Hand-Grenade Practice in Peking - Frances Wood

I had mixed feelings about this book. It's the story of an English student studying Chinese language & history in Peking in the 1970s, during the final days of Mao's Cultural Revolution. What disconcerted me at first was the tome of humorous incomprehension. I was tempted to pick this up because I'd been reading articles about the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Everything I read emphasized the horror & the tragedy of this period of Chinese history, when the Communist leadership, led by a resurgent Mao Zedong, incited students to form the Red Guard. The Red Guard violently suppressed intellectuals, exalted the role of the peasants & forced so-called class enemies to work in the fields. In the process this new policy ruined the economy & led to millions of deaths from famine as well as the many people imprisoned by the regime. China was almost an unknown land to most people in the West at that time & Frances Wood didn't know about the atrocities until her return from Peking. The book was based on her letters home & emphasize the absurdities of a regime that she compares to Sellers & Yeatman's 1066 and All That rather than Orwell's 1984.

I can't imagine how Wood kept her sense of humour in the circumstances of her life in Peking. She was one of a group of foreign students studying at a Language Institute & then, she was permitted to study history at Peking University. Living conditions were primitive, no heating in the winter, very little hot water (& that was usually monopolised by the aggressive North Korean students). Washing sheets in the winter & trying to keep the sleeves of a thick padded coat free from soy sauce are only two of the challenges Frances faces. Her Chinese tutors & fellow students lived in a state of fear that their words would be misinterpreted & so real friendships were impossible. Some of the foreign students deliberately tried to question the official version, which changed depending on who was in or out of favour with the leadership of the Party. Teaching materials were bland & uninteresting because so much history was being rewritten & so many books stamped Negative Teaching Material & only available from the library with written permission from a tutor.

Then, there were the compulsory games & the periods spent working in the country, trying to plant rice or bind enormous cabbages with inferior rice straw that broke. Every aspect of life was dictated by the Party & foreigners were restricted in their movements, forced to get permits to travel &, like other Chinese, having to take all their food with them for the journey. There are some beautiful moments, seeing the dawn at the Great Wall, for instance, but most journeys, whether by train or bicycle, were frustrating. The British Embassy staff provided respite for the British students, providing transport for them to get into Peking & inviting them to social events & outings. Wood always feels an outsider & the horrified reaction of most Chinese to Westerners gives her insight into racism at a very basic level,

An immensely tall and lanky Swedish student with a great clump of fair hair got tired of walking along city streets and having the entire population call out Waiguo ren (Foreigner) as if he didn't know. ... The same thing happened to the rest of us, all the time, although we weren't quite so visible from a distance. Wherever we went, whatever we did, there was always the insistent whisper, Waiguo ren. If you just slipped out of the Institute gates to post a letter, people staggered back, arms flailing, or flattened themselves against walls and stared. I remember one little old lady in her thick black cotton padded suit, hobbling along on bound feet, who had to clutch at a tree when I passed as she muttered Waiguo ren to herself.

After a year in Peking, Frances returns home after a long journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway & through Eastern Europe. She regrets her failure to really become a part of China, unrealistic though such an aim might have been. On her return home, she was paralysed by the choice of cereals at breakfast (even though she'd dreamed of such choice in Peking) & felt paranoid when she was ignored by her fellow travellers on the bus. Frances Wood & her fellow students were witnesses to the essential absurdity of all totalitarian regimes. She was fortunate in being an outsider, able to observe & be amused by the ridiculousness without becoming a victim of the arbitrary whims of the leadership. I enjoyed Hand-Grenade Practice in Peking with reservations. Having just read Christabel Bielenberg's memoir, The Past is Myself, I had similar questions about writing & reading memoirs. Although written many years after the event, both authors take us back to the people they were at the time with the knowledge they had then. I can only respect their honesty & their ability to strip away the knowledge they gained after the fact & take their stories at face value, for the fascinating slices of life they are.

