A Certain Slant of Light

The Wrong Box by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne (1889). This novel, co-written by RLS and his stepson, is a rather macabre comedy of errors and unfortunately I find that style of heavily misunderstanding-based humour and plotting stressful rather than funny, so I didn't enjoy it very much. (It also had me repeatedly thinking, surely that's as much contrived coincidence as you need to make the plot work?... No, evidently not, here's another one...) But on the level of sentences and dialogue it's very well-constructed and I admired that. As I noted of The Dynamiter (co-written by Fanny), it doesn't show obvious signs of having two different authors, and if the style and subject are rather different from RLS's other books it's not clear how much of that was due to Osbourne's style and how much was RLS varying things as he was wont to do.


They Were Defeated by Rose Macaulay (1932). I can remember the title of this book catching my eye years ago, but I didn't get round to reading it until I recently found a copy in a second-hand bookshop with a cover design immediately making clear that it's set in the 1640s in Cambridge. That sounds interesting, thought I, and the good thing about the Civil War is that you can call your book They Were Defeated without giving away which side you're writing about, because do you stop in 1649 or keep going to 1660? In fact it's more complicated than that: the book is set in 1640-41 and only reaches the actual war briefly in the epilogue, the title is not a straightforward reference to one side or the other and the average main character's viewpoint is that the Puritans in Parliament are worse than the King but the King is hardly worthy of ardent loyalty either. It is a strange book and has several aspects worth discussing, so I'll take it in points:

1) Macaulay really commits to the use of historical language in dialogue. She warns the reader of this in a prefaratory note and apologises for any inaccuracies; I don't know the period well enough to comment on how accurate it really is, but it's certainly believable and doesn't feel forced or unnatural. Occasionally there are letters written by the characters which—between unfamiliar language use and abbreviations and period-typical bad spelling—get genuinely difficult to read, and I say that while having some experience of reading seventeenth-century letters and diaries. I'm impressed.

2) Barbara Pym might have liked this book, because it has a lot of her seventeenth-century poets in it. The book is divided into three parts, each of which has a poetic epigraph whose author appears as a major character, with the most major being Robert Herrick. (Herrick's Wikipedia page notes that he wrote a lot of love poems addressed to women, but that he was a lifelong bachelor and it's generally supposed that these women were fictional; Macaulay conjectures that they were mostly fictional but one of them was real, while also giving a definite impression that Herrick is in love with the recently-deceased Ben Jonson.) Anyway, I'm not a huge poetry fan but it was an interesting aspect of history to see in a book.

3) More relevant to my interests was the discussion of contemporary theological and political controversies: it's very much a book set in the lead-up to the Civil War and the details of King and Parliament, Puritans and Papists and Arminians and Calvinists and what all the different factions are doing and arguing about and I found it all terribly interesting. For an author who's such a stickler for historical accuracy in language I did find the repeated mentions of witch-burning rather odd, and I wondered about the plausibility of one main character's openly-avowed atheism and absolute disbelief in the supernatural, especially its being regarded by the other characters as regrettable and embarrassing in one's friend/father/associate but no worse.

4) About three-quarters of the way through, the book (somewhat suddenly, but not without foreshadowing) plunges into one of the worst het romances I have ever encountered in fiction. Straight up on the shelf that contains Jamaica Inn, The Bostonians and that one Georgette Heyer book I tried to read before running away in horror. I am not known as the world's greatest fan of Lucy Honeychurch/George Emerson, but if I wanted a reminder that 'I want you to have your own thoughts, even when I hold you in my arms' really was a pretty good and important thing for someone's male love interest to say, I clearly only had to read this. Mitigating things slightly, this isn't a romance novel, there's plenty of other interesting stuff in the book and the author is partially (though certainly not fully or with good priorities) aware that it's not a good thing. Aggravating things quite a lot, the plotline is resolved through a ridiculous melodramatic ending.

So what do I make of it on the whole? I don't know. It's a weird one. A deeply flawed book that ultimately doesn't work in saying what it wants to say, but possibly worth reading for the stuff you get along the way.


Ashenden; Or, The British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham (1927). I recently bought an omnibus of some of Maugham's lesser-known novels, and also Of Human Bondage has been on my list of things I really ought to read for a little while, and so naturally I next decided to pick up a book that's neither Of Human Bondage nor in the omnibus. Ashenden is a collection of short stories about a writer who becomes a secret agent during the First World War, closely based on the author's own experiences doing the same thing. It opens with a preface in which Maugham explains and defends his fictionalisation process: real life, and especially the real life of a spy, doesn't have the neat plots, full explanations of what happened and nicely-tied-up loose ends desirable in fiction, so some editing is necessary. There follow a series of stories about Ashenden's time as a spy in Switzerland, Russia and elsewhere, which are remarkably lacking in nicely-tied-up loose ends, neat plots and full explanations of what happened given that introduction. I suppose they're still neater than the real events that inspired them, but the endings definitely incline towards ironic twists and abrupt revelations of inefficacy and sometimes of tragedy that leave a lot of questions unanswered. Thrilling and dramatic spy stories these are not; the general mood is of half-resigned, half-amused cynicism about both the humorous, absurd little details of the spy's life and the horrific larger events in which he takes part (and Ashenden is complicit in some pretty bad actions over the course of the book). It would make an interesting comparison with John le Carré later in the century, probably. I didn't find the prose as enjoyably precise as in Cakes and Ale, there are a lot of comma splices, which I don't particularly remember in that book.