MarysLibrary

Penny Plain

Jean Jardine is only 23 but for five years she has been a mother to three orphaned boys -- her brothers and an adopted half-brother by marriage. They haven't much money but they have their father's library and a great love of books and music and they have been happy with the help of their housekeeper, Mrs M'Cosh, in a little cottage, The Rigs, in a small Scottish lowland town, the fictional Priorsford.

Then one day a wealthy old man, Peter Reid, who has been told he hasn't long to live because of a heart condition, arrives in town. He is not well dressed and he is very reserved but he comes to see the Rigs, which is where he grew up and where he plans to live until he dies.

When he visits the cottage intending to tell the tenants they must move Jean is very welcoming. Thinking he is poor she asks him to stay with them and when he asks her to write the words to a song his mother used to sing to him as a boy she gives him a rare and valuable old book with that and other songs he knows from his childhood. He has a great deal of money but no family and no freinds, so he has impulsively vowed to leave his money to the first person who is kind to him with no hope of material gain. Even the most unimaginative reader can see where that plot line is going, and it's delicious to keep it in mind as we read the book, as a love story develops, we meet modest and snobbish neighbors, and we see Jean struggling to provide the money for her oldest brother at Oxford.

One day another visitor arrives in town, Pamela Reston, who is wealthy but very bored with her London life. She has come to this little town, which she heard about years ago from a friend, in hopes of recharging her batteries so to speak. She rents a room in the cottage next to The Rigs and the women soon become friends, Pamela spending part of every day with the Jardines. Pamela is looking forward eagerly to a visit from her brother, Lord Bidborough, who is a world traveler who planned before the war (it is now 1920) to climb Mt Everest, then thought to be the tallest mountain in the world and as yet unseen by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

The delightful Scottish characters from all levels of society, the interaction between the English and the Scots, the fraught relationship between Pamela (an Episcopalian!) and her rock-ribbed Presbyterian landlady Bella Bathgate, the lively doings of Jean's brothers, all make very satisfying reading.

O Douglas is a pseudonym for Anna Buchan, sister of John Buchan, who wrote The 39 Steps. Penny Plain is her third novel, and like most of her other 14 novels is set in Scotland. I heard about O Douglas from Barbara at Life Must Be Filled Up and Nan at A Hill Farm.

2012  No 120

The Railway Detective

The year is 1851 and the world's first train robbery has just occurred on the London to Birmingham line. How did the robbers know that this train was carrying gold coin? How did they get into the state-of-the-mid-19th-century-art Chubb safe? Why did they force the fireman to run the engine off the track after the robbery?

Difficult questions face Inspector Robert Colbeck, who is assigned the case with his sergeant, Victor Leeming. Scotland Yard, which is actually New Scotland Yard, which of course is really the London Metropolitan Police Service, is in its early days under only the second commissioner, Richard Mayne, who has a bit part in the book. Colbeck works for Superintendent Edward Talis, a retired major who runs his office like a military unit, and he is "the yard's" most successful detective despite Talis rather than because of his help.

This mystery is unusual in that we learn about half way through the book who is the mastermind behind the robbery and it isn't difficult to figure out what he plans to do in the future. Nor does the reader have to struggle to figure out why he undertakes this complicated crime - or why he has three people murdered in its aftermath.

Colbeck and Leeming interview the fireman and the guards and as soon as he recovers sufficiently from being beaten about the head with a pistol butt, Caleb Andrews, the driver (engineer in the US.) When an attempt to blow up a tunnel (built by one of the Stevenson family of engineers) goes bad Colbeck is able to predict what the gang will do next and to forestall them.

The book is full of information about trains and tunnels and engines, all of which I enjoyed learning about. And the dashing Colbeck, who is a barrister who decided to become a police officer instead of a lawyer, is an interesting main character. This is the first of a series and I look forward to more of the Railwlay Detective.

