A Work in Progress

Reading Along in January

So, mark you calendars...there are loads of opportunities to read along this month (as there are probably every month, but lots of books of interest to me this time around).  I'm not sure I can actually read all these by the end of the month, but I'm going to give it a good try.

First up on January 19, I hope you'll drop by as I am participating in a blog tour.  I don't often do these as I tend to stress out a little when it comes to posting on a book on a particular date.  It's always nice to be able to fudge a little when I finish reading a book and write about it when I feel up to it, but Matthew Gallaway's The Metropolis Case sounded so good, I couldn't pass the opportunity up.  "From the smoky halls of 1860s Pars to the tumbling skyscrapers of twenty-first-century New York, Matthew Gallaway's debut novel gives voice to the sweeping tale of an unlikely quartet, bound together by the strange and spectacular history of Richard Wagner's masterpiece Tristan and Isolde."  I love the story of Tristan and Isolde, though I admit I don't know much about opera.  This might just prove educational as well as entertaining.

Then Cornflower's Book Group will be reading Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop and discussing it on Saturday the 22nd of January.  I've never read any of Penelope Fitzgerald's books, though I seem to keep collecting them.  This sounds like a perfect place to start.  I always check in and see what Cornflower's group is reading, though last year when I was able to read along it was usually well after the fact.  Maybe this year will be different. 

Caroline at Beauty is a Sleeping Cat has planned a year long Literature and War readalong.  The first book to be discussed is Susan Hill's Strange Meeting on January 28.  I'm only familiar with Hill's wonderfully atmospheric The Woman in Black, so I am looking forward to trying something else by her.  Strange Meeting is about a wartime friendship on the Western Front during WWI.

Rounding out things is The Slaves of Golconda's first read of the year, Tove Jansson's The Summer Book.  Sunshine and sandy beaches sounds blissful to me right now, especially as we're due for snow Sunday and Monday (fingers crossed it goes either north or south of us).  We'll be discussing the book on the last day of the month, January 31.  You are, of course, welcome to join us.  Can't you  feel the sand between your toes already?  The Guardian says the book "makes you slow down, forget about everyday hassle and float off into a sunny, blissful reverie."  What better recommendation? 

I would be remiss if I failed to mention again the Virago Reading Week, and the date has been offially set: January 24-30.  If things work things out I'll have most of my other reading behind me and can concentrate on the three books I've chosen to spend the week with.  Of course my choices may change by the end of the month, but at the moment I am leaning heavily towards Thank Heaven Fasting by E.M. Delafield, A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor, and The Solitary Summer by Elizabeth von Arnim (that seems like a nice companion book to the Jansson, don't you think?).

Just in time for the weekend I think I'll be starting a new book or two (and I've not forgotten about choosing a spy novel either).  I have to say a full week back at work after a nice break is a little rough going.  I think I'm in need of a little relaxation and a few good books to read. 

Happy weekend everyone.

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

Angel Deverell is one of the most infuriating characters I have come across in literature in a really long time.  She is intensely disagreeable (see scene where her dog Czar meets a small fox terrier), and I at times relished disliking her as I was reading.  Ultimately though, I found that despite being such a prickly person, it was hard not to feel some amount of sympathy for her.  Misunderstood?  Misguided?  Probably yes on both counts, but very very complex and human.  Such are the abilities of author Elizabeth Taylor to create such a humorless woman that the reader can't help but be curious about.

And Angel really is without humor.  She inhabits the worlds, at least in her mind, that she will come to write about so successfully.  Born at the end of Queen Victoria's reign, Angel is the daughter of shopowners.  Her maiden aunt is a lady's maid and might just be able to get Angel a position in the Great House where she works, but Angel has other ideas.  Named after the daughter of this landed family, Angel fantasizes about Paradise House.  She embroiders stories about her life there that she passes off as real to her school friends.  And when at fifteen she sits down to write out her daydreams, she discovers she has a knack for it.  She leaves off school altogether and pushes aside any plans or hopes her mother and aunt might have had for her.  Plans she disdains as she knows she is destined for greater things.

The thing is, greater things do come her way.  Angel is nothing if not tenacious and when Oxford University Press, the only publisher she knows of, turns her down for publication, she doesn't give up.  A small publisher's interest is piqued when she sends them her manuscript for The Lady Irania.  They expect the author to be an "old lady romanticizing behind lace curtains", but get Angel instead.

"Gilbright & Brace had been divided, as their readers' reports had been.  Willie Brace had worn his guts thin with laughing, he said, The Lady Irania was his favorite party-piece and he mocked his partner's defense of it in his own version of Angel's language."

