Song for a Sunday

A successful, productive day with my thesis yesterday - so let's celebrate with a cheerful, upbeat song. Step forward 'Something in the Water' by Brooke Fraser. It's a fun video too. Happy Sunday!

Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

Happy weekend, everyone. My week has included maximising the number of books I can fit in the shelf above my bed - which calls for horizontal shelving, rather than vertical (see below). My Saturday won't be very weekendy, as I'll be heading into the library to try and meet my chapter deadline next week - but Sunday has several fun events planned, one in particular I'm looking forward to - Diana Birchall will be visiting Oxford!


It seems to have been quite a while since I did a Weekend Miscellany - has it? - but I'm ready and waiting for a book, a blog post, and a link.

1.) The link - I found the idea behind this article fascinating, even if I haven't read many of the books mentioned: it's authors famous for the 'wrong' book. I.e. they've written better ones than the one which everyone knows about. I'm going to mull this over, and probably come up with a blog post myself about it... (Oh, and I can't remember who pointed me in the direction of this article, but I suspect it was someone on Twitter in one of my brief sojourns there. Thanks!)

2.) The blog posts - are a wonderful series, recommended to me by a fellow blogger at the TV Book Club outing, of Weird Things That Customers Say in Bookshops. That link should take you to all the posts the blogger, Jen Campbell, has labelled in this series, although you may need to scroll down a bit to get to one of the listy-posts. They're HILARIOUS.

3.) The book - and if you can't wait til Jen's book of these gets published, there's always this one to hunt out: Bookworm Droppings (awful title, but fun contents) by Shaun Tyas. (Sample: "Do you have Anne of Clark Gables?") Basically it's the same idea as Jen's proposed book... still, a good idea is a good idea. You can get it for 1p plus p&p on Amazon.co.uk at the mo!

People Who Say Goodbye

Continuing something of a theme, tonight I'll be writing about P.Y. Betts' People Who Say Goodbye, no.13 in the Slightly Foxed Editions series, and kindly sent to me by the lovely people at Slightly Foxed. This series of reprints seems to be mostly - perhaps wholly? - devoted to memoirs, and limited editions of 2000 of each are printed. Indeed, some have sold out completely, and others have fewer than a hundred copies left - and they are so beautiful that I at least now have a hunger to own the lot.

People Who Say Goodbye was originally published in 1989 by Souvenir Press, when I was three and the author was eighty - and looks back over the first couple of those eight decades, giving a rich and quirky vision of her childhood. Slightly Foxed Editions republished it earlier this year. Betts was apparently a successful writer in the 1930s, contributing to Graham Greene's 'prestigious but short-lived magazine Night and Day', according to Hazel Wood in her preface. It is perhaps odd that she should return to the literary world fifty years later with a childhood memoir, but I'm very glad that she did - for no other justification need be given for her expecting the reading public to care about her childhood than that she has written about it in an entirely engaging, amusing, and refreshingly unmournful and unsentimental manner.

Phyllis Betts' childhood in Wandsworth, South London is essentially an ordinary one - made historically extraordinary by having been lived through World War One. One of the most touching and amusing moments in this memoir comes after the war, when Phyllis and a friend are given a bag of sugar - long scarce - and head off to the woods to eat it, laughing hysterically after they have done so. It is moments like this which punctuate People Who Say Goodbye - keenly remembered moments of childhood which are not earth-shattering, but are a delight to read.

Phyllis Betts' parents are a little unconventional, ignoring protocol and society a lot of the time (Phyllis had to attend a new school in her old gym uniform, for instance, since her mother couldn't see the economic sense in changing it simply to fit in) and she has a wide range of relatives who shuttle on and off the page at various junctures.

But the 'plot', if one can have a plot in a memoir, is not what appeals - it is Betts' voice throughout. If she reminded me of anyone, it was Barbara Comyns. No writer I've encountered understands the child's perspective as well as Comyns did - with all its unpredictability, callousness, and odd humour. Well, Betts' is a close second, remembering her own childhood and childlike voice so perfectly (one assumes) that this never feels as though it were written by an eighty year-old. Not that it is written with childish naivety and ignorance, as Emma Smith's excellent memoir The Great Western Beach was - rather we see the world through a child's surreal vantage, without forfeiting the knowledge and perspective of adulthood. It's difficult to define, but it certainly works wonderfully well. To show you what I mean, especially in terms of the Comyns connection, I'd better just give a few examples... here are three from various points of the books:

'People like to hear about other people going mad. It sort of cheers them up that it is not yet Madday for them.'