2012  No 118

Nothing Like Us Ever Was

I hadn't read this poems for many years before I encountered it this morning at the blog of the Gentleman Farmer. It's in the same key as Ozymandius.

 

Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind

by Carl Sandburg

The past is a bucket of ashes.

1
The woman named Tomorrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it
and fastens at last the last braid and coil
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.


2
The doors were cedar
and the panels strips of gold
and the girls were golden girls
and the panels read and the girls chanted:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.

The doors are twisted on broken hinges.
Sheets of rain swish through on the wind
where the golden girls ran and the panels read:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.


3
It has happened before.
Strong men put up a city and got
a nation together,
And paid singers to sing and women
to warble: We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.

And while the singers sang
and the strong men listened
and paid the singers well
and felt good about it all,
there were rats and lizards who listened
… and the only listeners left now
… are … the rats … and the lizards.

And there are black crows
crying, "Caw, caw,"
bringing mud and sticks
building a nest
over the words carved
on the doors where the panels were cedar
and the strips on the panels were gold
and the golden girls came singing:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.

The only singers now are crows crying, "Caw, caw,"
And the sheets of rain whine in the wind and doorways.
And the only listeners now are … the rats … and the lizards.


4
The feet of the rats
scribble on the door sills;
the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints
chatter the pedigrees of the rats
and babble of the blood
and gabble of the breed
of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers
of the rats.

And the wind shifts
and the dust on a door sill shifts
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.

The Older Woman in Recent Fiction

 

 The Older Woman in Recent Fiction by Zoe Brennan has all the indicia of a dissertation turned into a book that it took the author at least a decade to get published – it was published in 2005 but the references are all to books and articles published at least a decade earlier.

It is one of those books that makes me sad because it could have been brilliant. This is a topic that deserves attention. Her thesis is that older women are portrayed almost exclusively in negative terms whereas most ageing women have found ways to live their lives with hope and satisfaction. Unfortunately she was writing for the academic community and the text is full of jargon: valorizing this or that, dominant discourses, privileges as a transitive verb, paradigm, and a mention of Foucault every six pages like clockwork. It’s dated with its references to feminist and Marxist interpretations that are no longer in vogue.

I was particularly interested in it because of Brennan's chapter called The Contented and Developing Older Woman in which she discusses “Single Women and Contentment in Some Tame Gazelle.” I'm interested in Barbara Pym as my Trollope group is reading her novels and because I've just re-read Some Tame Gazelle for the secoond time in six months.

Brennan quotes from a book by Michael Cottsell, who “captures the tone of her [Pym's] writing when he states that: ‘meaning must be sustained amongst us by good humour, a delight in the absurd, recurrent small gestures, taking an interest, loving anyway. Life delivers disappointments but if those disappointments are accepted . . . small joys and satisfaction await us.’ ”

I think Brennan’s position on Pym can be summed up in her phrase, “the dignity of the quotidian.”

2012  No 117

High Rising by Angela Thirkell

High Rising, the first book in the Barsetshire series by Angela Thirkell, is an extemely amusing novel, filled with charming characters, much absurdity, irony and satire, and giggly froth. Published in 1933, it tells the story of the lives and loves of a handful of people in the villages of High Rising and Low Rising from the point of view of a 40-something writer of novels about the world of couture, Laura Morland.

The town doctor is in love with Laura's secretary, Miss Todd. Miss Todd, who is saddled with the care of her ailing and dotty mother, is in love with a neighboring writer, the talkative Mr Knox, who is in the coils of his secretarty, Miss Grey, popularly known as the Incubus, who wants him to marry her. Laura's publisher, Adrian Coates, is in love with the daughter of Mr Knox. Fortunately Miss Knox reciprocates. Many of the characters from this book reappear in others of the 30 or so books set in Anthony Trollope's fictional county of Barsetshire.

