London

Making Things Better, by Anita Brookner

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At 73, Julius Herz has spent his life obeying others. In his youth, he paid court to spoiled, flighty Fanny, but believed her correct in disdaining him. When his family fled Nazi Germany, they were set up in a London flat by Ostrakov, apparently a connection of some relative. He went on to give Herz’s father a job in a record shop, part of his empire.

As with Vivian’s daughters in On the Rooftop, Herz was controlled by his parents, ordered to work in the record shop and to live with them, even after his marriage, which of course quickly foundered. His parents continued to ignore him, though, and never acknowledged what Herz did for them. His brother Freddy, a violin prodigy as a youth, and the focus of his parents’ attention and ambition, suffered a breakdown after arriving in England, and spent the rest of his life in care.

Now his parents and Freddy are dead, and Ostrakov has decided to sell the record shop and the flat. Still the benefactor though, he gives the proceeds to Herz, enabling him to purchase a small flat and live simply but comfortably. Without the welcome routine of work, Herz wonders how to fill his days, usually falling back on “a newspaper and the supermarket in the morning, and in the afternoon a bookshop or gallery.” Regarding a photo of himself with a rare smile, he thinks:

Even the smile had become modified with age. The smiling boy had become a polite adult; the smile now had something dutiful about it as if it were expected of him; he would continue to offer it but without conviction. It was a smile that no longer expressed eagerness but was a suitable feature in his dealing with others. Preparing to listen, to sympathize, he would acknowledge the return of his habitual smile, while all the time registering his lack of joy.

I was especially charmed by the cover, which I recognised immediately as a Romaine Brooks painting. The quiet colors disrupted by strong diagonals match the tone of the book brilliantly.

My library adds a sheet to the back flap of books where readers can rate the book and add a comment. From these, I’ve learned that Brookner’s novels are not for everyone. You couldn’t call them fast-paced: because they are so internal to the protagonist, there is a preponderance of narration.

For me, much of their value lies in the deep dive into the psychology of a silent person. By that I mean someone who for whatever reason—introversion, social anxiety, solitude, learned behavior—does not interact much with others. They aren’t the ones who bend your ear about their latest love affair over a bottle of wine. They are not the ones who play tennis or join a book club.

The lack of interaction leads to fewer of the dramatic scenes that make up the bulk of most modern novels. Teachers of fiction and creative nonfiction (including me) emphasize that modern readers, accustomed to film and television dramas, expect a story to be mostly dramatic scenes with a little narration as necessary. Some readers have gone on record that they automatically skip over descriptions of a place or a person to get to the action.

Here the scenes are internal and the drama muted. But it is there, burbling underneath the seemingly drab story as Herz wanders the city, picks over his past, and tries, ineptly, to start or restart relationships. Now that he is free—finally—to do what he wants, he cannot decide what that is. He finds himself reduced to “hoping to catch life on the wing, and to make himself into a semblance of gentlemanly old age which others might find acceptable.”

As with all of Brookner’s novels (I’ve read 17 out of 26), there is much going on under the surface of this seeming simple novel. Multiple themes are there to be teased out. And her polished prose satisfies something in me that no other writer’s work does.

Do you ever wonder about the inner life of a seemingly ordinary person, perhaps someone you see in the supermarket or in the post office?

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

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The story opens with the infamous Nellie Coker, owner of a string of nightclubs in 1926 London, being released from Holloway Prison at dawn. Many of the toffs and high-ranking politicians who revel at her clubs and who conspired with her in evading police scrutiny are present, a bit bedraggled by their long night dancing and drinking, to celebrate Nellie’s release, along with “the usual riffraff and rubberneckers.”

Nellie immediately has to buckle down and defend her empire from several threats.

Meanwhile Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher, on loan to Bow Street to “root out corruption,” is one of those threats, though he is hampered by the distrust of his new colleagues, the distraction of a string of drownings of young girls, and his own ineffectual nature. He is unhappily married to a mentally ill woman; he’s not really sure why he married her except that he prevented her from jumping off a bridge.

