Mercury Rising - Robert Edric

 Edric is one of the best, least famous contemporary British novelists.  He is well published - Doubleday and Penguin - and well reviewed, but not adequately promoted.  I found his London Satyr by chance (reviewed on this blog) and have been on the lookout for more ever since.

Mercury Falling from 2018 is another minutely characterised story - the story of Jimmy Devlin (29), dishonourably discharged from the army at the conclusion of hostilities in 1945, who has spent the last nine years on the tramp around his birthplace in the Fens.  Fenland always floods but the floods of 1953-4 have been the worst in memory.  Homes inundated, farms too wet to work.

We start with Jimmy being evicted from one such farm which he rented with the vague idea of becoming self-supporting.  He finds work as a casual labourer on a government drainage scheme, lodgings with Ray Duggan, a farmer with a sideline in scrap, not necessarily legally acquired.  He gradually involves Jimmy in his illicit business, which involves working with the Maguire family, gypsies who spend the winter repairing fairground equipment, building holiday camps, and (inevitably) stealing stuff.

Jimmy's life settles for a while.  He re-establishes contact with his sister, and tries to avoid her husband.  But his transgressions start to catch up with him.  He tries to settle scores, finds there are too many.  The police become involved.  Jimmy is a gunman on the run...

It is masterfully done - one not especially likeable man's inexorable fate rolls out against a sodden, almost alien background.  All utterly believable.  Edric asks the question, how hard was it for the unskilled conscripts kicked out of the army en masse in 1945?  Conscripts with skills, like my father, for instance, were kept on, promoted, their skills enhanced, so they were demobbed into a more settled economy with prospects.  But for the Jimmy Devlins?

If you haven't already come across Robert Edric, I recommend you seek him out.

Somerset and All the Maughams - Robin Maugham

 An interesting and unusual concept - half an account of the Maugham brothers' ancestors, half Robin's memories of his famous uncle with a particular focus on the dislike between Willie and Robin's father, Frederic Maugham, who before this I had not realised was Lord Chancellor of the UK.

Robin brings it all off entertainingly.  Like Willie, he was gay and enjoyed literary success.  Unlike Willie he was unashamedly gay and brave (he was severely wounded in action in WW2).  Not knowing anything of Frederic Maugham before this, I was unaware that any Maugham had become a peer of the realm.  Robin was thus the second and last Viscount Maugham.

The men in the book are all eccentric.  It is the women who shine, in particular Somerset Maugham's wife Syrie Wellcome, nee Barnardo (yes, the daughter of Thomas Barnardo).  Sadly their daughter Liza makes no appearance, even though (perhaps because) Robin claims her as a close friend.

A great pleasure to read.  Essential for anyone interested in the private Somerset Maugham.

Plainsong - Kent Haruf

 Kent Haruf, whom I admit I'd never heard of, wrote a handful of novels, all set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado.  Plainsong (1999) was his 'middle' novel, and apparently most successful, winning a bunch of literary prizes.

What Haruf pulls off here is an ordinary domestic drama, handled so tenderfully, so delicately, that it becomes something much more.  Yet we lack more or less all detail.  We get only superficial descriptions of the main characters.  The landscape is evoked but never nailed down.  Everything is entrusted to atmosphere and dialogue.  The characters reveal themselves in the way they talk, albeit most of the time they are exchanging superficial politeness.  And yet the story throbs with life.  The characters draw us in.

There are basically two stories at play.  They only come together in the last chapter.  Teacher Tom Guthrie's wife has suffered some sort of breakdown.  She spends all her time in bed until she ups and moves to her sister's apartment in Denver.  It quickly becomes apparent she is never coming back to Holt.  So Tom is left with two young boys to bring up.  Meanwhile sixteen year old Victoria Roubideaux falls pregnant.  The boy wants nothing to do with her.  Her mother throws her out of the house.  Her only recourse is schoolteacher Maggie Jones, who takes her in but can't keep her because of her senile father.  So she places Victoria with two elderly bachelor brothers, Harold and Raymond McPheron, at their farm outside of town.  The relationship that builds between the young girl and the two old men is probably the most beautiful thing in the book.  The iron-hard oldsters also provide an element of gentle comedy.

