Review of the Day: Gormenghast

Gormenghast is the second volume in Mervyn Peake’s trilogy about Titus Groan, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast. In Titus Groan, the first volume (reviewed here), Peake created the fantastic, elaborate, ritual-bound world within the labyrinthine castle of Gormenghast. This volume picks up when Titus is a restless schoolboy of seven.

Many characters return in this volume: Steerpike is still the villain – now plotting an elaborate take over as the Master of Ritual. The Countess mother is still the batty, bird-loving recluse she was, although she rises to a period of fierce capability when saving the castle’s citizens from an incredible flood. Titus’s sister Fuchsia is still sad. Flay is still in exile, although protecting the castle in secret. The twin aunts are still crazy and are driven even crazier. And Dr. Prunesquallor and his nitwit sister still tie the social fabric of Gormenghast together.

The major addition is the introduction of the professors, a large crowd of eccentric academicians with funny, Peakesian names like Flannelcat, Shred, Shrivell, Mulefire and Perch-Prism, who dominate Titus’s childhood. Major scenes involving these worthy tutors are highlights of the book, although they do not move the central plot forward. One involves a terrifying game played by the schoolboys while their schoolmaster sleeps at his desk. The other is the fabulous party the Prunesquallors throw to find a husband for Irma.

The book is less about plot – although there is a central story around Steerpike’s attempted coup and Titus’s coming of age – as it is about the richness of Peake’s detailing. Reading Gormenghast is like being lost in an elaborate Medieval tapestry.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review listed here, please leave a comment with a link to your review and I will add it.)

Review of the Day: Second Wind

Second Wind starts off like a typical Dick Francis novel: A random assortment of characters shows up at a Stately Home of England for a swanky weekend lunch and a prized racehorse ends up poisoned. But before you can button up your tweeds and pet the corgi, it switches to a meteorological adventure when two BBC weathermen decide to spend their vacation flying through a Caribbean hurricane.

In the course of bringing these two storylines together, Francis drags the reader on a rambunctious trip from Newmarket to Florida mansions to the Grand Caymans to a mysterious island of dubious ownership. It is not as tight a plot as Francis usually provides, and there is a lot of ink spent on weather science, but the loose ends get tied up for a satisfactory ending.

NOTES

This is one of the books I read for the Typically British challenge. Dick Francis certainly qualifies.

OTHER REVIEWS

Review of Even Money on Book Dilettante 

(If you would like your review of this book or any other Dick Francis book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

Review of the Day: Cold Comfort Farm

I never write in books. Underlining, highlighting, and marginalia are not for me. I like my books to be straight of spine and clean of page. So what am I to do with Cold Comfort Farm that makes me itch to underline? There is a funny, quotable, commit-to-memory-in-case-of-long-imprisonment passage on every page.

Stella Gibbons published Cold Comfort Farm, her first novel, in 1932, as a satire of the moulderingly rural romantic novels of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and others. The set up is pitch perfect: Newly orphaned Flora Poste is taken in by distant relatives to live at their grim, decrepit Sussex farm, where morbid Judith lurks in shawls, Amos seethes with religious fury, oversexed cousin Seth lounges half naked, and crazy Aunt Ada Doom won’t leave her room because she “saw something nasty in the woodshed” 68 years ago.

Instead of wallowing in the gloom like some Brönte heroine, Flora takes the situation in hand. Starting with having the curtains washed, she moves on to fixing everyone’s problems with dispatch. She finds careers for the under-employed, spouses for the lovelorn, care for the ill, and a new lease on life for Aunt Ada. Even the cows are better off for Flora’s attentions.

What makes the book so spectacular is that it is funny. Flora’s spot-on commentary about everything from intellectual women gone “all queer about the shoes and coiffure,” to Japanese art films, to rural fecundity is just dead clever.

I am going to have to buy a second copy of Cold Comfort Farm so that I can have one to sit and look pretty on my shelf and another that I can underline to my heart’s content.

OTHER REVIEWS

Serendipity

(If you would like your review listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

Opening Sentence of the Day: Cold Comfort Farm

"The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living."