With characteristic humor, Atkinson vividly depicts the London club scene of the time. The aftermath of the Great War is everywhere in this story, from wartime reminiscences of the doorman to the difference between men who had gone to war and those who had not. Even the reckless abandon of 1920s London is blamed on a reaction to the war.

The criminal elements are mostly played for laughs. This bumbling cast of villains reinforces Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil. Writers don’t come off much better. Frobisher’s articles requested by John Bull are never published because they are not sensational enough. Ramsey Coker wants to be a best-selling author, but is too lazy to actually write.

Atkinson has done her research on this period. However, this novel illustrates the danger of too much research. I found it an unsatisfying story of uninteresting characters.

It also illustrates the danger of using real people and their lives for a story. Real people the author only knows from reading about them don’t necessarily make for interesting characters. There’s too little detail, nothing that makes them stand out. Frobisher, “influenced” by real-life Superintendent Robert Fabian and Nellie Coker, based on the real “queen of Soho’s clubland” Kate Meyrick, never quite come to life in this story.

Nellie’s obnoxious brood seem like empty caricatures put in place for plot purposes. The two 14-year-old girls who run away to London are stock characters. There’s a prostitute with a heart of gold, two policemen on the take, a strict battleax running a hotel for women, and so on.

Only the third protagonist, fictional Gwendolen Kelling, a former librarian who has come to London in search of the two lost girls, steps off the page, displaying real emotion and unexpected competencies. A nurse during the war, she is more than equal to London’s recklessness.

The other danger of using real lives is that they rarely fit into the kind of narrative arc readers expect. Here, plot threads are abandoned without being resolved; story questions are not answered; important events are random happenings rather than growing organically out of the characters and the plot. True, a couple of threads and questions are dispatched, but too much is left unresolved for there to be a satisfactory ending.

I had to wonder why I should care about these characters and their lives when the author seemed to care so little that she would just abruptly abandon them.

Just like real life, you might say. True. And it is somewhat interesting as an experiment. Atkinson is not alone among authors questioning whether standard story structures adequately represent our lives in this world. I appreciate her willingness to tinker with the balance between reality and story. Still, it was too insubstantial a story to satisfy me.

Have you read an historical novel that includes real people as characters? What did you think of it?

The Bay of Angels, by Anita Brookner

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What if you grew up reading fairy tales, all the ones I found in a corner of the little stone library near our house: the Blue Fairy Book, the Yellow, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault? Perhaps like Zoë you would come to believe that someday a fairy godmother would come or a magic cloak be given, a prince, a slipper, so that you yourself need do nothing but hold yourself in readiness, be calm and pleasant and passive.

What if you lived with your widowed mother, a sad and solitary woman, with no friends or even visitors aside from two of your mother’s cousins-in-law who descend on you with indigestible food, unsolicited advice, and unwelcome invitations before disappearing again (to yours and your mother’s relief)?

Zoë says:

After I had done my homework in the evening I would take up my position at the window. I liked to watch the lights go on in other houses, as if preparing for a wayfarer’s return. My reading had conditioned me to think in terms of wayfarers, so that footsteps on the pavement gave me an agreeable sensation that the stories contained enough authenticity to justify the fact that I still read them.

When Zoë is sixteen, her mother unexpectedly meets a man at one of the cousins’ parties and marries him, whereupon Simon whisks his new wife off to his home in Nice. Zoë is delighted with Simon but wants to stay in their old London flat. She is finally ready for freedom.

Freedom. It can mean so many things. As Zoë faces increasingly difficult challenges, she discovers different ways of being free, from sacrificing her own ideas and desires as she clings to an indifferent lover to Sartre’s existentialist freedom with its attendant responsibility and anguish.

As with all of Brookner’s work, this is an iceberg of a novel: brief and quiet on the surface, with a huge mass of emotions and ideas and insights hidden below. Narrated by Zoë, the story is built on scenes that bring to life both the quiet London dusk and the blazing sun of Nice.

With her usual penetrating psychological insights, Brookner provides fascinating portraits of the people Zoë interacts with, such as elderly Mme Levasseur whose face was somewhat twisted after a stroke, and her bitter disappointment when her grandson, a small child, refuses to kiss her.