Tom is subject to a complaint from the aggressive parents of a loutish student.  The student himself takes out his resentment on Tom's sons, ten year old Ike and eight year old Bobby.  This moment of malice somehow equates to the farm-life in which animals are sometimes brutally born yet gently eased into death.  The detail of a calf being successfully yanked out of its mother by the McPherons and Ike's horse being put to sleep by the local vet stand out powerfully from the soft pastoral background.

Plainsong is an extraordinary book, highly recommended.  For once, the 'big name' introduction - by Peter Carey - adds to our understanding and appreciation of what follows.

Adventures in the Skin Trade - Dylan Thomas

 Thomas intended Adventures in the Skin Trade as the successor to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.  The latter was a fictional rendering of his childhood in Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea, the former as a version of his first attempt to break free by going to London in 1933.  In real life the key element of his first London life was participation in the Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries in 1936.  The fictional version never gets that far.  The discontinued fragment that came out in 1955 - this Aldine paperback - is limited to three chapters covering the day of departure, arrival, and immediate descent into dissolution.

Dylan's fictional alter ego is Sam Bennett, intended to be a passive character whom things happen to.  Thus he stays in the station cafeteria until someone offers to take him home.  The someone is Donald Allingham, a dealer in secondhand furniture, who takes Sam to his three rooms in Praed Street, every room of which is crammed with furniture, thus making rooms within rooms.  There is no water or cooking facility so Allingham takes Sam to Mrs Dacey's informal cafe, where Sam ends up naked in the bath without the company of Mrs Dacey's amorous daughter Polly.  Then it's everybody off to the progressively seedier nightspots - "the Gayspot first, then the Cheerio, then the Neptune."

It is surreal in its way, and colossal fun, but how I wish Thomas had been able to take us to exhibition and finding the spanner to get Dali free of his diving helmet.  Nevertheless, Adventures in the Skin Trade is an essential for anyone interested in the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive.

English Journey - J B Priestley

 

In 1933 Priestley toured England from Southampton to Newcastle and then back to London down the East Coast.  His account of the country, four years into the Depression, was published the following year.

There are signs of the industrial collapse everywhere he goes but most calamitously, of course, in the North, which had been industrialised more intensively than anywhere else.  A Northerner himself, Priestley naturally takes this personally, and his descriptions of deserted shipyards and abandoned factories is at times harrowing.  What prevents the book becoming an ordeal is the way Priestley seeks out the positive - the charitable settlements in towns large and small which give the unemployed a way of occupying their time and expressing themselves, often through choirs and theatrical productions.  Priestley, again, was a great man of the theatre.

The English Journey should be a set book for Sixth Formers but never will be because Priestley makes no bones about who is responsible for the collapse.  The same people who, even as I write, are gleefully trashing the British economy, slashing social support to fund tax cuts for the extremely rich, few of whom live in England any more.

Ashenden - W Somerset Maugham

Ashenden is said to be the fictive version of Maugham's experience as a semi-professional intelligence agent in World War I.  As a famous author, middleaged, and long-term expat, Maugham's presence in Switzerland, France and Italy was unquestioned.  As he famously sociable and civilised, he could easily mix with people of all sorts.  So, therefore, does Ashenden.

The fascinating thing for me was that some of the spies Ashenden tangles with in these stories are easily identified.  Guilia Lazzari, for example, is surely Mata Hari.  Others, I would love to be able to identify. Was Maugham really in Russia during the Kerensky government?  If so, who was Mr Harrington and who was Alexandra Alexandrovna?

Published in 1928, Ashenden is Maugham at the height of his powers.  The writing, characterisation and narrative structure are all superb.  To anyone who hasn't tried Maugham before, could there be a better introduction?  I think not.