* * *

'She was a dedicated Fabian and looked the part, with her serious grey eyes, wide intellectual forehead and her air of a pained saint always looking for the good in people and not finding much.'

* * *

Brattle Place was not, of course, the only place that I had been to for holidays. By the time I was six I had been to a number of different places and, by a coincidence that struck me as marvellous, they all began with a B: Broadstairs, Bournemouth, Brattle Place, Barton, Bagnor and Bexhill. For ages I had known the alphabet with its twenty-six letters, and as the tally of holiday places mounted, all beginning with B, the same as our surname, my sense of wonder increased. There were plenty of other places where people went for holidays, no farther away - Eastbourne, Ramsgate, Hastings, Torquay - yet all the places we went to began with B. The improbability of the thing hinted at the intellectual beauty of mathematics and engrossed me with a sense of the marvellous.

Betts often throws out all sorts of tid-bits which make me want to know more, and then sidles away from them with the insouciance of any raconteur who knows how to keep the audience wanting more, rather than bored by detail. She mentions the Isle of Wight - where, she had heard, 'you could never be more than four miles from the sea, yet in the paper recently there had been a bit about an old lady, well into her eighties, who had lived on the island all her life but had never set eyes on the sea.' Is this true? Why? How could anybody not be filled with curiosity at this! More personally to Betts is the question of her brother. Early in the novel she declares that she will barely write about her brother, since he wouldn't want to be included (how like Barbara Comyns, who did the same with one of her sisters in Sisters By A River) and she is true to her word. Only occasionally is he mentioned, and she quietly says at one point that he 'grew away from her'. How terribly, terribly sad - but left barely spoken, on the page. Betts gives the most extraordinary details and memories all over the place - the minutiae that children notice and remember - but in a strange way she is also reticent.

There is plenty to laugh at in the book, which, although it couldn't be called a comic memoir, certainly makes use of humour along the way. One of the moments I'm sure I'll remember involved Phyllis' desperate hunt to find gifts for her relatives, invariably without success or receiving gratitude:

"... and she gave me a china dog," exclaimed Aunt Ada in bitterness to my mother... "a china dog not fit to put in a servant's bedroom".

This remark, repeated at home by my injured mother, became a family catchphrase. Anything disliked or rejected, be it a pair of scuffed tennis shoes, a note sung flat, or a lump of unchewable gristle, was thereafter described as being 'not fit to put in a servant's bedroom'.

Isn't that lovely? Family catchphrases are always enchanting to share (ours include such strange things as 'it's always the nose', 'HEAVY BOOTS', and the mouthful 'not as nice as you possibly could be if you tried your very hardest) although it is difficult to write much about them without leaving the reader feeling left out - it is one of Betts' merits that the reader feels rather part of the family, or at least an accepted guest.

Lurking behind this unsentimental, energetic childhood memoir is, however, a sadness - the inevitable sadness of nostalgia, perhaps. Towards the end of People Who Say Goodbye, Betts includes a conversation which explains the title. She is talking to Clement, an unconventional boy with whom she has struck up a friendship. He is the first to speak in this excerpt:

"Will you be coming back to see us?"

"I shouldn't think so. In a way I should like to but the way things are I don't expect I shall."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because I've seen that people who come to say goodbye usually don't come back."

"When did you begin to notice this?"

"It came on gradually, from when I was about five right up to now. It's true, you know."

"You were young to notice that that is how things are."

"Fairly young, I suppose, yes."

"Do you remember the people who don't come back?"

"Yes. I remember them all."

"Will you remember me?"

"Of course I shall. If I live to be eighty I shall still remember you here playing the piano - playing 'The Dance of the Blessed Spirits.'."

It is probably a fanciful recollection of eighty-year old Phyllis which puts the age 'eighty' into the mouth of the child Phyllis - but that doesn't affect the sadness of this belief, created in the maelstrom of war with the soldiers who came to say goodbye and never returned.

I don't think I'd have chosen quite such a sombre title for the memoir. These people, who say goodbye, are certainly present in the book - but there is so much more. Who knows what happened to most of the figures in the book. I don't even know what happened to Betts after she became an adult - there is no mention in the memoir, as though childhood were hermetically sealed, revisited now without any acknowledged link to what happened afterwards. And that is what comes most to the fore of People Who Say Goodbye - not the people who say goodbye, but the person to whom it was said. Betts' memoir is not only a very honest and perceptive book about childhood, it is honest and perceptive about a real individual child - a much rarer quality.

