or clubs to actually meet each other, so it appears to flounder except in her fantasy life.  Now, by ‘fantasy life’ I don’t mean various shades of (Agnes) Grey!  What I mean is she thinks about the person until she can think about nothing else.  The story does eventually have a happy ending, but not until Agnes has been subjected to endless humiliations and cruelty.

It is possible that the book is, in part, autobiographical.  Anne Bronte worked for a period of time as a governess herself.  That will be how she could pull out so much detail; and it is the detail that makes this book work reading.  The real interest is in considering the social content.  Bronte seemed to have it in for the upper classes and portrayed them in a very uncomfortable light.  We read about child rearing methods that, in 2015, would be considered to border on emotional abuse.  In our discussions we had to be clear that when we thought about the descriptions of relationship, work life, domestic details, etc, we were keeping them in their historical context.  Ways of living that we find foreign and complicated would have been perfectly natural and acceptable.  The family could, for instance, insist that Agnes sit where they wanted her to sit at church, or in the carriage home. If the girls chose to walk, Agnes must walk, and walk behind them in silence, unless the girls wanted to communicate with her.  She was then expected to teach them respect, along with their academic lessons – a near impossibility.

The book was written and set at a time when the industrial revolution was well established and there will have been a lot of new money in the England.  In towns and cities there may have been a smidgeon more freedom for women, but Agnes (as with Ann herself) was trapped in isolated rural situations until the very end of the story when she and her mother set up a school in a seaside town (and she meets again the man of her fantasy).  Agnes’s life as a governess created a sense of claustrophobia, isolation, and despair.  Even among the staff in the houses she worked at she was alone: she was too educated to be considered one of the servant class, and did not have high enough social status to socialise with the family.  With nowhere to go and no one to help, Agnes relied on her religious background to steady her.

The reading group read The Suspicions of Mr Whicher a few months ago, a book about a crime that took place in the 1860s, just a few years after Agnes Grey was written and published.  The two books were describing life experiences in the same time period, yet when reading Agnes Grey, there is the distinct feeling of something much more archaic.

In general Agnes Grey is an uncomfortable but thought provoking read.

The group scored it 6.5 out of 10.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

 

Our reading group meets monthly at my house and has done for 8 years (next month). I order the books from the library, and collect and return them.  I provide tea, biscuits, and nuts, and a tidy table to sit around.  I also hold a certain amount of anxiety about the group and some of that anxiety showed itself with this book.  When I first started the group there were so many people interested that I ran two and from the very first time we met each person – 20 people in total – was given a copy of the same book.  I chose Cloud Atlas because it was short listed for the Booker Prize and it was new, etc.  Looking back, I could have chosen something safe, like a Daphne DuMaurier or similar, but I didn’t know then that there were safe books and ones that could create mayhem in a group.  Almost to a woman, the book was disliked, not understood, not read.  I felt I was on the brink of failing before we had really started.  Fortunately the group members had more faith than I did and they continued to come back.  It has to be said that two of us really liked the book.  Most of the group members had read the book, saying later that they were afraid they would be ‘told off’ if they didn’t read it.  (What a predictable nation of people we are, really: ‘follow the rules, perceived or otherwise, or else!’ – maybe that is a discussion for another blog.).

Cloud Atlas is still mentioned from time to time with a humorous tone that surprisingly brings back an inkling of the old feeling of potential failure.  It reminds me that I have continued to feel anxious about whether the group will like a book and reading The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry brought it back for me in bucket loads.  Fortunately, the group members no longer feel that they HAVE to read a book if they don’t get on with it, so, when I started this book, I thought that some may put it to one side and read something that was on their own reading list. I thought the book was Sentimental Tosh. But, as I continued to read my opinion changed and I realised this was a remarkable book.

Unsurprisingly, the group agreed;  the most consistent comment by group members was “I loved this book.”    The group’s score out of 10 was 8.5 with the  scores ranging from 9 to 6.  That is a pretty high score for our discerning group.

This unusual and moving book is about  what can happen to a marriage following the loss of a child and the difficult process of repair that is possible.  It is also about the inner struggle for parents if their own parenting had gone wrong.  Harold’s honest descriptions of feeling that he had failed as a father because he didn’t know what to do – The fathering he had received had been wholly inadequate, as was the mothering, so how was he to know if he was doing it right or not.   Equally, communication between him and his wife became non existent, probably because they had no idea how to manage the painful and fearful feelings in themselves, let alone together.

Woven around that story are some wonderful observations, of the countryside, minor physical ailments, but mainly about people.   It was noted at length what a good observer of people the author is.  She included  some quirky and unusual interactions between strangers that, we all agreed, could and do happen.   A line was pointed out that describes this well: “He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others.”