Sunday Poetry - William Shakespeare

I'm off to the movies this afternoon to see the Almeida Theatre production of Richard III with Ralph Fiennes & Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Margaret. It's had some interesting reviews here & here.
As a member of the Richard III Society I disagree with a lot of Shakespeare's ideas, but I do love this play & this opening speech by Gloucester, soon to be King, laying out his evil plans right from the start. Such a famous speech with some wonderful images - the dogs barking as he halts by them & "descant on mine own deformity" as he observes his shadow & the first four lines ending on that sombre "buried" & the pun on son/sun.
I'm looking forward to seeing what Ralph Fiennes makes of it & I'm sure I'll have to reread Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time afterwards as well as several issues of The Ricardian.

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says that 'G'
Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here
Clarence comes.

Literary Ramblings

A few more bits & pieces that I found interesting as I wasted time on the internet when I probably should have been doing something else. Taking photos of the girls probably isn't the most effective use of my time either but I was so stunned to see Lucky (on the right) lounging in the sun on Phoebe's purple bed the other day that I couldn't resist. That wary look is just her default expression although she's never happy to see me approaching with a camera, phone or iPad. I think she was just too comfortable to move. The photo of Phoebe was taken on a lovely late winter afternoon the previous week.

The covers for the much-anticipated reprints by Scott of Furrowed Middlebrow (in conjunction with Dean Street Press) have been unveiled. I've already preordered the Winifred Pecks & A Chelsea Concerto by Frances Faviell. Can't wait to get my hands on these.

One of my favourite podcasts is Chat 10 Looks 3 with Leigh Sales & Annabel Crabb. In the latest episode they recommended Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast. Gladwell is an author & "global thinker", probably what used to be called a public intellectual. In this 10 part series, he looks back at moments in history that have been overlooked & reconsiders their importance. The first episode is about Elizabeth Thompson, better known as Lady Butler, a Victorian artist best known for her monumental pictures of military subjects. Everything about her career was unusual & typical of her sex & time. She was a woman artist in an age when women couldn't attend art school or attend life classes (unless they were the model); she became famous when her picture, The Roll-Call, was exhibited at the Royal Academy; she was not elected to the all-male Academy & her career ended when she married. Gladwell is very interesting on all these points & he interviews former Prime Minister Julia Gillard for another angle on the difficulties of being the first in her field. I'm looking forward to listening to the other nine episodes.

An extract from John le Carré's memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, has been published in The Guardian. I'm looking forward to this after reading Adam Sisman's biography of le Carré earlier this year.

More books have entered this house lately than are really necessary but one that is entirely necessary & that I'm very excited about is Caught in the Revolution by Helen Rappaport. The story of Petrograd in 1917 told by the outsiders, the foreigners who were living in the city at the time. I'm a fan of Helen's, having loved Four Sisters & Magnificent Obsession. This is definitely next off the tbr pile, actually, it's not even going to make it on to the pile, it's on my reading table already.

The Moon and Sixpence - W Somerset Maugham

This is a story about artistic genius & the responsibilities that go with it. Part of the story is supposed to be based on the life of Gaughin but I was curious about the title which is never explained in the book. Wikipedia tells me that, in a letter, Maugham explained it in this way, "If you look on the ground in search of a sixpence, you don't look up, and so miss the moon." There's also a quote from Maugham's novel, Of Human Bondage, that is very similar. I was also interested to learn from Wikipedia that a movie was made of the book in 1942 with George Sanders as Strickland & Herbert Marshall as the narrator. Two of my favourite actors! It's on YouTube here with French subtitles.

The story is told by an unnamed narrator (I did wonder if it was Willie Ashenden, the narrator of Cakes and Ale as well as several short stories). He tells the story of Charles Strickland. At the age of 40, Strickland, a stockbroker with a wife & two children, suddenly leaves his family & goes to Paris to become an artist. He does this in the most callous way, leaving no explanation for his wife, Amy, or his business partner. They are left penniless & he never communicates with his family again. The narrator is sent to Paris to track Strickland down as the family assume he's run off with a woman. He's found alone, in a garret in a very poor area, with virtually no money. He refuses to explain himself & refuses to go home.

