published 2017
As usual, I was the only white guy in the place. I watched as the cordless microphone was passed down along the bar to Ban Gu, a pale-faced Korean with huge bags under his eyes. I looked up at the wall-mounted TV behind the bar. A Korean ballad began to play—words I couldn’t understand. Ban Gu got deep into the tune—he was a good singer. Once or twice, when I got really drunk, I’d try to sing in Korean. No one ever told me to shut up. No one ever grabbed the mic out of my hand. Instead they’d smile and slap me on the back as I gutted their language. I looked over at the front door where a tall floor fan whirred and buzzed, doing its best to cool off the bar...
I glanced over at Ms. Tam, the owner of the bar. She was smiling. She liked it when I sang. The Koreans were middle class and were pleased when a white guy showed them respect—even a white guy like me, in jeans and a black T-shirt. Ms. Tam looked to be in her fifties, still put together well, always wearing a sheath-like dress. I think her black hair was a wig, since it never changed shape. She always had a Marlboro pasted to her lower lip. The rest of LA had won the war against smokers, but you’d never know it in Koreatown.
commentary: I discovered this book via my friend Col at his Criminal Library blog. I loved the cover, and the idea of a book set in the LA Koreatown – a place I knew little about. And the setup is great – this is from the publisher’s blurb:
Wes buys a carwash in LA’s Koreatown and gets a young Korean wife he’s never met as part of the bargain. The catch? Her five previous husbands were murdered before the honeymoon. Now Wes has a ring on his finger and a target on his back…and is caught in the middle of a centuries-old blood feud that won’t end until he’s either dead or the last husband standing.
Intriguing… and it was indeed a highly enjoyable book. As expected, I loved the details and descriptions of Koreatown and the life lived there. The weird blood feud aspect of the plot was great – like a supercharged Godfather.
There was this after someone is killed:
I hadn’t been that surprised to find the Saja Room open after last night’s bloody shooting. If it’s one thing Koreatown understands, it’s business. The flow of dollars must be kept open and constant. There was no time to mourn. Cart off the body, bag the evidence, and scrub away the blood. Do it fast—overnight if possible—so you can open the next day, pouring beer and soju and cranking out the karaoke. And anyway, the guy who got his head blown off wasn’t a regular.
The plot varied between routine violence, beatings, alpha male parading, and some more interesting aspects. The feud that our hero Wes gets caught up in is 300 years old, so he asks what caused it:
“Bon-Hwa, a Nang merchant, gave Hyo Doko a short measure of rice—five hundred grams.”
“Is that a lot?”
Soo Jin did the metric conversion in her head. “A little more than a pound."
“The Dokos and the Nangs are fighting over a pound of rice?”
The answer is: Yes.
Wes is living on the edge, in constant danger – so he asks his crew at the carwash to keep an eye out for him:
“Anybody hanging around?”
“Just the crew, man.”
“Look around. You see a Korean guy watching you?”
“We’re in Koreatown,” said Manuel. “There’s a bunch of Korean dudes.”
The book is well-plotted: and it made me realize something. Usually in a thriller – no matter how thrilling and twisty – you have a pretty good idea of how it is going to end, how good will prevail, who needs to die, and how the hero will end up, and who with. In this case I was kept guessing as to how Wes was going to get out of the feud, the threat and certainty of death. And also how he was going to resolve a strange and difficult situation that had arisen in his lovelife.
Well, the author certainly achieved this, in surprising and entertaining ways. In an interview with Col, he said:
I’m also proud of the ending, which has been singled out by reviewers as being unexpected and contemporary.
Fair comment indeed. I could be snarky and say I wasn’t sure about some of the sex scenes, but that would be my only complaint – this was a really good thriller, short sharp and to the point, with some surprising and charming scenes in it, and a look at another way of life.
Top pictures is, obviously, the book cover.