I haven’t written about the plot – that is easy to figure out from the title – a man goes for a long walk, across the country in fact.  During the walk he remembers and sorts through parts of his life.  It is a book about love and loss and betrayal and transformation.  There are a few unexpected twists in the story, as there can be in any journey.

We loved it.

 

Catcher In The Rye

 

 

Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger,

published 1951

 

 

It has taken me a while to get the strength up to write about this book.  It seems to have transferred its inherent depressiveness onto me so that, each time I even think about writing, I am pinned down by the weight of despair.

This book, published in 1951 has been one of the biggest selling books of all time with around 250,000 copies being sold each year with total sales of more than 65 million.

That is a lot of books for the most challenged and banned book of all time……

CONTINUE READING BY CLICKING THE MORE BUTTON HERE

The Great Gatsby

I have been putting off writing about our last Reading Group book, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, primarily because I love this book and, at the same time, there are some problems for me in the subject matter. However, I am not only writing about my views. My reading group scored this book with an average of 7.5. I won’t go into the plot here because, if you haven’t seen one of the FIVE movies (a silent movie in 1926, 1949, 1974, a TV movie in 2000, and the latest in 2013), or read the book, then there is always the internet to give you a precis of the story. I asked the group what one word they would use to say what the book is about: Class, Love, Money, Loneliness, were some of the words that came up. There is a deep sadness throughout the book, highlighted by the glamour and the glitter and the extravagance of the lives of the characters. We are given to believe that the narrator is above it all (or below it), however, he comes from a family which lives at the same dizzying aristocratic heights as the rest of them – he is after all, cousin to the main female character. At least he works for a living and lives a little more frugally than the rest. But this character carries his own sadness – he seems to get drawn very easily into Gatsby’s pain; as if he is living a life vicariously. His (the narrator) relationship with Jordan, the golf star, seems terribly false, whereas Gatsby’s romance and subsequent broken heartedness seem so much more real in comparison. We never hear the narrator extolling his feelings for Jordan. They are simply an item.

The landscape is also set out as if it is a character – or two characters: the gorgeous, exciting, moneyed, people in the know and on the move, and the waste heaps, dirty, smokey, poor, people wanting to get out yet no one is going anywhere. The fact that this landscape exists in real life is equally extraordinary and just pays testament to Fitzgerald’s ability as a writer to find a way of displaying some of the sordidness of American life by using these two opposing worlds. And when these world’s collide we see them all for what they are, shallow individuals living within a facade, a fantasy, even Gatsby, perhaps Gatsby more than the rest.

Our next book, the Catcher in the Rye by J. D Salinger brought groans of happiness and despair from members of the group as I handed it out. I can’t wait to hear the result of this read.

 

BOOKS

I run a monthly reading group and have done for 7 1/2 years. Half of the current group have been coming since the beginning. In those years we have read approximately 90 books that most of us have said we would never have read had it not been for the group. Our group is connected to the local library and that is how we get our books. It means we are limited in choice to what the Reading Group Department are offering. Mostly we are pleased with the choices. A couple of years ago we began scoring books out of 10 after the discussion. We have had one 9 (Engleby by Sebastian Faulks)

and one 2 (The Infinite Wisdom of Harriet Rose by Diana Janney). Most range in between the two.  A book we read before we began scoring was The Woman In White, by Wilke Collins.  My guess is that that book would have been given a 9 – only missing a 10 because of its length (it is quite long).

The last book we discussed was That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, by Anne Sebba.  It was one of the most mixed in terms of discussion.  Some hadn’t read it at all, feeling uncomfortable about that aristocratic life style; others, including me, read part but not all of it; and then some read it all and thoroughly enjoyed it.  There were elements of her life that were interesting, especially some of the speculation about her gender disorder and her apparent desperation to avoid living a less than opulent life.  Wallis and the Princes’ relationship with Hitler and his cronies could have been interesting, but it is all so well known about now. Frankly I was somewhat bored by it.  The score for the book in the end was a middle of the road 6.  We’re not big on biographies in general in the group.  In fact, this may be the first we have read.

 

Currently we are reading The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  It is ironic that this too is a book about people with so much money they don’t know what to do with it and are themselves bored.  In That Woman, there is a reference to the idea that the main female characters in The Great Gatsby were based upon two very wealthy American women into whose circle Wallis found herself while hob-nobbing with the Prince.

Its hard to know how to think about that connection.  If one thinks about the life of Wallis Simpson as a work of fiction, like the life of Jay Gatsby, it makes a bit more sense.  I, at least, find it easier to accommodate it.  My mind simply has no way of relating to the lifestyle, other than in my imagination, where it is easier if it is all a fiction.

I’ll report later on the outcome of the discussion and final score.