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.

That is one of the best opening sentences I've read in forever. It is a whole short story in one sentence. I want to live in this book for a long, long time.

Cold Comfort Farm is one of my all-time favorite movies (I think it is actually a British TV show patched together into a movie). It is the source of several "lines" in my household, including the best, "I saw something nasty in the woodshed," always said in a quavery, sepulchral voice. So far, the book is just like the movie, which is fine by me.


NOTE
Book Beginnings on Fridays is a new "opening sentence" event hosted by Becky at Page Turners. 

Review of the Day: The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds is a perennial favorite. Every couple of decades, its popularity is regenerated with a new adaptation, most famously with Orson Wells’ 1938 radio production that convinced listeners that Martians were invading in real time, and most recently with Steven Spielberg’s 2005 blockbuster. But there is something to be said for revisiting the original – H. G. Wells’ 1898 novel.

The book is a monumental work of science fiction, both for its science and its fiction. The story itself is particularly exciting in the original because of its historical setting. Martians land in the suburbs of London and proceed to massacre the inhabitants with a terrifying heat ray and smothering toxic smoke. But this is the 1890s – the people have to fight back with infantry and cavalry troops. There are no tanks, no planes, no nothing.

The science gives the book depth beyond the adventure story. Wells provides a roadmap to late-Victorian popular issues, covering Darwinism, Marxism, microbiology, planetary science, military advancements, and even that Victorian favorite, botany. Discussion on these topics gives the reader ideas to mull over after the excitement fades.

NOTES

This counts as one of my books for the Typically British Challenge.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

Review of the Day: Titus Groan

Titus Groan is the 77th Earl of Gormenghast, born in the opening pages of this first novel in Mervin Peake’s famous Gormenghast Trilogy. Although considered a “fantasy” classic, the novel should not be cubbyhole by its genre. There are no wizards, warlocks, orcs, or walking trees. The inhabitants of Gormenghast Castle come in the recognizable forms of humans, cats, birds, and other common creatures.

The story is fantastic in that it is free of geographical or historical constraints. It seems to be set in a Britain “of yore,” but is so self-contained that it does not matter. The point is the elaborate world contained within the sprawling walls of Gormenghast Castle.

The plot centers on the canny, 17-year-old Steerpike, who aims to control Gormenghast. In this first volume, we watch Steerpike wriggle his way up the ladder of power from a post as kitchen scullion, to the servant of the awkwardly endearing Dr. Prunesquallor, into an elaborate plot that gives him command over the nitwit twin sisters of the aged 76th Earl, to the exalted position of heir-apparent to the Master of Ritual at the castle. Who knows what heights he will reach in the remaining volumes.

Peake fills every page of Steerpike’s journey with intricate details of the ceremonies, manners, foibles, and relationships that govern the Groan family and their court. Darkly humorous and lusciously written, Titus Groan is a novel to get lost in.

NOTES

This book is listed on at least one of the lists I am working on, but I am too scatterbrained by trial prep to remember which one right now. I will figure it out and add the information later.

This counts as one of my books for the Typically British Challenge.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

Review of the Day: Where Angels Fear to Tread

Where Angels Fear to Tread is a gem with too many facets to appreciate fully at first inspection. E. M. Forster packed so much into his short first novel that it would be a pleasure to read several times.

When Lilia Herriton left for a year in Italy, her in-laws breathed a sigh of relief to have the impetuous, somewhat gauche, widow out of their stodgy hair. But when they discover that Lilia has gone and married the ne’er-do-well son of a provincial Italian dentist, their shocked overreaction leads to a series of misfortunes that eventually crush their prim conventions.

Forster uses the star-crossed lovers, Lilia and Gino, to illustrate the clash between star-crossed cultures and philosophies. In surviving these clashes, Lilia’s brother-in-law, Philip Harriton, and her companion, Caroline Abbott, grow to appreciate a world much bigger than their tedious hometown of Sawston.