A picture of karaoke actually in Korea, with this attribution ‘by Uri Tours (uritours.com), CC BY-SA 2.0.’
published 2017
[Clytemnestra is speaking]
I have been acquainted with the smell of death. The sickly, sugary smell that wafts in the wind towards the rooms in this palace. It is easy now for me to feel peaceful and content. I spend my morning looking at the sky and the changing light. The birdsong begins to rise as the world fills with its own pleasures and the, as day wanes, the sound too wanes and fades. I watch as the shadows lengthen. So much has slipped away, but the smell of death lingers. Maybe the smell has entered my body and been welcomed there like an old friend come to visit. The smell of fear and panic. The smell is here like the very air is here; it returns in the same way as light in the morning returns. It is my constant companion; it has put life into my eyes, eyes that grew dull with waiting, but are not dull now, eyes that are alive now with brightness.
commentary: These are the opening lines of the book, and really he had me at the first sentence. This is the story of the Oresteian tragedy, an Ancient Greek myth which has resonated down the ages. Toibin tells his own version: concentrating on certain parts and filling in some of the gaps and uncertainties of the original stories, which link up with the Trojan War. Toibin follows three lines: Clytemnestra, who murders her husband Agamemnon in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia. Elektra is another daughter, Iphigenia’s sister, and she wants revenge for her father, and hates both her mother, and her mother’s new lover and co-conspirator, Aegisthus. Orestes is the young son of the family, at the beginning playing with toy weapons and not fully aware what is going on – his will be a long and difficult journey. (His part is told in the third person, while the two women narrate directly.)
I admire Toibin’s work, he is a great writer, but I haven’t loved his previous books the way I love this one: Brooklyn (on the blog here) I found flat and passive, and in the end I preferred the film. But these strange Ancient Greek women, with their passions and their weird ways and their honour and their shame were to me far more convincing and real and human than Irish Eilis of the 1950s. And at the same time his distancing style suited this story very well.
The book is terrifying and sweeping. The strange story Toibin gives to Orestes is hard to pin down: the obvious questions of Where? What? Why? Who? are rarely answered, and he just expects you to believe that no-one ever questions what happens, nor discusses it at all over a period of many years. Yet it digs itself into your brain. It’s so lacking in detail it is hard to visualize, and yet somehow it stays with the reader.
The women have their very individual characters. Electra tells her mother:
‘I want my father to return. Not until then will I feel safe.’
Clytemnestra says ‘I was about to tell her that her father’s interest in the safety of his daughters was not something that could be so confidently invoked...’
Later Orestes reports this:
Sometimes Electra spoke of the gods and her belief in them, invoking their names and speaking of the power they had. ‘We live in a strange time,’ Electra said. ‘A time when the gods are fading. Some of us still see them but there are times when we don’t. Their power is waning. Soon, it will be a different world. It will be ruled by the light of day. Soon it will be a world barely worth inhabiting. You should feel lucky that you were touched by the old world, that in that house it brushed you with its wings.’
The gods do not feature in the book at all, this is a human story. One of the final sections features a ghost, one of the characters who is dead: it is a haunting and brilliant tour de force, dead person walking.
I was very sorry that Toibin missed out another sister, Chrysothemis, who appears in other versions – I read the Sophocles Elektra in pursuit of this blogpost (in English – Ancient Greek is possible but slow, though you can see translations from Ancient Greek by me here and here.) And then there is the Strauss opera Elektra, with its discomforting, desolating and wild music.
There are many reasons why I would never have been an opera singer, but if it were possible I would have loved to play Elektra, who is demented and in a permanent state of outrage in the Strauss version, and also has the best stage directions ever:
Elektra flings herself about…
She is dancing a mysterious dance round him and suddenly stooping low…
Elektra descends from the threshold. She has flung back her head like a Maenad. She flings her knees and arms about. It is a nameless dance in which she comes forward
I feel I could have given quite the performance.
Here are some more stage directions from the opera:
(A hurried procession rushes and staggers past the luridly lighted windows; it is a wrenching, a dragging of cattle, a muffled scolding, a quickly choked shouting, the hissing of a whip in the air, a struggling of fallen men and beasts, a staggering onwards.