A few years later, our narrator is in Paris when he meets Strickland again. He's still painting, still unsuccessful & almost half-starved. He has never sold a picture. The narrator's friend, Dirk Stroeve, also knows Strickland. Stroeve is a jovial man, a painter of very bad, chocolate-boxy pictures that, nevertheless, sell very well. He is relentlessly friendly to Strickland who is morose, rude & dismissive of Stroeve's work. Stroeve's wife, Blanche, loathes Strickland & is embarrassed to see her husband's kindness dismissed. However, against her better judgement, Stroeve brings Strickland to their home when he is ill with a fever. This precipitates tragedy for the Stroeves although Strickland is unconcerned of the consequences of his actions. All he cares about is his work.

Strickland eventually goes to Tahiti where he continues to paint. He takes a native woman, Ata, as his wife & retreats to an inaccessible valley. The narrator travels to Tahiti some years later, after Strickland's death & when he is acclaimed as a genius, his work now selling for thousands of pounds. He wants to find out more about Strickland's last years & he hears the terrible story of his death.

Strickland is a genius but he's an intensely unpleasant man. He leaves a trail of destruction behind him in the lives of those who love him & seems to feel no remorse or even concern. He has no compassion for anyone he meets. When he's dying in his garret, he's not grateful to Stroeve for rescuing him. It's as though he would be just as happy to die alone. He doesn't seem to care that no one admires his pictures, he is compelled to keep working even though no one but himself can see any point. It's not even clear whether he is ever satisfied himself. Is he always striving to achieve something out of his reach? I'm sure he would have been scornful of the experts who acclaimed his work after his death. There are bigger questions here about genius. Strickland was never recognized in his lifetime. Would he have considered that all his sufferings, physical & mental, were worth it? Would he have been a genius if he'd been a nicer, more compassionate man or was his single-minded pursuit of excellence mean that he should be absolved from the ordinary human politenesses that keep society functioning?  Such interesting questions & I have no answers! I don't think Maugham had any answers either, I think he was just intrigued by the contradictions of life & fame. The narrator is certainly fascinated by Strickland even as he's shocked by his cruelty & dismissive of his work. He tries in vain to warn Stroeve & to soften the blow for abandoned Amy but he obviously feels that there must be something more than mere stubbornness to account for Strickland's obsession with his art.

Maugham is interested in the idea of fame & genius (it's also one of the themes of Cakes and Ale) but always at one remove. I need to read more of his books to see if he uses the same device of a narrator observing the action rather than the viewpoint of the central protagonist. I also need to know more about Maugham himself & I'm tempted by Selina Hastings' biography, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham - has anyone read it? Although the narrator always remains slightly shadowy, the other characters are full of life. Dirk Stroeve is pathetic but also ultimately quite dignified. Amy Strickland's desire to be part of artistic circles in London (which is how she meets the narrator) & seen as Bohemian can't survive the reality of her husband's desertion. She's resigned to being left for another woman & magnanimously declares that she'll take him back when his fling is over but she can't comprehend being left for art. She ends up learning typing & running her own agency while being secretly ashamed that she's had to earn her own living instead of being proud that she was able to do so. There are also some wonderful minor characters whom the narrator meets on his journey, like Dr Coutras & Tiaré, a woman who runs a lodging house in Tahiti where Strickland meets Ata.

This is such a compelling story. I listened to it on audio, narrated by Robert Hardy. I wish Robert Hardy had narrated more audio books, he does such a wonderful job with this one. I remember listening to his recording of Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree many years ago but there's very little else. However, I couldn't stop listening to this book which is a testament to Hardy's narration as much as Maugham's storytelling.

Sunday Poetry - George Meredith

Last weekend I listened to a Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concert on Classic FM that included one of my favourite pieces, The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams. This beautiful music was written in 1914 (the version we know for solo violin & orchestra was written in 1920) & based on this 1881 poem by George Meredith (photo from here). Maybe it's become a little hackneyed with overuse but I never tire of listening to it. Here's a lovely performance at the BBC Proms in 2003 by Janine Jansen.