Angela Thirkell is one of those Englishwomen who are in the middle of a small-world web. She was the grand-daughter of Edward Burne Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter and the first cousin of Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Bandwin. Her brother, Denis Mackail, was a popular novelist of the 20s and 30s. Her son was the novelist Colin MacInnes and her godfather was J M Barrie.

Thirkell's novels have the gaiety and whimsy of P G Wodehouse and A A Milne but with her own outlook on the world and its absurdities. She suffered from lifelong melancholy, something you would never begin to guess from her delightful comic novels.

2012  No 116

Bats by Gail Gibbons

 

This week Elaine and I read another chapter in Betsy-Tacy -- we read a chapter each week. This week's chapter was about an imaginary trip to Milwaukee in the family buggy in the buggy shed. We also read about the first three states in The Train of States by Peter Sis, which is a first-rate book about the states and their mottos and state birds, trees, flowers, fossils, and more.

And we read Gail Gibbons' book, Bats. Gibbons writes introductory books for young children -- books about owls and coral reefs and weather and the planets and farming and ice cream. She does not write down to her readers. In the bat book she uses terms like membrane and nocturnal and she explains sonar (she calls it echo-location) and migration and hibernation. (Did you know bats do both? Some bats hibernate and others fly south.)

Baby bats are called pups. And bats eat a phenomenal number of insects in a single night. A small colony could easily eat millions, most of them mosquitoes I hope. There are many different kinds, from tube nosed bats, to big eared bats, to the flying fox, which isn't a fox at all but the largest bat species with a wing span of five feet.

Gibbons addresses the bad reputation bats have acquired and explains away some of the myths about them. She tells about bat houses that you can put up to encourage the little mammals. And she tells us the bat is a symbol of good luck in China.

Elaine and I had a wonderful time with this book. She is fascinated by bats at the moment, which why she picked this book at the library. I wish I had a magic carpet and could fly her to Carlsbad Caverns this afternoon to see the enormous colony of bats there. (After warning her about the smell of bat guano of course.)

2012  No 117

The Unexpected Joy of Re-reading the Mrs Pollifax Mysteries

It's 1965 and Mrs Virgil Pollifax of New Brunswick, New Jersey, is bored. She has been recently widowed and spends her time volunteering. But she is tired of pushing the book cart at the library and listening to lectures at the Garden Club. So when her doctor pronounces her in terrific health for a woman of her age (mid-60s) she decides to take his advice to do something she has always wanted to do.

What has she wanted to do since she was a girl? Be a spy! She flies to Washington, gets a letter of recommendation from her Congressman, and visits the personnel officer at the CIA in McLean, Virginia, to apply for a job. The personnel guy puts her in an interview room and says he will be back shortly. But while he's gone Carstairs from field ops walks in and he immediately recognizes that she is perfect for a uncomplicated but vitally important courier job for which he has been looking for a tourist-like agent. What harm can it do to use Mrs Pollifax?

Mrs Pollifax is in Mexico City as a tourist for three weeks and she often walks by the bookstore where she is to make her contact on the 19th of August. On the 15th of August she can't resist dropping by the store and buying a book. The owner chats with her and suggests she take up solitaire to relax and gives her a book about the game. And as she is going out the door he tosses her a pack of cards to play with. Mrs Pollifax takes to solitaire with gusto.

Well, it turns out the Red Chinese, who are trying to get their hands on some top secret microfiche that an agent has prepared in Costa Rica, are on to the transfer. Mrs Pollifax shows up at the bookstore on the transfer date and there is another man there. He too, likes to chat with customers, but when she accepts an invitation to have a cup of tea with him, Mrs Pollifax realizes she has made a possibly fatal mistake.

She finds herself with her hands tied to those of Mr Farrell, another CIA agent, and they are shipped to Albania before they know what's happening. Waiting for them there is General Perdido, an infamous Mexican in cahoots with the Red Chinese and the Albanians. He is a specialist in "interrogation" - and tortore. Things don't look good for Mrs Pollifax and espcially not for Farrell (they have taken away his cyanide pill.)