In the broad window appears Klytemnestra. Her sallow, bloated face appears, in the lurid glare of the torches, still paler over her scarlet robe. She is leaning on her trusted Confidante, who is draped in dark violet, and on a begemmed ivory staff. A jaundiced figure, with black hair combed back, like an Egyptian woman, with smooth face, resembling a rearing snake, carries the train of her robe. The Queen is covered over and over with gems and talismans, her arms are full of armlets, her fingers bristle with rings. The lids of her eyes are larger than is natural, and it seems to cost her an unspeakable effort to keep them from falling.)
--- so there are the roles for my later career as an opera singer (‘resembling a snake’!), and I think you can all see why it is one of my favourite operas: it has music that sounds like the end of the world.
But amid all the drama and shouting, there is the sister Chrysothemis. Elektra is trying to make her fight for revenge, kill people, swear a life-long feud. But Chrysothemis wants something else:
Ere I die
I crave for life; and children would I bear
Ere all my body fades, e'en were't a peasant
Chosen to wed me; children will I bear him
Rejoicing; to my bosom will I clasp them
Basically (although her complaints would not be the same as a woman today) she is saying ‘Please can’t we just forget all this and live our life and try to be happy, and get on with Mother’s new lover, and stop causing trouble? I want to have a life and get married and have children.’ But Elektra is implacable. They are like so many children of divorced families, with one sibling trying to keep up the feud - one of the ways in which this strange and ancient and foreign and un-modern tale resonates with modern feelings.
So – Colm Toibin, House of Names, opera, Richard Strauss, Elektra – all wonderful and compelling and deeply relevant to us even now… And indeed the plot is in many ways similar to Hamlet: often on the blog in a variety of ways.
And last month I read Madeleine Miller’s terrific Song of Achilles, and did a post on poems about Odysseus. A good time for Ancient Greece.
Pictures:
Engraving of one of the many deaths, from NYPL
.. and another death also from NYPL.
(more detail of murderers and murderees would be a spoiler).
Elektra and Chrysothemis on the NY stage from NYPL.
published 1926, set some years before that
LOOKING AT WHAT GOES ON UNDER THE CLOTHES
Valancy took off and hung up in the closet her nightdress of coarse, unbleached cotton, with high neck and long, tight sleeves. She put on undergarments of a similar nature, a dress of brown gingham, thick, black stockings and rubber-heeled boots. Of late years she had fallen into the habit of doing her hair with the shade of the window by the looking-glass pulled down. The lines on her face did not show so plainly then. But this morning she jerked the shade to the very top and looked at herself in the leprous mirror with a passionate determination to see herself as the world saw her. The result was rather dreadful. Even a beauty would have found that harsh, unsoftened side-light trying. Valancy saw straight black hair, short and thin, always lustreless despite the fact that she gave it one hundred strokes of the brush, neither more nor less, every night of her life and faithfully rubbed Redfern's Hair Vigor into the roots, more lustreless than ever in its morning roughness…
commentary: There’s a new TV adaptation of Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables around at the moment, called ‘Anne with an E’. It is very much a version of the book: it has been extended, all kinds of things added, and it has produced very mixed reactions. There are many things to like about the episodes that I have watched: the casting and the acting are absolutely terrific: Anne, Matthew and Marilla are unimprovable, and the setting is beautiful. I have my doubts about some of the additions, and think the 21st century language is unnecessary (‘What’s your problem?’ as one the of the characters improbably says…) This blogpost by Doretta Lau (recommended by my friend Marina Endicott) sums up some of the problems, although the writer feels more strongly than I do.
But: Anne always does catch you. Another blogfriend, Samantha Ellis, wrote in the Guardian about the original book, and in the subsequent Twitter discussion Jo Ouest was one of several people who recommended this book.
And what a strange and splendid read it is. Half of it is entirely predictable (and none the worse for that of course – we’re talking comfort read here) and half of it is wholly unexpected.