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolv’d and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls;
A press of hurried notes that run
So fleet they scarce are more than one,
Yet changingly the trills repeat
And linger ringing while they fleet,
Sweet to the quick o’ the ear, and dear
To her beyond the handmaid ear,
Who sits beside our inner springs,
Too often dry for this he brings,
Which seems the very jet of earth
At sight of sun, her music’s mirth,
As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardor, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day,
And drink in everything discern’d
An ecstasy to music turn’d,
Impell’d by what his happy bill
Disperses; drinking, showering still,
Unthinking save that he may give
His voice the outlet, there to live
Renew’d in endless notes of glee,
So thirsty of his voice is he,
For all to hear and all to know
That he is joy, awake, aglow,
The tumult of the heart to hear
Through pureness filter’d crystal-clear,
And know the pleasure sprinkled bright
By simple singing of delight,
Shrill, irreflective, unrestrain’d,
Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustain’d
Without a break, without a fall,
Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical,
Perennial, quavering up the chord
Like myriad dews of sunny sward
That trembling into fulness shine,
And sparkle dropping argentine;
Such wooing as the ear receives
From zephyr caught in choric leaves
Of aspens when their chattering net
Is flush’d to white with shivers wet;
And such the water-spirit’s chime
On mountain heights in morning’s prime,
Too freshly sweet to seem excess,
Too animate to need a stress;
But wider over many heads
The starry voice ascending spreads,
Awakening, as it waxes thin,
The best in us to him akin;
And every face to watch him rais’d,
Puts on the light of children prais’d,
So rich our human pleasure ripes
When sweetness on sincereness pipes,
Though nought be promis’d from the seas,
But only a soft-ruffling breeze
Sweep glittering on a still content,
Serenity in ravishment.

For singing till his heaven fills,
’T is love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes:
The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine
He is, the hills, the human line,
The meadows green, the fallows brown,
The dreams of labor in the town;
He sings the sap, the quicken’d veins;
The wedding song of sun and rains
He is, the dance of children, thanks
Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks,
And eye of violets while they breathe;
All these the circling song will wreathe,
And you shall hear the herb and tree,
The better heart of men shall see,
Shall feel celestially, as long
As you crave nothing save the song.
Was never voice of ours could say
Our inmost in the sweetest way,
Like yonder voice aloft, and link
All hearers in the song they drink:
Our wisdom speaks from failing blood,
Our passion is too full in flood,
We want the key of his wild note
Of truthful in a tuneful throat,
The song seraphically free
Of taint of personality,
So pure that it salutes the suns
The voice of one for millions,
In whom the millions rejoice
For giving their one spirit voice.

Yet men have we, whom we revere,
Now names, and men still housing here,
Whose lives, by many a battle-dint
Defaced, and grinding wheels on flint,
Yield substance, though they sing not, sweet
For song our highest heaven to greet:
Whom heavenly singing gives us new,
Enspheres them brilliant in our blue,
From firmest base to farthest leap,
Because their love of Earth is deep,
And they are warriors in accord
With life to serve and pass reward,
So touching purest and so heard
In the brain’s reflex of yon bird;
Wherefore their soul in me, or mine,
Through self-forgetfulness divine,
In them, that song aloft maintains,
To fill the sky and thrill the plains
With showerings drawn from human stores,
As he to silence nearer soars,
Extends the world at wings and dome,
More spacious making more our home,
Till lost on his aërial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

Return to the West - Mabel Esther Allan

Derrin Lennox is 18 years old & on holiday in the Western Isles with her parents. Her father just wants good fishing weather & her mother is already complaining about the lack of amusements. Derrin is tired of being treated like a child & unenthusiastic about the imminent arrival of Ian MacKinlay & his family on their yacht. Mrs Lennox approves of Ian & hopes that he & Derrin will marry. Derrin likes Ian but is not in love with him. She is instantly attracted to the village of Ardglen & the surrounding countryside & just as attracted to Keith Rossiter, an artist who spends as much time as he can there. Keith's London friends, Adela & Grant Marriott, are visiting & soon the four of them are playing golf, swimming in the Sound & spending a lot of time together. Ian's arrival is not welcomed by Derrin who is already falling in love with Keith.