I don't know how to convey the delightful goings on at the forbidding prison in the Albanian Alps where Mrs Pollifax lectures two Albanian secret police agents on the American jury system and discovers who the imposing General Nexdhet is really working for. Will she and Farrell escape from the fobidding fortress before Perdido returns from a quick trip to Peking? Should they take the mysterious Chinese man from the next cell with them? And what became of the microfilm that Carstairs is so eager to acquire?

A wonderful sort of cozy spy novel, The Unexpected Mrs Pollifax delighted me just as much as - perhaps more than - it did when I first read it more than 45 years ago.

2012  No 115

A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas

The most important thing I can say about this book is that I'm grateful to Nan for talking about it long enough and saying the right things about it that I was willing to request it from the library. Despite having read and enjoyed Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking - if enjoyed is the right word for my experience of that book - A Three Dog Life is not "my kind of book." I don't normally read inspirational stories, self-help, parlor psychology, or "me and my animal(s)" sorts of things. This is all of that, and I loved it.

Abigail Thomas' husband was walking their dog one night when he was hit by a car one night and suffered permanent brain damage. His short term memory is almost entirely gone and he is unable to make appropriate connections between older memories and new words and ideas. He is permanently living in a neurological care facility in upstate New York. The author, after living for more than 30 years in New York City, has sold her apartment there and bought a single-family house near where her husband is living. She has acquired two more dogs since the accident and part of this book is about how important they are to her and how they have helped her to cope with the past five years.

She doesn't say it, but she has come through this ordeal able to look at the bad things that have happened in her life, the painful things, the embarrassing things, and turn away from them. But she is not numb. She is better able to see the good things, be warmed by them, smile, and sometimes be thrilled.

The best way to convey the feeling of this book is to quote from it:

Good things happen slowly, said a doctor in the ICU months ago, and bad things happen fast.

Her husband, though sometimes unable to recognize her and often unable to carry on a conversation in anything resembling a normal way, can sometimes say things that are wise and perceptive:

I feel like a tent that wants to be a kite, tugging at my stakes.

Ms Thomas has used what she has to hand to deal with the waves of feeling that used to overwhelm her, coming finally to the realization that things are what they are and what will come will come despite her, and to feel a sense of contented stasis. The New Age people would probably say she feels "centered."

When I was young, the future was where all the good stuff was kept, the party clothes, the pretty china, the family silver, the grown-up jobs. The future was a land of its own, and we couldn't wait to get there. Not that youth wasn't great, but it came with disadvantages; I remember the feeling I was missing something really good that was going on somewhere else, somewhere I wasn't. I remember feeling life passing me by. I remember impatience. I don't feel that way now. If something interesting is going on somewhere else, good, thank god, I hope nobody calls me. Sometimes it's all I can do to brush my teeth, toothpaste is just too stimulating.

The future was also the place where the bad stuff waited in ambush. My children were embarking on their futures in fragile vessels, and I trembled. I wanted to remove obstacles, smooth their way, I wanted to change their childhoods. I needed to be right all the time, I wanted them to listen to me, learn from my mistakes, and save themselves a lot of grief. Well, now I know I can control my tongue, my temper, and my appetites, but that's it. I have no effect on weather, traffic, or luck. I can't make good things happen. I can't keep anybody safe. I can't influence the future and I can't fix up the past.

What a relief.

And the wisest thing of all:

I was on a small island once, in the middle of a great big lake, mountains all over the place, and as I watched the floating dock the wind kicked up, the waves rose from nowhere, and I imagined myself lying there and the dock suddenly breaking loose, carried away by the storm. I wondered if I could lie still and enjoy the sensation of rocking, after all, I wouldn't be dead yet, I wouldn't be drowning, just carried off somewhere that wasn't part of my plan. The very thought of it gave me the shivers. Still, how great to be enjoying the ride, however uncertain the outcome. I'd like that. It's what we're all doing anyway, we just don't know it.