Valancy is a miserable old maid (her own description) living in a small Canadian town: she is bullied or ignored or dismissed by her family, and there seems to be no-one rooting for her. She takes refuge in a fantasy life in the Blue Castle of the title. She is 29, very plain, and knows no-one will ever marry her. Everyone is mean to her, even her lovely cousin who has everything Valancy would like in life. After all this has been thoroughly established, Valancy takes herself off to the doctor, and hears that she has a near-fatal heart condition, and probably a year at best to live.
So this finally pushes her into action: if she only has a year left, she’s going to do something sensible with it. And this is where the real surprise of the book comes: the reader expects that she might move to the city, take an exciting job, or travel. But
SLIGHT SPOILER
--her way out is to go and live in a horrible shack in the woods, to look after a young woman who is dying, along with the girl’s reprobate drunken father, Roaring Abel. She looks after them very well – but even here she doesn’t (as, again, the modern reader would expect) expend much energy in beautifying the shack or doing it up to be a luxury home. Everything is comfortable and clean and tidy, and she cooks for them, and that’s it.
Her family is horrified and tries to get her back, but she is enjoying herself far too much. She meets one of Abel’s friends, a younger man,
Their eyes met--Valancy was suddenly conscious of a delicious weakness. Was one of her heart attacks coming on?--But this was a new symptom.
So you can guess quite a lot of what is coming next in that direction.
She buys some clothes:
When Abel paid Valancy her first month's wages--which he did promptly, in bills reeking with the odour of tobacco and whiskey--Valancy went into Deerwood and spent every cent of it. She got a pretty green crêpe dress with a girdle of crimson beads, at a bargain sale, a pair of silk stockings, to match, and a little crinkled green hat with a crimson rose in it. She even bought a foolish little beribboned and belaced nightgown…
She got a pale green bathing-suit, too--a garment which would have given her clan their deaths if they had ever seen her in it.
And she also goes to a very low-rent dance in a rough neighbourhood and nearly gets into trouble.
One of my Twitter friends compared it to Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, and while no detail of surroundings, settings or character is at all similar, you can see exactly what she means.
All in all a tremendous read. I particularly liked the character who was
rich as wedding-cake.
This IS a comfort read, but that's not all it is: it has an un-marshmallow, pro-woman, steel thread running through it, and is unexpectedly non-judgemental and open about sex. An excellent book.
There is an interesting literary byway here: best-selling Australian author Colleen McCullough (author of The Thorn Birds) wrote a short book called The Ladies of Missalonghi which would seem to bear a striking resemblance to The Blue Castle. ‘Unconscious influence’ was McCullough’s explanation. I read the McCullough book a long time ago, and the only thing I remembered didn’t seem to fit with this. So I re-read it, and my goodness ‘unconscious’ influence sounds unlikely: there are some differences, but a huge amount of the plot is exactly the same, and it would be completely impossible for McCullough to have written Missalonghi if she hadn’t read Blue Castle – that would be totally unbelievable. So weird – especially as McCullough was such a successful and imaginative writer in her own right.
Plenty more LM Montgomery all over the blog.
The top picture is by Richard Bergh, from Wikimedia Commons.
Treasure Hunt by Molly Keane
published 1952
They were the clothes of 1907 without exaggeration. The skirt of her orchid-coloured coat and skirt was long, but not to the ground. The coat was gently sloping down the shoulders and faintly egg-boilered at the waist. Naturally there was a certain amount of soft lace at her throat, but not a shred at her wrists. She wore little doeskin gloves with a wrist button—her pink palm bulged like a peardrop through the gap. She leaned on a thin duck’s headed umbrella with bright eyes. On her head she wore a particularly soft and becoming hat with a bird in it, a cross between a dove and a seagull, curiously complete throughout graceful wing-spread and soft breast, it was a bird not just feathers in a hat.
commentary: An Irish entry for Bloomsday, though James Joyce was not the man for the big house.
