High-brow reading that pays dividends

When post-holiday depression hits you even before the summer holiday is over, you know you’re in trouble. Let’s see if I can ward it off with some blogging on further summer reading (nothing much happens on the TV front in summer). I’ve managed one single Ambitious Book Project among all the self-indulgence reading this summer: The Stranger’s Child, by Alan Hollinghurst.

As I’ve argued before, summer is not an ideal time to take on something ambitious in the way of reading. In the case of The Stranger’s Child, though, it worked pretty well. I don’t think it would have been ideal to read it in half-hour-sized chunks during lunch hours, plus a page or two on the bus. Unhurried reading sprawled on the bed seemed the right way to consume it; granted, autumn showers outside would have been preferable to sweltering heat, but when do you have hours of uninterrupted reading time in the autumn? It’s an elegant and beautifully written novel, as well as enjoyable. But it is high-brow. Once more, as when I watched Parade’s End, I felt a bit like an uncultured lout. But at least this time, I was a lout who appreciated the high-brow product in question in my own caveman-like way.

Many of  the best classics work on two levels: one for the unsophisticated reader/audience who simply wants a straightforward story – for instance, when you’re a child and encounter the stories in question for the first time – and one for the reader who wants a little more. I first came across David Copperfield when my mother read an abridged version to me: I was eleven or twelve at the time. During this reading, I never doubted that Micawber was a good egg, and I was scared of Uriah. When I read the complete novel later, I realised the plot and characters were not as clear-cut as they appeared (I suspect, however, that Dickens would have approved more of my child-self’s judgement of the characters than my present one). Since becoming a grown-up, I thought I was well able to find hidden nuances in a novel and read it on a fairly sophisticated level. And so it was a little troubling when I found myself reading The Stranger’s Child very much as if I were a child myself, taking everything at face value.

On face value, the novel starts like a classic country-house novel. In 1913, George Sawle brings home his university friend and secret lover Cecil Valance, eldest son of a fairly newly-created aristocratic family, for a summer visit. Cecil writes poetry and George’s sixteen-year old sister, Daphne, is set on falling in love with him. Naturally she knows nothing of his affair with her brother. The two first parts of the novel are set thirteen years apart, but they both concern the interactions between the Sawle and Valance families. When the novel skips forward forty-one years to 1967, and concentrates on two young men who only tangentially have anything to do with the Sawles and Valances, I for one felt a little disorientated at first. The story moves back to these families eventually, though, only now they are seen from an outsider perspective. Later, in 1980, one of the young men – Paul Bryant – attempts to write a biography of Cecil, but he finds it uphill work to get anything out of the surviving witnesses, including Daphne. The only one forthcoming is the indiscreet George.

Favourable reviews of The Stranger’s Child, cited at the front of the book, concentrate on such matters as the passing of time and the nature of memory. These abstract themes, you feel, are meant to be more important than the plot/character part of the story; many of the most dramatic events happen off-stage. So when I say that I felt for Paul in his tribulations as (admittedly nosy) biographer – social awkwardness is a trait that immediately elicits sympathy if you’ve ever felt socially awkward yourself – and that, as a consequence, I lost much of the sisterly sympathy I’d previously stored up for Daphne, I’m at the same time aware of somehow missing the point. This is not the kind of novel where you should really spend much time debating whether you like a certain character or not. That said, the novel works for us plot/character nuts too, and the author himself seems disposed to think kindly and tolerantly of his characters, which for me is a big plus. For instance, Paul – in spite of not being such an innocent abroad as he seems – does rather better than expected, and a story of a secondary character’s unrequited love that petered out in the book’s first part is touchingly wound up in the last part.

In other words, if you’d like to read something in the Booker Prize league but not be weighed down by language experiments or dismal content, this is a good bet. But be prepared, if you find yourself discussing it afterwards, that observations like “isn’t that Dudley a perfect pain” could cause a few raised eyebrows.

Middle-class (female) morality

Alfred Doolittle, Eliza’s feckless father, is very scathing about “middle-class morality” in Pygmalion (and in My Fair Lady, which actually is better). I don’t have any problems with it myself: as moralities go, the middle-class one is pretty reasonable, though eulogies on the rewards of hard work aren’t always easy to relate to. However, after having spent a great deal of time reading popular fiction set in an affluent and predominately female environment, I’m starting to feel a little Doolittleish. What gets my goat is when middle-class women blithely dismiss aspects of life that contribute to making their own lives – and that of a great deal of other people – comfortable. There’s a hint of Mrs Merdle, the financier’s wife in Little Dorrit who wishes we could all live like savages, about it.

