Arduinna

Humbug: A Study in Education by E. M. Delafield (1921). I thought I should take the interesting chance of a Delafield novel I knew nothing about, and chose this one for the intriguing-sounding title. It is what the subtitle says, broadly interpreted—a study of how the upbringing of a young girl in Victwardian England constrains and stifles her character and happiness. It is not as miserable as Consequences or as nasty as The War-Workers, but it's also less effective than either of them. I really liked the family relationships in the early chapters, in which the main character Lily is favoured by their parents over her disabled sister Yvonne and both girls suffer horribly as a result in different ways—it reminded me of The Mill on the Floss as a precise and well-observed study of how awful the internal experience of being a child can be—but I thought the book went astray later on, became less interesting and less focussed, and eventually tried for a triumphant happy ending I felt it hadn't really earned. It strikes me that my favourite books in the 'upbringing of a girl in Victwardian England and how badly it's done' genre—Alas, Poor Lady and The Crowded Street—continue with the main character failing to fulfil the goals of her upbringing by remaining single, and in this one she does make a conventionally-acceptable, unhappy marriage and the book then tries to pull apart the failures it's criticising from within that structure, and perhaps that's part of why it didn't work for me.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles (1959). The edition I read has 'AN AMERICAN CLASSIC' in big letters across the top of the front cover, and what I think is that if Americans so badly want to write CLASSICS then they can jolly well learn to format and punctuate dialogue correctly. Anyway: If you took schooldays-era Raffles and Bunny, only they're the same age, and also they're American, and also it's the Second World War, you would not exactly have something like this book, but you might have something not entirely unlike it. I did not enjoy the book on the whole; a lot of the appeal of boarding-school stories for me is in the cloistered setting, the school as its own closed-off little world, and this book does not have that because the school setting can't be closed-off when the war keeps intruding everywhere, and this is a large part of the point of the book. However (wobbly grammar aside) it is a very good portrayal of a very specific kind of messed-up relationship, and indeed just a little bit gay even though the author apparently didn't mean it that way (?), and also very good at what it's trying to do vis-a-vis the war intruding on everything else in the world. Actually my favourite character was 'Leper' Lepellier, who is not involved in the central homoerotic relationship, but I think he deserves a nice boyfriend and also some more cool snails to make up for everything he has to go through.

Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee (1959). Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham was in my last reading post, and it kept reminding me of this (because ale/cider, main character called Rosie, and for some reason the only thing I knew about this book is that it's set in Gloucestershire and Somerset hence reminded me of that), so I decided to read it. Most of it I merely didn't get on with very well—the style favours rich impressionism over descriptive or narrative substance more than I like, and there's neither the perceptive social observation (Flora Thompson <3) nor the likeable narratorial personality that I think make for a good memoir. Also most of the way through the book I was getting a sense that the author was kind of dodgy about women. (If I say as a synecdoche that he uses the word 'voluptuous' too much to sum up what I don't like about Lee's writing, does that make sense?) Anyway, in the penultimate chapter it turns out that he is not slightly dodgy but horrifyingly awful, and I think that's enough books by straight men for me this year at least. If you want to read a beloved classic memoir, please read Flora Thompson instead.