But this entry does link up with a couple of different themes. I recently read a biography of Molly Keane, a great writer of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, and one whose book Good Behaviour is a great blog favourite. I’ve read most of her novels, but then this one popped up – it was originally a play (and a very successful one) by Keane, and then she turned it into a novel, and to be honest it isn’t her finest moment.
I found myself on the side of the serious young people worrying about money – and very much with the character who ‘was at the end of his patience with these spoilt, doting old aristos’ – they had no charm for me. They are shown as dishonest, cheats, and thieves as well as being infantile. The plot (such as it is) starts after the funeral of the head of the family: he has left generous bequests all round, but in fact was close to bankruptcy. The only hope of keeping the family home, and keeping the family in food and whiskey, is to take paying guests. The older generation are horrified, and plot to get rid of the guests by being as obnoxious as possible (not a stretch). There is another plot strand which you can guess from the title of play and novel.
There are some nice moments – discussing funeral wreaths:
The young girl said with a quaver: “Mine was just a bit of white heather, made up into a horseshoe—just for luck.”
“Quite unnecessary, my dear.” The mother’s rebuke was light but sure, “your Uncle Roddy will have the best in every sphere—I’m sure of it.”
And the clothes are described beautifully – presumably some of it for the benefit of the stage designer. Aunt Anna Rose, who is described above, spends most of her time in a sedan chair in the middle of the drawing-room (you can just see it on stage and I like the ‘egg-boilered’ waist as a variation on an egg-timer), and is living in the past…
The book did make me think about the importance of the big old house in novels about Ireland. Molly Keane (under that name and as MJ Farrell) is the Queen of the dilapidated Anglo-Irish. In March we had JG Farrell’s Troubles, a true masterpiece, although that is set in a hotel. Henry Green’s haunting Loving, 1945, takes place wholly within an old Irish house, looking at the servants’ intricate lives.
WG Sebald has a marvellous old Irish house and family in his Rings of Saturn (which might be a novel or might not). Elizabeth Bowen came from the background herself, and dealt with it in The Last September, while Kate O’Brien wrote about the Catholic gentry in books such as The Last of Summer. John Banville’s The Newton Letter takes a sideways look at a house – from the lodge. And – bang up to date – the young people in Tana French’s marvellous and hypnotic The Likeness are living communally in an old family house.
There’s Lissadell House, which features in a beautiful poem by WB Yeats, and was visited on a Clothes in Books holiday recently – blog entries here and here. (‘Nothing says fun holiday day out like a trip to a dead poet’s grave.’)
I’m sure there are many more, and look to my readers to suggest which literary Irish houses I have missed out…
And of course the whole post is almost an excuse to show some photos from the wonderful collection at the National Library of Ireland, a resource that I haunt.
published 1950
The boys filed out, slamming their desk-lids with the sweet abandon of felons released from their bonds… The form was in a light-hearted mood on this summer’s evening, as the echoes of the last bell died among the rambling roofs of Monks Court.
Except for Reginald Aloysius Martin. As he followed the rest of the chaps out of the room, he glanced strangely at Mr Jackersby's desk, as though his eyes were trying to pierce the woodwork and read again the title of the book, The Case of the Screaming Shadow.
For Reginald Martin had seen this book before; and his excitement was ill-concealed. No one had been watching himn when Mr Jackersby first read the six words of the title. Had any seen Martin’s expression they would have seen a catch of the breath and a start of surprise.
“You having tiffin in the study, Martin?” asked Andy Brown, hurrying along the corridor beside him.
“M’mmm?” muttered Martin absently. “Er – no, thanks.”
commentary: My reading this book and writing this post is a case of my missing the point in a large-scale way.
I was visiting the splendid Pretty Sinister Books blog back in January, and saw the picture above. I was instantly entranced by it, and thought ‘well that’s a book I must get hold of and read. Right away.’