Derrin's absorption in her new friends upsets Ian who becomes sulky & unreasonable. Derrin's parents also disapprove & her determination to marry Keith leads to her father refusing to have any contact with her if the marriage goes ahead. Derrin & Keith marry, spending a blissful honeymoon period in a wintry Ardglen. Eventually they return to London & a daughter, Andrina, is born. Derrin loves the time they spend in Scotland but finds herself growing increasingly bored & unfulfilled. Keith is completely absorbed in his work & the house seems to run itself. Drina has a competent nurse & Derrin is drifting. Then, she meets Ian MacKinlay again & an instant attraction sparks between them. Derrin finds herself torn between her secure, happy life with Keith & the excitement of a future with Ian. Keith's determination to take Derrin back to Ardglen seems to be the only way to clarify her feelings & resolve the crisis.

Return to the West was written in the 1930s but never published in the author's lifetime. This Greyladies edition was published in 2013. In the Author's Note, Allan describes coming across the manuscript of this unpublished novel years later. "... I think this was an attempt at a "romantic" novel. Possibly it is tripe, except for the setting." I wouldn't agree that it's tripe but I do agree that the setting is the most wonderful thing about it. Allan was a prolific writer, mostly of school stories. Greyladies have reprinted several of her novels for adults & I've enjoyed all I've read so far.

Allen's real strength in the books I've read is the sense of place, especially when that place is Scotland. Ardglen in this book was based on Glenelg which she used as a setting many times. Glenelg is near Oban on the west coast & Skye is featured in this book as well as the wild countryside of the hills & lochs. It's obvious that Allan loves Scotland, the people as much as the place. The MacDonells at the Manse, Janie MacNeil who cooks for Keith in his cottage, the locals Derrin meets at the harbour & at the dance she sneaks out to, are all fully formed characters & I enjoyed all the Ardglen scenes. The romance plot was spoiled a little for me because I couldn't see Ian as a romantic rival to Keith at all. Of course, I'm not a spoilt 18 year old but I found Ian really unpleasant, from his sulks to his quite menacing physicality when he tries to force Derrin to love him just because he's in love with her. I couldn't see that a few years in Cuba could have made him a more attractive prospect. Keith, however, was definitely my idea of a romantic hero. He's gentle, modest, kind & very realistic about the potential problems in a marriage between a man in his 30s & a girl of 18, even when Derrin is too starry-eyed to see anything but romance. His affinity with the landscape & his kinship with the locals is also very attractive. Return to the West is an absorbing story & if the romantic conflict seemed a little too manufactured for me, the Scottish scenes more than made up for it.

Listening to novellas

Jane Fairchild & Paul Sherringham are lying in bed after making love. Paul is the son of a well to do family & the lovers are taking advantage of an empty house. His parents have gone to Henley to have lunch with his future in-laws, the Hobdays & their neighbours, the Nivens. It's March 1924. Mothering Sunday, the day when servants are given a holiday to visit their mothers. The Sherringham's house is empty & Paul has taken the opportunity to arrange this meeting with Jane. Jane has the day off because she's the Niven's housemaid. Jane & Paul have been secret lovers for several years & in two weeks, he will be marrying Emma Hobday. This is the last time they will see each other.

That's all I want to say about the plot of this stunning book. The events of Jane's whole life are woven through the story of this one day. We learn that Jane is an orphan & left the orphanage with enough education to be able to read (more than just to recognise the word Brasso on a tin) & write, which was unusual in a servant at that time. She's been in service since she was about 15 & is now 22. Her employer allows her to borrow books from his library, most of which seem never to have been read. She will go on to leave service, work in a bookshop in Oxford, live in London & become a writer. All this is conveyed in the third person although we are seeing everything from Jane's point of view. The narrative moves from present to past to future effortlessly. Devastating facts are dropped into a casual sentence, so casually that I had to stop listening & wonder if I'd really heard that.

Graham Swift creates a whole world in just 130pp, 3 1/4 hours of listening. The Great War permeates everything about this story. The two houses, in their country estates, have each lost two sons in the War. The young men stare out at Jane from photographs; their rooms are left untouched. The only well-read books in Mr Niven's library are on a small revolving bookcase next to his chair; even that detail evokes his grief, that he keeps his sons' favourite book near him. Boys adventure stories - Henty, Rider Haggard, Stevenson - that Jane reads avidly. There are a few books, dated 1915 that still look new & unread, among them a book by Joseph Conrad that shows Jane what a writer can do. So much in this world is unsaid. Each house has only two indoor servants, a cook & a housemaid. The bicycles that Jane & the cook ride on their afternoons out must have belonged to the dead boys but this is never mentioned. They're called Bicycle One & Bicycle Two.