Forster is – for the better – a stripped down version of Henry James. The beauty and big ideas are there, but are not swaddled to obscurity with a million extra words. Where Angels Fear to Tread was published in 1905. To readers used to James’s heavy hand (The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl were published in that order in the three years prior to Angels), Forster must have seemed like the breath of life itself.

NOTES

This book is on the Radcliffe Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century list. It counts as one of my books for the Typically British Challenge.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review of this or any other Forster novels listed her, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

Review of the Day: Three Loves

Three Loves is A. J. Cronin's second novel, first published in 1932. It tells the engrossing, ultimate tragic, story of the three loves of Lucy Moore -- her husband, her son, and God.
Into all three relationships, Lucy brings the same monumental pride, bull-headed obstinance, and self-defeating melodrama that lead to her ultimate downfall. Life gives Lucy some hard knocks, but it is hard to feel sorry for her when she antagonizes all those who try to help her.

It is Lucy’s stubborn hostility that makes this book more interesting than the typical family drama. Although she is not likeable, she inspires some sympathy because she means well in her monomaniacal way. Like with a Greek tragedy, it is hard to tear away even when the tragic end is so apparently inevitable.

The book is fairly long -- over 550 pages -- but moves right along with plenty of action, plot, and conflict among the characters. Some of the attitudes and assumptions of the characters are a little dated, but with illegitimate children, adultery, violent death, lesbianism, insanity, social injustice, and Church hypocrisy, there is nothing stodgy about the story.

Cronin was a prolific mid-century author who wrote more than 20 novels, many which were made into movies or television shows. Judging from Three Loves, it is easy to see why he was so popular.

NOTES

This book counts as one of my choices for both the Chunkster Challenge and the Typically British Challenge.

OTHER REVIEWS

(I realize that other reviews of this book are unlikely, but if you have reviewed any Cronin book, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it here.)

Review of the Day: One Fat Englishman

Roger Micheldene is One Fat Englishman. An obese publisher on an extended business trip to America, Micheldene (or Mitch Dean as one gauche American insists on calling him) spends his time eating and drinking prodigiously, attempting to bed every woman he meets, and pompously mocking Americans’ intellectual pretentions and taste in cigars.

There is very little in the way of plot. Lots of things happen, but to not much purpose. The point seems to be to compare and contrast American and British sensibilities, as displayed in a mid-60’s, second-tier academic culture. The pleasure lies in Kingsley Amis’s curmudgeonly wit, in passages such as:

To be sure about nonsense he had to be able to classify it, assign it to a family tree of liberal nonsense, humanist-humanitarian nonsense, academic nonsense, Protestant nonsense, Freudian nonsense and so on. Macher’s nonsense stopped before he could get deep enough into it.

Or his dipsomaniacal observations, such as:

Not caring what one drank unfortunately did not guarantee not caring what one had drunk.

Fans will eat it up. Amis neophytes should start with Lucky Jim.

NOTE

This is one of the books I read for the 2010 Typically British Challenge.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review of this or other Amis books listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

Challenge: Typically British Reading Challenge

FINISHED!

This challenge paired perfectly with my Battle of the Prizes Challenge -- British Version -- as well as my reading preferences. Which is why I finished it first of all my 2010 challenges.

The challenge was to read "typically British" novels by British authors in 2010.  There are different levels of participation.  Since I typically read typically British novels, I signed up at the "Cream Crackered" level to read eight qualifying novels.

This challenge was a lot of fun and I look forward to participating next year if Book Chick City hosts it again. I hope she does!

FINISHED BOOKS AND REVIEWS

One Fat Englishman by Kingsley Amis (reviewed here)

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson (finished, not reviewed)

The New Confessions by William Boyd (reviewed here)

Three Loves by A. J. Cronin (reviewed here)

Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster (reviewed here)

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (reviewed here)

Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis by Kinglsey Amis (reviewed here);

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry (reviewed here)

LIKELY CANDIDATES
(MAYBE NEXT YEAR)

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

Bolt by Dick Francis

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

NOTES

Last updated on June 23, 2010.