But then I actually read the blogpost, and it turned out that the picture was just making a point about the rarity of the book John Norris was actually blogging on. That book – and I am moderately interested, by the way – was Danger Next Door by Q Patrick. (The whole Quentin/Patrick pot-pourri is beyond explanation: I touched on it in this entry, but you really need to look it up on Wikipedia to get the full lowdown on these authors.) You can read John’s blogpost about it here.
When I commented, John said this:
I only used that D[ust] J[acket] photo as an illustration for the post. I don't own that book and had never heard of "Trevor Burgess" until yesterday. Turns out that name is one of the many pseudonyms used by British novelist Elleston Trevor who wrote (among hundreds of titles) The Flight of the Phoenix and the Quiller spy novels as "Adam Hall." You ought to track down a copy of The Mystery of the Missing Book and review it yourself, Moira. It'll be easier for you to find than for me since it's one of Elleston's three juvenile mysteries written as "Trevor Burgess" that were published only in the UK.
So I did what he said, and have now read it.
And, I have just started reading Mike Ripley's Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang: it's a look at popular thrillers in the 1950s-70s, and Elleston Trevor is featuring because he wrote quite a few of them... Though also, Ripley talks in some detail of schoolboys and masters sharing books and being equally interested in the latest thrillers. He's talking about real life and his own youth, but it does chime with the action of The Mystery of the Missing Book
It is a boys’ boarding-school story, and starts with a Fourth Former caught in class reading a thriller under the desk. The book is confiscated, and then goes missing, and it becomes apparent that there are forces of darkness after it. The main schoolboys are a predictable set of heroes, trying to find out what’s going on, breaking bounds and sneaking out after dark in a very dashing way. They ‘borrow’ a car at one point and drive it some distance. Strangely, one of the four heroes is called Dresley Burgess, thus sharing part of his name with the author’s pseudonym.
They talk in a very tiresome manner, and not one that seems convincing - “Well I’m blithered” and “Tell us all, unutterable ass, or suffer the consequences.”
It is reminiscent of the Frank Richards school stories about Greyfriars. Those featured Billy Bunter, and here again there is a fat boy who is the butt of many jokes: Podger Pepys. It is, I suppose, pointless at this distance (and given that the world of this book does not resemble any reality) to worry about the fact that he is fairly ruthlessly bullied both physically and mentally. But his treatment (at one point he is accused of having “fat blood”) does not shine an attractive light on his tormentors, who are undoubtedly meant to be the heroes.
I was more taken with the mysterious Reginald, above, whose role is not so clearcut. He disappears at one point, and when his father is informed he comes to the school and says
“I have had a great deal of trouble in this direction before. If you remember, Reginald was a week late for the Summer Term only last year, because he took himself off to Switzerland during the holidays, on the spur of the moment.”
The mind boggles somewhat – the boys are meant to be 14 or at most 15 - I think we can perhaps guess that the author was missing the freedom of his books about spies and secret agents, who can wander all over Europe at will. Apparently he wrote three books about crimes at Monks Court School: this was the second. (Perhaps Reginald's spectacular truancy was explained in one of the books?)
As a crime story it was entertaining, with some tense moments. But curiosity value only, really. And if John at Pretty Sinister wants to read it himself, I would be delighted to pass my copy on to him.
The photo of the cheering schoolboys is from the State Library of Queensland, and I pinched the book jacket pic from John – though my copy does have the same one.
This is an occasional feature where a few crime fiction fans answer a question of general interest, and one of us collects the answers. this time it is JJ over at his splendid Invisible Event blog, and I will let him explain:
including mine....
Previous Verdicts of Us All:
published 1979
[The young narrator has just arrived at the Open Air School – a sanatorium – where she is to stay for a year]
Sister Sweet went flying across this hall, up the stairs and down a long corridor. One minute she was there, the next she was gone and I was standing in this corridor wondering what to do next. I felt very tired and poorly and my legs were going wobble, wobble, and everything was starting to go dark in front of my eyes…
I felt tireder and tireder and in the end, I must have been walking about an inch an hour but I got to this room where this Sister Sweet had gone and looked round the corner. There were six beds in it. Three down each side. Everything in the room was white. White walls, white beds, white chairs. Match my face a treat all that white, I shouldn’t wonder, because our Mam says I go white as a sheet when I’m tired and I was so tired I could hardly stand.
commentary: Not more sanatoriums/sanatoria? Yes more.
