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We’ll Read Again: Living in the 1940s
Oct. 6th, 2009 07:20 pmDame Vera Lynn tops the charts, Dad’s Army is still being re-run on BBC2 and novels set in the 1940s continue to pour off the presses. Already this year I’ve read La’s Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith and Joan Bakewell’s All the Nice Girls. Here are three more.
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters *L
If I hadn’t enjoyed The Night Watch so much, if The Little Stranger hadn’t been so cried up, I doubt if I would have persevered with this book beyond the first two chapters. Nothing happens! Chapter 3 and page 97 before a significant event. It opens in a Rebecca-ish way with I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old. Unlike other books with a house at its heart (Brideshead Revisited, China Court, even The House at Riverton) one is not drawn in and fascinated from the start but wonders where this is going. Once it was clear that a frightful thing was at work in the house I read very fast to get the story. It was horrible but not as frightening as it should have been and irritatingly unresolved by the end. I was careful not to look at any reviews before reading, so nothing has prejudiced me against the book. On finishing, I did read several and I really will not say, as some people seem to, ‘Sarah Waters is a good writer (she is!) therefore this must be a good book but I’m reading it wrong’. For me it’s five hundred pages too long, I’m astonished it’s on the Booker short list and glad I wasn’t tempted by all the pre-publication offers to buy it.
Another disappointment. I’m a sucker for books with ‘garden’ in the title and this one came recommended by Geranium Cat. Gwen is thirty five, a professional gardener. After the death of her mother she volunteers to leave her job with the RHS in bomb-smitten London to work for the Women’s Land Army growing potatoes in an overgrown Devon garden. The idea of the ‘lost garden’, created secretly, perhaps by someone killed in the First World War, is a very romantic one. I liked very much the flower imagery used throughout the book and the litany of plant names which reads like poetry.
This is a painful story of love and loss which sadly rang false for me on so many levels that I longed to finish it. I assume the author has researched this but I’m not convinced that Gwen’s work on diseased parsnips would have been carried out at RHS headquarters in Vincent Square. The RHS had acquired Wisley in 1903 and then as now research took place in laboratories there. I found it very hard to believe that Gwen could have secretly and single-handedly restored the lost garden at Mosley. It stretched credulity that Land Girls would be able to get away with doing as they pleased during wartime or that frightened soldiers would tell anyone they were frightened. Nor do I think that a woman in the 1940s would feel about Virginia Woolf as many women do today; it’s the kind of retrospective projection of modern ideas I particularly dislike.
Oh dear, I don’t want to be horrid about someone’s carefully crafted book but it really didn’t work for me.
( and now for something completely different. )
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters *L
If I hadn’t enjoyed The Night Watch so much, if The Little Stranger hadn’t been so cried up, I doubt if I would have persevered with this book beyond the first two chapters. Nothing happens! Chapter 3 and page 97 before a significant event. It opens in a Rebecca-ish way with I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old. Unlike other books with a house at its heart (Brideshead Revisited, China Court, even The House at Riverton) one is not drawn in and fascinated from the start but wonders where this is going. Once it was clear that a frightful thing was at work in the house I read very fast to get the story. It was horrible but not as frightening as it should have been and irritatingly unresolved by the end. I was careful not to look at any reviews before reading, so nothing has prejudiced me against the book. On finishing, I did read several and I really will not say, as some people seem to, ‘Sarah Waters is a good writer (she is!) therefore this must be a good book but I’m reading it wrong’. For me it’s five hundred pages too long, I’m astonished it’s on the Booker short list and glad I wasn’t tempted by all the pre-publication offers to buy it.
Another disappointment. I’m a sucker for books with ‘garden’ in the title and this one came recommended by Geranium Cat. Gwen is thirty five, a professional gardener. After the death of her mother she volunteers to leave her job with the RHS in bomb-smitten London to work for the Women’s Land Army growing potatoes in an overgrown Devon garden. The idea of the ‘lost garden’, created secretly, perhaps by someone killed in the First World War, is a very romantic one. I liked very much the flower imagery used throughout the book and the litany of plant names which reads like poetry.
This is a painful story of love and loss which sadly rang false for me on so many levels that I longed to finish it. I assume the author has researched this but I’m not convinced that Gwen’s work on diseased parsnips would have been carried out at RHS headquarters in Vincent Square. The RHS had acquired Wisley in 1903 and then as now research took place in laboratories there. I found it very hard to believe that Gwen could have secretly and single-handedly restored the lost garden at Mosley. It stretched credulity that Land Girls would be able to get away with doing as they pleased during wartime or that frightened soldiers would tell anyone they were frightened. Nor do I think that a woman in the 1940s would feel about Virginia Woolf as many women do today; it’s the kind of retrospective projection of modern ideas I particularly dislike.
Oh dear, I don’t want to be horrid about someone’s carefully crafted book but it really didn’t work for me.
( and now for something completely different. )