I am indebted to Slightly Foxed for sending me a copy, and Lyn for telling me about it in the first place. Click on her name there to go over to the wonderful review she wrote in May. And then go and get a copy of this wonderful little book!

Slightly Foxed Archive

The lovely folk at Slightly Foxed have asked me if I'd like to join in with their new project, 'Taste of Slightly Foxed' - every month they publish a newsletter, including a piece from their archives of Slightly Foxed journals, and they asked if I fancied posting the pieces on here as well. Stuck-in-a-Book readers are prime audience for Slightly Foxed, really - we do tend to prefer the under-the-radar gems from previous decades, don't we? - so I keenly agreed to post the Tastes. And here is the newsletter too, so enjoy that as well! And, do you know what... there will be even MORE in a Slightly Foxed vein tomorrow, when I review one of the books they publish - and it's a good'un.


This month’s taste of Slightly Foxed is A.F. Harrold on the novels of Iris Murdoch, chosen to celebrate the 92nd anniversary of Iris’s birth. Here’s to you, Iris, and happy reading to you all.

Some years ago a couple of friends were running a speed-dating event at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature and, being short of male participants and knowing I was performing at the festival that weekend, they asked if I could help out. And so it was that I found myself meeting twenty women, sequentially, for very short periods of time, wearing nothing (as it were) but a name tag. It was, naturally, almost as bad as it sounds.

Because it was a literature festival, however, our name tags didn’t sport our own names. Instead they carried the title of a favourite book or author or character, and that evening I wore ‘Iris Murdoch’ on my lapel – the consequence of which was that every time I changed tables I was greeted by one of two opening gambits. On the one hand, the words ‘The Sea, The Sea’ might be said (an acknowledgement of her Booker-winning novel of 1978), usually followed by the phrase, ‘I’ve not read it’; or, on the other, I would be encouraged to agree that Jim Broadbent is a really superb actor, especially (and relevantly) in the film Iris. It’s not wholly unusual for an author to be remembered for such things but it seems a bit of a shame, as does a third response, voiced by many of my speed-daters: ‘I’ve always found her rather impenetrable.’

Perhaps Iris Murdoch is often seen as off-putting because she began her career as a philosopher (as a student she arrived at Cambridge just after Wittgenstein had left but fell under his spell nevertheless – the first line of her novel Nuns and Soldiers is simply his name, spoken by a dying man) and she both lectured in and published books on the subject (hers was the first English monograph about Sartre, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist). Her books, even the thinnest of them, inhabit a world alive with philosophical thinking – her characters are people in search of meaning and understanding, on the deepest levels. In short, they worry a lot.

But what sometimes isn’t mentioned is that all her books are rollicking love stories. Her characters fall in and out of love violently, passionately, desperately and despairingly, often with the wrong people, often when they’re already involved elsewhere, often inopportunely. If they wore bodices they would be ripped. And it’s these two poles that make her books entirely their own creatures – stories of intellectuals having affairs with one another and worrying about the nature of The Good. And they’re funny, too. And heartbreaking. They’re like grandiose Shakespearean tragedies and comedies with added vigour and philosophy. Take the plot of The Sea, The Sea. It’s told in the first person by a retired theatre director, Charles Arrowby, who moves to a remote cottage on an unnamed stretch of coast. He’s busy living a life of solitude and simplicity – a break from his London life, an escape from his friends – when he meets a woman in the local small town. She turns out to have been the love of his life, whom he last saw forty years ago. They have both grown old, but in his deluded loins the fires are relit. She is married; he stalks her, abducts her. All sorts of complicated, embarrassing and frankly frightening (and occasionally supernatural) things happen and eventually she is lost to him again.

So much for the plot. We only have the report by Arrowby himself however, and as a storyteller he is astonishingly self-centred, self-important and clearly somewhat deluded. One wonders exactly how far the unreliability of his unreliable narration extends. What would this story of obsessive, destructive, unrequited love of one pensioner for another look like from the outside?

The Black Prince, an earlier first-person novel, actually has four additional postscripts written by characters other than the narrator – each of whom shares their view of the narrator, each of whom puts themselves at the centre, as the real undeclared love interest of the story. Maybe that’s an accurate and natural way of seeing things, to assume such a central importance (it’s certainly very funny to read), but in The Sea, The Sea, Arrowby goes wonderfully above and beyond, entirely unable to imagine any other point of view.