Earlier this year I blogged on Linda Grant’s Dark Circle and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and those posts brought me tip-offs from commenters on other works with that theme. There was Betty MacDonald’s The Plague and I. The film Twice Round the Daffodils – a longlost treat of a film, and ggary (in the comments here) is the only other person I know who has seen it, which somehow doesn’t surprise me.
Then long-time blogfriend Daniel Milford Cottam (who always has brilliant suggestions) came up with this one, a children’s book, and described it so enticingly (again, in the comments) that I had to track down a copy.
I realized I had read another book by this author: the predecessor to this one, Private – Keep Out! It’s about the same young girl, growing up in a Nottinghamshire town in a miner’s family. To be honest, I don’t think I’d realized till reading this one that the events were taking place in the 1940s, and not around the publication dates in the 1970s. (And I have only just realized the coincidence of Linda Grant/ Gwen Grant, which I’m pretty sure is only coincidence.)
As a child the author had to go away from her family because of illness and live in an Open Air School (see her website here), and Knock and Wait is based on that: in this case it is anaemia rather than TB that is the problem, but the experience sounds much the same.
She is carried off from her warm close family living in a terraced house, surrounded by her parents, a busybody community of old ladies, and her rowdy siblings - and she is taken to another world, cold and sterile and white. She doesn’t want to go, knows she is there for a year, and hates the idea. When she gets there – well, the book is fully of funny anecdotes. But there is never any feeling that it was a lovely place, or warm or kind.
After four months (four months) her family is allowed to visit her. They are delayed by train problems, and the description of her staring out the window and waiting and waiting, as everyone else’s parents arrive, had me in floods. When she gets a letter saying her dog has died, she is devastated. She asks for a dog picture which she knows will comfort her, but the Matron refuses: ‘Not a good thing to brood.’ (Fortunately the slightly kinder nurses cheat and get her picture for her.) When she has chilblains, she is tied to her bed, hands and feet, to stop her from scratching.
So this is very much like The Plague and I: understand the recommendation, understand that others found it hilarious (and really, the tiger in this one is quite extraordinary… as is the story of the censored letters) but I was too bothered by the san experience to put it wholly in the hilarious comfort read category – too much in the bittersweet category. One thing you could say is that it is more cheerful than Janet Hitchman’s King of the Barbareens – in that poor child’s life, the sanatorium wasn’t much worse than anywhere else she was sent. At least Gwen Grant had a family.
So then I managed to get hold of Twice Round the Daffodils, and watched it for the first time in probably 30 years. It’s a 1962 British black and white film and it is a gentler, less risqué version of a Carry On film. It is set in a TB ward; the patients are all red-blooded men, and they all fancy the nurses. It is very much of its time, but still has a charm and mellowness of its own.
The film shows its origins in a play written some years earlier, it was more convincing for 1956 than 1962. Some of the humour is very obvious, and some of it would not be acceptable now, but overall I very much enjoyed it. However, I have read so many books on the topic recently that I was full of criticism of the way the patients acted – ‘oh’ I kept thinking ‘they shouldn’t be doing that, it will be bad for their condition’. ‘Oh no, they’d be in big trouble for that in a properly-run san.’ I was nodding appreciatively at the unmentioned handcrafts sometimes glimpsed. (Betty MacDonald hated doing them – making hideous and useless objects - but felt sorry for the men who usually refused to do any such crafts at all, on the grounds that they were un-masculine: she felt it might have helped them.)
I am becoming institutionalized.
The nurse picture is from an anti-TB campaign, and came from the Library of Congress.