The sense of grief is there but also of looking to the future as the Sherringhams look forward to Paul's marriage & his plans to study law. What the characters know or fear is hinted but never spelt out. The transgressive nature of Jane & Paul's relationship across social classes is evident but there's also a sense of time moving on & those conventions changing as everything changed after the war. Paul leaves his discarded clothes on the floor & the bed unmade while Jane thinks about the housemaid's work. Paul is handsome, confident, entitled. We don't know what he's thinking or feeling about this last meeting with Jane although by the end of the book, we can speculate. After he rushes away to meet Emma for lunch, Jane slowly walks naked through the empty house, eating the pie left out by the cook for a snack, in possession for a short time, before dressing & riding her bike the long way, back to her everyday life.

Mothering Sunday is such a beautiful book. It has an elegiac quality that reminded me of J L Carr's A Month in the Country, one of my favourite books. The characters & scenes in this novel will stay with me for a long time.

Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means is also about the aftermath of war but has a very different tone. I heard a discussion of the book on BBC4's A Good Read. I'd read the book years ago but discovered the audio in our catalogue was read by Juliet Stevenson so couldn't resist revisiting it.

In London in 1945, a group of young women are living in the May of Teck Club (named after Queen Mary who was born Princess May of Teck), a women's hostel. The war in Europe has just finished, the war in the Pacific is coming to an end but there's still rationing, there are bomb sites everywhere - there may even be an unexploded bomb in the garden of the Club if one of the older residents is to be believed. Food & clothes are vital topics of conversation,. A group of girls living on the third floor share a Schiaperelli dress which has consequently been seen all over London. The dress belongs to Selina, cool & beautiful, with several men keen to escort her around. Joanna, the daughter of a country clergyman, unlucky in her love for her father's curate, gives elocution lessons. Jane Wright works for an unsuccessful & unscrupulous publisher & spends her spare time writing begging letters to famous writers under the instructions of Rudi. Even if the writers don't send money, an autographed letter from Hemingway is worth something. She is overweight so can't fit into the Schiaperelli dress but feels she should have extra rations as she's doing important "brain work" that requires extra calories.

While the girls wait for lovers or brothers to come back from the war, they continue in their jobs, enjoy what social life they can find, scheme to get up on the roof of the Club through the lavatory window to sunbathe, complain about the wallpaper in the drawing room. The three older members of the Club, spinsters who have been exempted from the rule that members should be under 30, provide a history of the Club & take pride in continuing quarrels about religion & proper Club protocol for as long as possible. One young man, Nicholas Farringdon, becomes involved with Selina. He's a poet who has written an indigestible manuscript full of anarchist sentiments that Jane's boss wants to publish if he'll change it. The feeling of being in limbo at the end of the war ends with a tragic event that scatters the residents of the Club & has an impact into the future for several of the residents.

I loved the satire of the publisher, George Johnson, always with an eye to the main chance, exploiting Jane's willingness to work & her adoration of authors. The war has had an impact on all their lives & now it's as if they're just waiting for the war to finally end for their real lives to begin. Muriel Spark looks with a very beady eye at the girls of the title. The Girls of Slender Means was written in 1963, so not that long after the end of the war. Muriel Spark's sharpness of tone & observation has none of the elegiac quality of Graham Swift's writing in Mothering Sunday. I wonder if it's just the passage of time that influences the way writers think of a period. Of course, Swift never knew England in the 1920s as Spark must have known it in the 1940s & of course, they're very different kinds of writers.

Juliet Stevenson's narration is excellent as always, she's one of my favourite readers. Maybe it was because she also recorded the audio book of Barbara Pym's Excellent Women, but I was reminded of Pym as I listened. After listening to & reading some very long books lately, these two novellas were just what I was in the mood to listen to.

I've never considered listening to audiobooks as somehow cheating or as not real reading. I see them as a way to read even more while I'm cooking, ironing, driving or walking. Apparently some people do but New York Magazine is on my side.