This is where the sumptuous pleasure of Iris Murdoch’s prose comes into its own. It’s the sort of prose that delights in its own fecundity, that believes in richness rather than sparseness, that was learned from Proust rather than Hemingway. She piles detail upon detail, without ever losing, for one second, her grip on the story. Granted, pages may go by as she details a dinner party and the involved irrelevant thoughts of the diners, but it all ties in (sometimes only on a second reading, but these books are jigsaws without any missing pieces).

Her writing is sometimes criticized for its superfluity of adjectives, an over-richness on the lectorial palate. Indeed, when the paperback rights reverted from Penguin to Random House at the turn of the century, and the novels were reissued with introductions, Candia McWilliam mentioned this while discussing The Black Prince: ‘As quite a young child . . . I heard an adult say that she wished “Iris Murdoch would not write her adjectives in threes”. So I watched for this habit . . . and it is true, she favours a triplet. Occasionally there are bravura groups of four or five adjectives . . . “She was looking at me in the cool north indigo duskiness of her room with such a humble pleading diffident rueful tender look on her face”.’ She goes on to suggest that these idiosyncrasies aren’t there to impress, but rather to soothe the reader – as if to suggest her art has the truthfulness and virtue of not being ‘over-mediated’.

Another common feature of Iris’s writing that might annoy is the habit of her characters to eat. Of course, characters in other writers’ books also eat, but not often in such combinations and detail. This reaches, perhaps, its apogee in the The Sea, The Sea, in Charles Arrowby’s meticulous and didactic diary entries:

For lunch, I may say, I ate and greatly enjoyed the following: anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice and olive oil. (Really good olive oil is essential, the kind with taste, I have brought a supply from London.) . . . Then bananas and cream with white sugar. (Bananas should be cut, never mashed, and the cream should be thin.) Then hard water biscuits with New Zealand butter and Wensleydale cheese. Of course I never touch foreign cheeses. Our cheeses are the best in the world. With this feast I drank most of a bottle of Muscadet out of my modest ‘cellar’. I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading.

This passage ends: ‘How fortunate we are to be food consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.’ You get the sense that Iris herself is speaking in this last pair of sentences, and who am I to argue?

Other objections? It is said that her characters live their lives in closed circles outside the real world. No one ever seems to own a television, go to the cinema or read a paper – in fact news events never seem to intrude, there is no topicality; if they have jobs then they’re usually civil servants who never appear to go to the office. There is a lot of truth in these comments (a lot of untruth too, of course). Her characters aren’t always connected to the real world, aren’t always anchored in a recognizable time (although they’re ‘contemporary’, precise years are generally unpindownable), but they’re Shakespearean in that way. The real world, the one outside the closed walls of these circles, or these strange closed-away communities (in The Sea, The Sea it’s an isolated cottage outside an unnamed village, in The Bell it’s actually a nunnery), has nothing to do with the story and so is unnecessary. This is what love does – it drives away all other concerns. Her novels often dwell in that middle section of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where all is magic and bewildering and love.

But when they do touch the earth, there’s one character that recurs time and again, and that is the city of London. Murdoch really is a London novelist. Her first novel, Under the Net, was a philosophico-picaresque romp around post-war London, through bomb sites, pubs and a midnight swim in the Thames. Her penultimate novel, The Green Knight, includes a detailed, breathless, desperate chase scene (following Anax, a runaway dog) in which streets and parks and details whizz past like the A–Z.

And dogs! That dog, Anax, gets a lot of attention and is a major driver of the plot. In Nuns and Soldiers, Barkiss, the pub dog, is missing for the whole novel, only to return on the final page. In The Philosopher’s Pupil the dog is called Zed, and there is a scene in that book in which some piece of information is revealed to an assembled crowd: ‘The silence continued, ringing now with echoes of what William had said, and each person present promised himself some amendment of life. Brian thought, what a skunk I am . . . Gabriel thought, dear, dear William . . .’, and so on for ten more characters, until, ‘What Zed thought is not known, but as his nature was composed almost entirely of love, he may be imagined to have felt an increase of being.’ To anyone who has known or owned a dog, that description must be ideal.

That passage is also one of the funniest – a hugely tangled web of concerns, intrigues and blind alleys all tied up together, with people worrying too much: Murdoch-esque and knowingly so. She’s funny in the same way as Leonard Cohen – they’re both aware of the dark corners of being human, and of their own reputations, and they know the only rational response is to explore the depths and smile while you do it.