"Kindly raise your coruscating beard from those iridescent pages of shimmering tosh and permit your mordant thoughts to dwell for one mordant moment on us perishing in the coruscating workhouse, which is where we shall find ourselves, among the so-called denizens of deep-fraught penury.  Ask yourself--nay, go so far as to enquire of yourself--how do we stand by such brilliant balderdash and live, nay not only live, but exist to..."

"You overdo these 'nays'," said Theo Gilbright.  "She does not."

"There's a 'nay' on every page.  M'wife counted them.  She took the even pages, I the odd. We were to pay a shilling to the other for each of our pages where there wasn't one, and not a piece of silver changed hands from first to last."

"So Elspeth read it, too?"

"Read it?  She devoured and gobbled every iridescent word."

"So will other women."

"I should hope more reverently."

Angel's books are truly awful, at best potboilers, sprung fully developed from her vivid, if wildly incorrect imagination.  She does no research basing her stories on what she thinks life might have been like in another time in another place.  And when later in life she does get to visit the places she has written about, she's absurdly disappointed.  Nothing lives up to her expectations, her imagination.  Her books, though are a great success and immensely popular.  

So.  Angel.  She is completely narcissistic, arrogant, self-absorbed, unable to empathize with those around her.  She doesn't get subtle jokes and isn't able to laugh at herself.  She writes but she doesn't read books.  Oh, the thought.  She is a prickly pear, but I knew that surely she must have a soft spot somewhere inside.  I think what it comes down to is she wants to be be loved and understood (though I'm not sure I entirely ever figured her out).  She's haughty and doesn't try to understand anyone else.  However she does love animals (despite that fox terrier scene).  The best moments are those when she lets the veil down ever so slightly and her husband or publisher sees a side of her that they (and the reader) wishes were the true Angel, or at least the Angel that she would allow the world to see.

The critics excoriate her, but her readers adore her.  She wants to live her own life and she does.  She gets everything she desires and becomes rich and reasonably successful in the process.  The novel follows her life's trajectory from humble beginnings to the arc of success, but as the times change and the war comes she isn't able to change as well.  Her books, as outlandish and risqué as they once were, become dated and no longer read by the younger generation.  Angel always carries on.

The story is a bit like Cinderella's.  When the ball is over and midnight chimes the magic vanishes.  Towards the end Angel's life is pitiable, yet she still lives in a pleasing fantasy not seeing the world crumble around her.  I wonder if she ever quite grasps the reality of her life?  And when she does get a glimpse, it is too painful and she is only too happy to have someone else gloss over the messy parts.  Do I care for her at the end finally?  I'm still not entirely sure.  She is a very provoking character.  The last sentence, though, was heart wrenching.

Teaser Tuesday: Angel

I doesn't take more than one book (maybe even one short story) by Elizabeth Taylor (and I know you all already know I mean the author not the actress) to become hooked.  Her prose is in my opinion gorgeous.  Kingsley Amis called her "one of the best English novelists born in this century".  Let me direct you to this article that appeared in The Atlantic if you still need convincing.  My introduction to her was The Sleeping Beauty with Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont as a follow up.  It's been too long since I've picked up any of her other books, so Angel is now gracing my night stand.

I have a feeling Angel is going to be an interesting character.  At fifteen she becomes (from the book blurb) a fêted author.  But she doesn't like reading and she has "not a seed of irony or a grain of humour in her soul."  Here's a little taste of Taylor's writing in Angel.

" 'into the vast vacuity of the empyrean,' " Miss Dawson read.

"And can you tell me what 'empyrean' means?

"It means," Angel said.  Her tongue moistened her lips.  She glanced out of the classroom window at the sky beyond the bare trees.  "It means 'the highest heavens'."

"Yes, the sky," Miss Dawson said suspiciously. She handed the exercise-book to Angel, feeling baffled.  The girl had a great reputation as a liar and when this strange essay had been handed in--"A Storm at Sea"--Miss Dawson had gone through it in a state of alarm, fearful lest she had read it before or ought to have read it before.  She had spent an agitated evening scanning Pater and Ruskin and others.  Though disdaining such ornamental prose, such crescendos and alliterations, before she would say that the piece was vulgarly over-written she hoped to find out who had written it.

When I first read Elizabeth Taylor I immediately wanted to read everything she had written and set out to buy all the books I could find by her.  Perhaps this will be the year I start to really read them in earnest (switching between Elizabeth and Molly Keane).  And I have Nicola Beauman's biography of her to read as well.  It always feels good to be excited about what you're reading and that's how I'm feeling about this book.