As quietly brilliant sentences follow one upon the other, Zoë’s experiences bring her to a place where many of us have found ourselves. As poet Stevie Smith put it:

Oh I know we must put away the beautiful fairy stories
And learn to be good in a dull way without enchantment

Then we must read on to discover how Zoë will manage her new adult freedom. This most unusual coming-of-age story will deliver surprising insights if you will let it.

What coming-of-age story have you read that was especially memorable?

Undue Influence, by Anita Brookner

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This third bookshop book, like the last one, starts with the death of the protagonist’s mother. However, no one is throwing Claire out of the London flat—the only home she’s known—and she’s already working in a bookshop. Still, her father having died some years previously, she’s now alone in the world.

Claire is a curiously passive person, though she doesn’t see herself that way. The bookshop where she works is owned by two elderly sisters, Muriel and Hester, but Claire doesn’t sell books. She’s in the basement transcribing the writings of the sisters’ late father for possible publication. Between the sermons and the rather dry articles, she finds herself pleasantly immersed in a more predictable past.

She has one friend, Wiggy, whom she met at the National Gallery and sees occasionally. Although she enjoys her company, Claire thinks Wiggy is too passive. Mistress to a married man, Wiggy almost never leaves her flat in case he drops by. Still, Claire turns to Wiggy now to compensate in part for the loss of her mother’s company.

Before her mother died, Claire used to go on vacations to foreign cathedral towns where she’d dutifully see the sites so she could describe them to her mother. She also indulged in brief affairs that she did not tell her mother about.

It doesn’t seem like much of a life, but Claire’s imagination fills in the gaps. Convinced that she perceives the secret lives of people she’s barely met, she’s often tempted to give them advice or set them straight.

Thus when a quiet good-looking man ventures into the bookshop and is sent by Hester to the basement to find a particular book, Claire pursues an acquaintance with him. She believes she is helping him come out of his shell, but is she influencing him or the other way around?

She’s vulnerable, having been unmoored by her mother’s death, though she doesn’t recognise it. I have seen myself how a death can leave you bereft, not just of the loved one but of the routines that filled your days. Brookner captures that weightlessness, that waiting.

Brookner’s style, with its leisurely pace, subtle shifts, and extensive use of exposition may turn off some modern readers. Claire, as the first-person narrator, tells us this story, with only a few dramatic scenes, whereas we have become used to stories that are almost entirely scenes tied together with a little exposition. But I love the change of pace and the chance to settle fully into the mind of another person.

Like other Brookner novels I’ve read and loved, this story makes me think of the muffled sound of falling snow, so quiet you barely notice until you look out and see how the world has changed.

Have you read a novel by Anita Brookner? Do you have a favorite?

The Last Bookshop in London, by Madeline Martin

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When Grace Bennett lost her mother, she lost almost everything. Her sole relative, an uncle, not only takes over her house but also dismisses her from her job at his store without a reference. She and her more adventurous friend Viv have always dreamed of going to London, so they set off, buoyed by the offer of lodgings with a friend of Grace’s mother.

It’s August, 1939.

Viv gets her dream job at Harrods, but timid Grace has no luck because she has no references. Finally, the fond, if bossy, Mrs. Weatherford bullies the owner of a struggling bookshop into hiring Grace for six months so she can get the necessary reference.

Primrose Hill is barely staying afloat because it is far away from Paternoster Row, home of most of London’s bookstores, and its owner Mr. Evans is not much of a businessman. Grace is nervous: she’s not a reader, so how can she recommend books to customers?

However, her retail experience helps her make the shop more organized and attractive, and she finds the kindness lurking under Mr. Evans’s gruff exterior. She also enjoys the customers, especially George whose encouragement finally gets her to start reading.

Then war comes, with blackout curtains and the Blitz. Amid loss and constant fear, Grace volunteers as an ARP (Air Raid Precautions) warden, coincidentally paired with the grumpiest of the store’s customers, sending her out on the dark nights during the worst of the bombing. She takes refuge in her new passion: reading. On the nights she’s not on duty, when she and Mrs. Weatherfield sleep in the subway tunnels, she’s persuaded to read aloud to help others pass the time and distract them from their fears.