2012  No 114

American Names by Stephen Vincent Benet

by Stephen Vincent Benet

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Seine and Piave are silver spoons,
But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn,
There are English counties like hunting-tunes
Played on the keys of a postboy's horn,
But I will remember where I was born.

I will remember Carquinez Straits,
Little French Lick and Lundy's Lane,
The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates
And the bullet-towns of Calamity Jane.
I will remember Skunktown Plain.

I will fall in love with a Salem tree
And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz,
I will get me a bottle of Boston sea
And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

Rue des Martyrs and Bleeding-Heart-Yard,
Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman's Oast,
It is a magic ghost you guard
But I am sick for a newer ghost,
Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post.

Henry and John were never so
And Henry and John were always right?
Granted, but when it was time to go
And the tea and the laurels had stood all night,
Did they never watch for Nantucket Light?

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny

The Arnot Case, apparently the downfall of Surete de Quebec Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, leaving his career in limbo and his promotion unlikely, was mentioned in passing in the first of the Gamache mystery series by Louise Penny, Still Life. In A Fatal Grace, the second in the award-winning series, we learn more about the Arnot Case and Gamache's role in it. The repercussions of the case still haunt Gamache and his team in part in the form of Yvette Nichol, an unattractive, arrogant, self-absorbed, and dangerously impulsive Surete agent who against his will is assigned to Gamache and who threatens not just the solving of the cases he is working on but his very life.

At the end of this book something is about to happen in the Arnot matter but the reader is, while satisfied with the solution to this second murder, left curious about the goings on in the Surete and how they will affect Gamache, whom the reader has become fond of, loving him in much the same way that his assistant, Jean Guy Beauvoir loves him, for his intellect, instinct, and care for his detectives and for the people whose lives are disrupted by the crimes he investigates and solves.

A Fatal Grace, like Still Life, takes place in the small town of Three Pines, and we are again introduced to the people who live there and their engrossing lives. Especially interesting to me is Clara Morrow, an unappreciated artist who is shocked and encouraged by the words of a derelict woman whom she finds in front of a Montreal department store and for whom she buys food. The woman is later found dead with a copy of a book written by Three Pines' acerbic poet, Ruth Zardo, but at first it is difficult to see how her death can be related to the crime in Three Pimes that Gamache is investigating.

And that crime is puzzling enough to keep Gamache and his team baffled. CC Poitiers, a weekend resident of the town and a much-hated woman with a corrosive personality has been electrocuted out in the middle of a frozen pond during a curling match. An impossible situation, but nonetheless there is no question that she died from electrocution and in full sight of at least a hundred people, none of whom saw anything unusual until she died.

It is Christmas and it is very cold in Three Pines, so cold that the weather becomes another character in the story. As in the earlier mystery, the B&B in town, the bistro, food, and the gatherings of friends make the reader, and Gamache, feel like a part of the place. Once again Myrna, the bookstore owner, talks about books and psychology, Clara Morrow aches for recognition of her art, Ruth Zardo insults everyone in her inimitable way, and Gabri and Olivier, owners of the B&B and bistro, serve food that makes one's mouth water. (I'd almost be willing to travel to Three Pines for some of their boeuf bourguignon.)

New characters are introduced: CC Poitiers and her family, long-time residents of the town called by Clara the Three Graces, and a rustic young man from nearby named Billy Williams who, along with a piece of lemon meringue pie, provides Gamache with spiritual inspiration.

A meditation center, a mis-quote from the Bible, a Tchaikovsky violin concerto, the movie A Lion in Winter, and Eleanor of Aquitaine all play a part in the story which, with a thrilling rescue and a last-minute turn in the plot proves even more satisfying than that in Still Life. Louise Penny's books have won four Agatha awards, three Anthonys, and a Barry, not counting numerous nominations. Penny is one of the finest writers of murder mysteries of our day.

2012  No 113