Lately, I’ve read Jenny Colgan’s Meet Me at the Cupcake Café and Gill Hornby’s The Hive, and I’m now in the middle of Lovers by Judith Krantz (in my defence, these are my summer holidays, and I bought it at a book stand during a week in London for 50 pence). They are three wildly different novels by three wildly different authors, but they have some things in common. They’re within the realms of popular fiction, and from a female viewpoint. Cupcake Café and The Hive both focus on a female-dominated group of people. Here, you find again the old opinions on what is good and bad in this world which I recognise from a hundred and one gentle romantic films.

Creativity is good. Consequently, cooking and baking are good things, because there you actually make something. Farming is also a good thing, in its down-to-earth naturalness. Children are quite simply the best thing ever. Bad things are: City types and City jobs; impersonal environments that lack that special warm, lived-in, quirky woman’s touch; too much focus on your career (and to be fair, this is frowned upon in men and women alike).  

Cases in point: the heroine in Cupcafe Café, Izzy, is made redundant from her admin job in the City where she spent an inordinate amount of time updating her Facebook status, and uses the opportunity to start the eponymous café. The bastard on-off boyfriend whom her friends are trying to convince her to get rid of is a City type – a property developer, no less. Izzy’s employee, Pearl, has an adorable toddler whom she tries to bring up more or less single-handedly and over whom all of the book’s women swoon. A children’s party at the café where the little mites learn to bake is one of the set pieces. The novel also contains some hand-wringing over beastly “gentrification” of neighbourhoods (honestly, don’t get me started on that one). Izzy’s new love interest is a banker – wow, innovation! – but he is an adviser for a local branch, always tousled and disorganised because he’s bringing up his little brother after their parents died in a car accident. So that’s all right then.

In The Hive, one of the characters you are supposed to like, Georgina aka Georgie, gives up a high-flying career as a lawyer to marry a farmer and start a large family. She’s as happy as Larry, and is always relieved to find herself pregnant yet again: like Rachel, another sort-of-goodie, she despises “me-time”. Georgie once had an au-pair, but her immaculate housework split up the family unit; now, the children muck in (whopee – because as a kid, you simply love chores, don’t you?), and everything is chaotic but lovely. Oh, and of course Georgie still gets plenty of sex from her manly farmer husband. When Rachel looks after Georgie’s good-natured, quietly sleeping toddler for one afternoon, she muses on “what a positive thing it was to have a little one around the place; how they imprinted their wholesome routine upon the days of everyone around them […] Where did it come from, this idea that it was small children who killed your fun and tied you down?” Hold on – that must be satire, right?

I feel I’m being a bit unfair, because I enjoyed both The Hive and Cupcake Café very much. And I realise that the world must be peopled, and that it’s only fair to depict bringing up children as something else than a hard slog once in a while – there are contented housewives out there, why deny it? But it does get a bit cloying if you’re not into all that earth-mother stuff.

However, there are upsides to middle-class female morality. This is where Lovers comes in (where there is, incidentally, a City-type villain, a bitch whose bitchiness stems from her mother’s neglect, and a benevolent matriarch who “over-engages” in her twins’ upbringing although she has a full-time nanny). A good old-fashioned bonkbuster, published in the 1990s, the good characters in it nevertheless adhere to a moral code. No goodie ever uses sex as a weapon for personal gain or in order to do someone down. As one character says, defending her polygamous past: “I never slept with a man I didn’t genuinely like. I never slept with a man to get anything out of it but pleasure. I never deceived them.” And after you’ve found your great love, it goes without saying that there’s no more sleeping around. This sense of fair play is a great source of relief in a novel like this, because then  you know that the characters you should root for – in spite of being miles more attractive than most people, including yourself – will not abuse their power and do something you’d find hard to forgive them.

I recently read an article lambasting the “good girl” ethos which I found curiously unconvincing. I don’t mind good girls, really. If only they could stop chirping about their sprogs all the time, enjoy the perks of modern urban life without guilt – and maybe give that City guy a break.

English high society and French spies

Sally Beauman once again proved a hard act to follow, but at least two novels have kept me well entertained since I regretfully finished Dark Angel. First out was The New Countess, the third and final part of Fay Weldon's "Love and Inheritance" trilogy. My expectations from when I started the the first book, Habits of the House, have been pretty much fulfilled: the three books are a light-hearted, witty, gossipy read set in Edwardian high society, with occasional trips downstairs to the servants' hall. But it lacks the heart-warming quality of the best Upstairs Downstairs episodes: the tone is reminiscent of the more satirical episodes of that series. James's friend Bunny's appalling country-house circle of friends come to mind. True, the Earl of Dilberne and his family shape up a bit after getting off to a bad start in Habits of The House, where they begin the book by snubbing their long-suffering (and powerful) financial advisor. But they don't engage your sympathy the way, say, Richard Bellamy, Hazel or Georgina do in Upstairs Downstairs.