In Nuns and Soldiers the character Anne Cavidge, a defrocked nun, has started reading novels: ‘Anne read with continued amazement. What an extraordinary art form it was, it told you about everything! How informative, how exciting, how funny, how terribly sentimental, how full of moral judgements!’ How true, I’d add! Even at their most fantastical, most unlikely and bizarre – when characters are being obtuse and irrational – Murdoch’s novels are desperately true and beautiful.

But I couldn’t say all this in the four minutes I had to share with each of those women in Cheltenham and so I left empty-handed, except for my name-badge which had declared me to be Iris Murdoch, for just one night.

A Grand Day Out

Thanks to the lovely people at Specsavers, and the media company they use (MEC) really does provide some charming folk, I spent yesterday travelling up to London and watching two episodes of The TV Book Club being recorded. I'd seen one recorded in the last series, which was great fun and involved meeting Jo Brand, whom I love - this time we didn't get to chat to the presenters, because other people had priority, but I'll get onto them in a moment.

So, I arrived at Kennington tube station and whipped out my (not-so)smart phone... but Google Maps wasn't working, for some reason... and I had to try to remember the route I'd taken last time. In my family, Mum and Dad seem to have navigation as their sixth sense, and look pityingly upon me and my brother... who very much don't. We're both pretty good at getting lost (one day I'll tell you about East Chinnock's Circular Path of Ineluctability, but not today) - however, today I managed to find my way, all by myself! True, this involved turning left, walking, turning right, walking... and I'm there. But think how many times I chose not to turn left or turn right? Several, that's how many.

I arrived, and immediately spotted Keith, whom I had the pleasure of meeting last time. It was also lovely to meet Martin and Lyndsay. Clicking on their names should take you to their blogs...

But we weren't the only special guests. The lovely ladies of Elm Park Reading Group had won a competition to come and see the episodes being recorded, and it was very nice to have a quick chat with them. Here are five of their group, with lovely smiles...


I'm especially hoping that Irene (second from left) will find her way here, as we turned out to have nearly identical reading tastes - bonding over Elizabeth von Arnim, Katherine Mansfield, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Barbara Pym, Diary of a Nobody... but Irene likes Catcher in the Rye, and I don't(!) Irene - you will love E.M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady, promise. Now I want to go and pay a visit to the Elm Park Reading Group! Are men allowed?

Onto the episodes. The first featured a discussion about The Radleys by Matt Haig - a suburban family with secret vampiric urges. The panel (Jo Brand, Meera Syal, Stephen Tompkinson, Rory McGrath and impressively intellectual celeb guest Andrea Corr from The Corrs) all loved it, as did Nicola (one of the wonderful crew) so I will probably give it a go sometime... but me and blood aren't a great combination.

The second episode being recorded was the same panel, but with Andrea Corr ushered off and National Treasure Celia Imrie taking her place on the sofa - and they chatted about Emma Henderson's Grace Williams Says it Loud, which I have started and sidelined... again, probably not my cuppa, but an interesting discussion nonetheless. Sorry to be quite brief about them, but (a) I haven't read the books yet, and (b) you should watch the episodes yourself!

I love that the presenters - and often, although not always, the guests - are really passionate readers, and excited to talk about books. It's refreshing, for a medium that often thinks the only way people will interact with books is costume drama. We love costume drama - of course we do - but there is definitely plenty of room for book discussion programmes too. I would LOVE to see more of BBC's My Life in Books too, or (even better?) The TV Book Club could pick a year from the past (1930 would be fun) and imagine which eight books they might have chosen from that year - and do a series on them. I'd love it, anyway...

All in all, a great day out. Thanks for letting me come back!

Oh, and I did pop by the wondeful Slightly Foxed bookshop on Gloucester Road first (mostly secondhand; some new books, including their own publications) and bought a couple of books I'm pleased with. More on that soon, probably. And a neat link into tomorrow's post... and the day after's (day's after?)

Adieu!

A Photo Post

A couple of years ago I was talking to a friend about this blog, and she said "I sometimes read the posts - but usually only when there are lots of pictures." That's right up there with my brother telling me he "skips the bookish bits" - both of them would be pleased to see a post devoted mostly to photos. I'm no great photographer, but I thought you might like to see a few bits and pieces from the past fortnight or so. Those of you who know me on Facebook may already have seen most of them...

I went to buy delphiniums, and instead came home with a cat-covered cushion...

On my very indirect way to Hay-on-Wye, I popped back to my old village - I planted this tree with my Grandad (known as Grandad Tractor, because he worked on a farm) when it was a tiny sapling. Look at it now!