This second in a string of bookshop books for me starts out as a light read, but quickly turns serious with the start of World War II. The story eloquently depicts the home front: the women and old men left behind, the first attempt to find your way home in the blackout, the fear at the sound of the doorbell because it could be someone delivering a telegram, the sounds and smells of sleeping in the tube station turned air raid shelter, the attempt to extinguish incendiaries, the shock—first physical and then emotional—of a bomb blast.

What I most admire in this story is the way Martin integrates the larger story of the war with Grace’s particular journey. The grim accuracy of life in London during the Blitz, and all the losses—loved ones, homes, security—keep this from being a frothy romance or coming-of-age story. The war is not just pasted on to add drama; it informs everything in Grace’s story, from large events to the smallest detail.

What novel have you read that incorporates events current to the story?

The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters

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After the carnage of the Great War, many women in England found themselves condemned to spinsterhood. That’s not why in 1922 Frances Wray remains unmarried and living with her mother in South London, where their lives are circumscribed by the endless domestic chores, church on Sundays, and occasional visits with a few friends.

Frances does the domestic work, her mother being elderly and still grieving for the loss of her sons in the war. They once had a servant, but after the death of Frances’s father, the two women discovered that he had left them nothing but debts. By the time of the story, they have decided that their only recourse is to take in lodgers, dressing up the idea by calling them paying guests.

Enter Lillian and Leonard Barber. Members of the “clerk class,” they take up residence in the newly created apartment on the second floor and quickly change the atmosphere of the house, with their lively music and visits from Lillian’s rambunctious, working class family. Still the Wray women are more puzzled than distressed. What upsets the applecart is Frances’s growing attraction to Lillian.

The author brilliantly captures the peculiar intimacy of families sharing a wall, something I’m familiar with from living in rowhouses, triple-deckers, and a duplex (aka semi-detached). You try not to listen, but nonetheless find yourself having an unwelcome familiarity with their routines. Sometimes you even speculate about what’s going on over there.

Vividly captured as well is the domestic life of the period. The author gives us enough of Frances’s routine to understand what a burden housework was before the “labor-saving” devices we are accustomed to, without letting those passages become boring. She does this by exquisite detail, carefully chosen, and sometimes by making them part of action scenes.

I was surprised and impressed by the author’s handling of the class differences between the three families. Though never coming out and saying something like They are not our sort, Mrs. Wray remains aloof from the Barbers and Lillian’s family. However, Frances begins to enter the lives of both and seems to be free of that sort of class consciousness.

In fact, the psychological portrayal of Frances is what helped me stick with this overlong book. A fascinating character to start with, Frances changes with exposure to new information or outlooks, each transformation believable within the story.

The other thing that kept me going was the narrator Juliet Stevenson, one of my favorite actors. Having her voice in my ear is always a pleasure.

Who are your favorite audiobook narrators?

Wild Chamber, by Christopher Fowler

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What a comfort reading is during this dark time! There is much to be afraid of and loved ones to be afraid for, but it’s important to take a break sometimes, be somewhere else for a while.

I’ve been reading Fowler’s Bryant and May detective series in order. The two head up the Peculiar Crimes Unit, a division of the London police formed during WWII to handle cases that could cause public unrest. Persisting into the present, it operates like no police department you’ve ever encountered and is constantly under threat of closure by traditional-minded administrators.

Arthur Bryant has his own methods which involve consulting museum curators, white witches, and his own offbeat but strangely useful collection of reference books. He’s a bit of a trickster, with a sly sense of humor. Having more depth than the typical English eccentric, I’ve come to delight in the odd turns his thinking takes, even odder as he ages and others begin to suspect the beginnings of dementia.

John May’s reputation as a ladies’ man has taken a bit of a beating as he ages. With a more logical approach to solving crimes, he tries to protect his friend from his wilder flights and is the only one who stands up to him.