A comparison with Downton Abbey doesn't present itself in the same way because its brief is somewhat different: the good-natured Fellowes wants to give each and every one of his regular characters a fair shake, and has never claimed for one moment to be of a satirical frame of mind. Upstairs Downstairs is closer to the "Love and Inheritance" trilogy in tone, but it digs deeper, and the characters remain more central to the story than any point made about the occasional rumness of master-servant relationships. In fact, Hazel Bellamy's touching speech about there being two families living at Eaton Place actually trumps Downton when it comes to all-in-this-together optimism. Picture any Crawley, even the Earl of Grantham at his most blue-eyed, likening their servants to a family! It would be a very dysfunctional family indeed.

Getting back to "Love and Inheritance", the closest we get to a likeable upstairs character is the heiress Minnie O'Brien (!) who ends up marrying the Earl's son Arthur. She is, for the most part, sweet-natured. As for the Dilbernes (or Hedleighs, to use their family name) themselves, they're not mean, exactly, just very selfish. They, and Minnie for that matter, seem to change their minds about each other a lot just to facilitate some witty phrase. One moment Countess Isobel likes her daughter-in-law and sees why she's upset with Arthur; a little later she doesn't understand why Minnie is making a fuss and is wondering of Arthur wouldn't be better off without her. These alterations of mood happen quite often, and some characters - Anthony Robin "Redbreast" springs to mind - change their leopard's spots completely. As for the downstairs characters, they remain little more than amusing sketches. So, not quite Upstairs Downstairs in book form, then, but the three novels (the middle one, Long Live the King, is the weakest in my view as it introduces the Earl's rather dull niece Adela) are still satisfyingly fun and frothy.

Robert Harris's historical spy thriller about the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and A Spy, is a different book altogether - but there again, I didn't feel passionately for the protagonist. In fact, I quite disliked Georges Picquart at first, and I'm not even sure I like him now after I've finished the book. It doesn't matter, though, as there is no disputing the rightness of his cause. I'm ashamed to say I had no idea the Dreyfus affair was this bad: suspicious as I am of miner-hugging French writers, the assumption had crossed my mind that it was all little more than a blunder, and that Zola used it as a stick to beat the establishment with. Not so. Dreyfus was victim first of a scandalous framing, then of an equally scandalous cover-up of the framing. Zola wasn't merely being a revolutionary show-off when he defended him: he was right, and he took a personal risk doing so. However, it is Picquart, who discovers the evidence of Dreyfus's innocence quite by chance while going after the real spy, and then refuses to let things rest in order to save the French military's face - and is made to suffer for it - who is the real hero of the tale.

But likeable? I dunno. Any character who starts out by describing David's painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps as an "atrocious piece of Imperial kitsch" has uphill work when it comes to gaining my sympathy. Moreover, Picquart stems from Alsace (as I suppose I must call it), but his family elected to remain French in 1870 and so were turfed out. He is hostile to Germans as a consequence, and he's not wild about Jews either, whose patriotism he suspects. His prejudices are of his time and not overdone by Harris. Mostly, historical prejudices are either caricatured (in "bad" characters) or non-existent (in "good" characters) in historical fiction, and I like the fact that this author tells it like it is. Nevertheless, Picquart's icy disdainfulness is trying. Frankly, he's a bit of a prig, and his snooping on the German military attaché Schwartzkoppen's (admittedly fascinating) love life did little to endear him to me.

Still, Picquart has his good points, quite apart from his honesty. Above all, Harris endows him with the characteristics necessary for a good narrator: a keen sense of observation and occasional flashes of humour. A straight man in more ways than one, he nevertheless dutifully takes notice of the personal attractions of male characters he meets, for the benefit of us men-fancying readers. A surprising number of his friends and foes are handsome; Schwartzkoppen sounds a real peach, which would explain his, er, universal appeal.

Above all, the story is a cracking read, and a good example of how historical research should be used in a novel: not in clunky look-how-well-read-I-am pieces of exposition, but as a means of enlivening the narrative with colourful detail. Neither Picquart, nor the unfortunate Dreyfus - whose lack of charisma is part of his tragedy - would make the ideal dinner guest. But they are, or rather were, honourable men, and this book is a fine tribute to them.