I am very impressed with the effort Blackwell's have gone to - no ordinary scaffolding for them.

Surely this can't possibly be true??

The quiz I attend every Sunday always has a cartoon round - this week's challenge was 'the landlord visiting a library' and I won with this sketch! My team, Queen Equizabeth I, were rightfully proud - even if we only came mid-table for the rest of the quiz...

My housemate and I took some pirates - including Tompkins the Inconsiderate - to the woods, to find a very particular tree.

Hope all is well with you this Monday - have a great week!

International Anita Brookner Day

Happy 83rd birthday, Anita Brookner, and Happy International Anita Brookner Day to the rest of you - surely the most publicised literary event of the past decade, courtesy of Thomas (and Simon is co-hosting). Having intended to read Brookner for a number of years, this seemed like the perfect time to give the old girl a whirl. And so I duly took down her 1984 Booker Prize winning Hotel du Lac off my shelf, and have just finished reading it.

And oh dear, it is not in the spirit of the thing, but... this might be something of a lukewarm post. Thomas did warn us several times that Hotel du Lac, although Brookner's most famous novel, is not her best - and I did listen to him - but it felt expedient to read the novel I had on my shelves already. So I shall judge merely Hotel du Lac; I will not try and extrapolate beyond that to Brookner as a writer.

Hotel du Lac is set in a hotel by Lake Geneva, and we see it all through the eyes of romance novelist Edith Hope. She describes herself thus:

this mild-looking, slightly bony woman in a long cardigan, distant, inoffensive, quite nice eyes, rather large hands and feet, meek neck, not wanting to go anywhere, but having given my word that I would stay away for a month until everyone decides that I am myself again.

And the hotel itself

seems to be permanently reserved for women. And for a certain kind of woman. Cast-off or abandoned, paid to stay away, or to do harmless womanly things, like spending money on clothes.

Amongst these women, and the most interesting characters in the novel, are mother and daughter Mrs. Pusey and Jennifer. Edith spends most of the first half of the novel revising the ages she considers them to be, from 40s and 20s to, eventually, 70s and 40s. They are rather desperate, and lonely, and put on false cheer. But, to be completely honest, they have already flown from my mind a little. Their portraits were painted a little too thinly, on too unstable a canvas.

Amongst these women there is only one man of note - Mr. Neville. I couldn't describe the relationship between Edith and Mr. Neville as romantic, still less a love story, but he does offer opportunities for some interesting views from Edith, which are refreshingly neither old-fashioned nor modern, but an honest path between the two.

"My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening." "You are a romantic, Edith," repeated Mr. Neville, with a smile. "It is you who are wrong," she replied. "I have been listening to that particular accusation for most of my life. I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together."

And so the novel continues. Now for the negative.

What makes me a bit cross is that Hotel du Lac made me respond in a way I hate - using responses from which I would normally run a mile. I can't stand it when critics sneer at 'nothing happening' in a book, or about boring heroines. The sort of ridiculous statement Saul Bellow made of Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, that 'I seem to hear the tinkle of teacups' - which ought really to be a compliment. I wish I could have heard the tinkle of teacups in Hotel du Lac! But nothing felt vital or vivid to me. Edith is quite a boring person, but that wouldn't matter if she had not also been a boring character. Austen's Mr. Collins is boring; Mrs. Palfrey is pretty boring, if it comes to that, but neither of these are boring characters, because of the vitality with which their dry lives are evoked - one for humour, and the other for empathy. Edith Hope simply fades, fades, fades into a pretty backdrop.

You know me, I love books without much plot. I love novels which look gently, calmly, slowly at the ways in which people interact. I thought I would love Anita Brookner, but I certainly did not love Hotel du Lac. Which is not to say I hated it - more than anything, I was disappointed. There seem to be so many novelists who 'do' this sort of book rather better - E.H. Young, E.M. Delafield, even Richmal Crompton to a lesser extent. Brookner's writing in Hotel du Lac is never glaringly bad, and is occasionally perceptive. She has a knack for using unusual adjectives or adverbs which unsettle ('"I hate you," she shouted, hopefully') but... overall, I was not blown away by her style, or compelled by her prose. Often my eyes slipped to the end of the page, without taking in what had I had read. It all felt tolerable, I suppose, but...

Yet I will not let my lukewarm response to Hotel du Lac put me off. I shall remember that I was warned it wouldn't be Brookner's best. I will read the other reviews which will doubtless pop up around the blogosphere today. And I will wait a few years, and given Anita another go.