The other members of the PCU are, well, characters in the sense of being unique, believable, yet a little quirky. For instance, Janice Longbright is enamored of the style of 50’s screen actresses—makeup, heels, hair, clothes, the whole shebang—but not terribly practically for chasing suspects down dark alleys.

In this outing, Bryant and May are investigating the murder of a woman in one of London’s parks and gardens, originally called (at least once) its “wild chambers”. This garden is in an exclusive crescent, so it’s kept locked with only residents having access. How could a killer have gotten in? Where is her missing husband? And what does her murder have to do with one of Bryant and May’s cases a year earlier?

Since I’m unable to go to England this spring as planned, I especially relished the way the investigation led through many of London’s parks and gardens, calling up sweet memories for me.

In fact, London is the real protagonist of this series. The solution to the crimes almost always hinges on Bryant’s arcane knowledge of London’s past, whether it’s the history of Bedlam, the routes of lost underground rivers, or forgotten details about St. Pancras Old Church and King’s Cross.

Interestingly, Bryant and May is also the name of London-based company that ran match factories in the 19th century before being absorbed by other companies.

These two detectives would fit perfectly into a Golden Age mystery, though their stories are a bit darker than those standards. The stories don’t really fit into the various subcategories of mystery. Bryant and May aren’t amateurs, but the stories aren’t police procedurals—unless you’re willing to accept a perfectly wacky procedure. They aren’t cosies exactly, but neither are they grim crime novels. What they are is delicious. Funny, infectious, knowledgeable about human nature and London’s long history: the perfect vacation.

What are you reading? Does it give you rest, comfort or courage?

Crooked Heart, by Lissa Evans

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Lissa Evans’s fourth novel is set in and around London during the Blitz in WWII. The characters are ordinary people, not homefront heroes like midwives or wardens or detectives. Well, I say ordinary, but like the best fiction, Crooked Heart shows us how extraordinary each life may be.

In the remarkable prologue, we are introduced to orphaned 10-year-old Noel who lives with his godmother in Hampstead. Mattie, a suffragette in her younger days, has retained her free-thinking ways, treating Noel to an eccentric and wonderful education. However, she is beginning to suffer from dementia. As she struggles to remember words and where she put things, the wordplay and accommodations between Mattie and Noel are wonderful to behold.

I’m generally not fond of prologues, but I loved this one. In fact, I thought it the best part of the book.

All good things come to an end, including Mattie, and ostensibly under the care of her cousins, Noel is evacuated to St. Albans. Unprepossessing and limping from a bout with polio, Noel is the last child to find a home. Finally, Vera Sedge snatches him up for the sake of the stipend and extra rations she’ll receive.

Vera, known as Vee, is a widow who barely makes ends meet by sewing notions for hats and engaging in various small money-making schemes. She has little affection to spare for Noel since she is absorbed in waiting on her no-good grown son and elderly mother who spends her time writing letters to Churchill.

Noel, however, is quite brilliant and, thanks to Mattie, creative at coming up with unusual solutions to problems. He and Vee become partners in petty crime.

Much of the joy in this book is seeing how their relationship develops. The description of wartime London, where the two conduct their activities, is brilliant. More than what it’s like to take refuge from the bombs in a shelter or the unsettling disappearance of buildings, we learn about the plethora of minor crime going on while ordinary mores seem to be suspended. I also enjoyed the glimpses of regular life continuing during the Blitz, how people adjust to the new normal.

Much of the story is light-hearted, but it has its dark side—and I’m not just talking about bombs. The reader cannot help but share Vee’s ongoing panic about how to make ends meet and the extremes she’s willing to go to in order to pay the rent—just like today when so many are struggling to survive.

How can you not consider stealing a loaf of bread if your children are hungry? And I’m not just talking about the Blitz or Jean Valjean. People are starving today, even in the richest country in the world. People—especially single mothers—are unable to pay the rent and are thrown onto the street.

I’m sure there are those who would describe this novel as charming or heart-warming. Perhaps it is my own background that makes me so aware of the shadow of desperate poverty that haunts the comic shenanigans of Vee and Noel. As in drawing, thought, the shading adds depth and power to this story.

Have you read a novel that is by turns funny and sad, light-hearted and dark?