Author: The Good Reader

The West Pier by Patrick Hamilton (Gorse #1)

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

West Pier

The West Pier can’t have been the first novel by Patrick Hamilton I read because my Penguin is dated 1986, and my copy of Hangover Square is dated 1985. I know I read a review of The West Pier in Time Out, that finished “further Hamilton re-issues, please”, but was that before or after I saw Gorse glaring up at me from the bookshop table in David Parfitt’s cover illustration? It captures him rather well, that picture, that look of smelling something unpleasant under his nose that he could never quite shake off.

“The best novel written about Brighton” said Graham Greene according to the blurb, but that strikes me as a sort of back-handed compliment, carrying as it does the sly suggestion that everyone really knows that it is Brighton Rock.

I would agree with most Hamilton admirers that this is not his best work, but I think I would have to say that it is my favourite, close to my heart for reasons that will become clear.

Hamilton was writing in the early fifties but The West Pier is set in 1921, with a prologue in 1913. The main characters are seen first as schoolboys, then as young men. What fascinated me was the way so little seemed to have changed. His detailed description of the way teenage boys behave seemed closer to my own experience than anything else I had read. Much as I love The Catcher in the Rye, this is adolescence, English style.

And later, the rituals of “getting off” with the opposite sex rang painfully true, as did the pairing of the tall, willowy beautiful girl with her short, dumpy and less attractive friend. Stocky, determined Gertrude, condemned to be one of the “other ones”, who must always accept being paired off together in the courting rituals that take place on the west pier itself.

The west pier was more or less intact when I first knew it, but already closed to the public. The ancient pre-decimal slot machines had been removed to an arcade on the seafront. You could buy a bag of old pennies to work them with. There was a figure of a sailor in a glass case, who laughed maniacally for about three minutes when a coin was deposited in the slot.

I had a friend, now sadly no longer with us, who lived in Brighton, and was a fellow-admirer of this book. We used to imagine what a good film the story would make, and my friend suggested that the laughing sailor would be an appropriate recurring image for Gorse’s trickery. The film would end, he suggested, on a freeze-frame of the final image in the book, Gorse’s face set grimly as he hunches over the steering wheel, speeding towards London and a dubious future.

I was fascinated that Hamilton described Over Street as a slum. When I first knew it, it was home to students at Sussex University.  In the novel, Esther Downes, daughter of a worker at the nearby railway station lives there. In one of the most striking passages of the book, we are told that despite being a porter and therefore despised, Mr Downes considered that he had risen in life, because his father had tried to make a living by running behind horse carriages and offering to carry the bags when they reached their destination.

It’s quite clear that Gorse is what we would today call a psychopath, but the book is all the stronger for not using any psychological jargon. Hamilton doesn’t need it. The descriptions of Gorse’s behaviour, and the disquiet he arouses in people are quite enough to tell us what is going on. All the tell-tale indicators are there. The general malevolence towards the world, expressed by puncturing strangers’ bicycle tyres, the races in the bath that he subjects his pet mice to and the hints of something strange sexually. Hamilton anticipated Patricia Highsmith and Tom Ripley by several years.

The film we imagined never did get made, but Gorse came to television, in the shape of Nigel Havers, in the series The Charmer. This was an adaptation of the second book of the trilogy, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, with an ending invented by the screen writer, Allan Prior. The screenplay was published as a novel and this is a good read for admirers of Hamilton and his compelling creation Ernest Ralph Gorse.

The Image of a Drawn Sword by Jocelyn Brooke

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

DSCN0229 (2)

I discovered this mysterious novel by Jocelyn Brooke via a review in Time Out. My Penguin copy is dated 1983, and was the first re-issue since its publication in 1950.

I had never heard of Brooke, and Penguin must have thought that nobody else had, as the words “with an introduction by Anthony Powell” are quite prominent on the cover.

The narrative in brief, concerns a lonely ex-soldier, now working as a bank clerk and living with his mother in a cottage in a tranquil corner of rural Kent. He is frustrated with life and worried about his health. He meets a young army officer and agrees to start military training with him, in a sort of shadowy territorial unit.

The cover illustration by Tony McSweeney is fascinating in itself. A sad-eyed man in military uniform looks out at us. It is winter and he is wearing greatcoat, scarf, and balaclava under his steel helmet. Behind him is a hedge with a strand of barbed wire above it, and in the distance is a mysterious earthwork and to the left, an oast house. The cloudy sky is a threatening reddish colour, and the dented steel helmet seems to merge into it. Yes, I know, you can’t judge a book by its cover and all that, but I have described this in some detail, because it captures something about the book that Powell’s introduction doesn’t, quite.

Powell is quite keen to compare the novel to Kafka, and this is fair enough, since it undeniably has some Kafkaesque elements, particularly in the later part, where Reynard finds that he has rejoined the army against his will. But the picture on the cover is closer to my feeling that the English landscape, specifically the landscape of Kent, is a major element in this book. Perhaps childhood holidays in the Hythe and Folkestone area had made me aware of the way the countryside here is haunted by a military presence. After all, this is the area of Shorncliffe barracks, the Royal Military Canal, and  Martello towers along the coast, relics of the Napoleonic war and two world wars.

It actually goes back further than that, as Brooke reminds us. The “Roman camp” where Reynard begins his military training regime is thought to actually be an ancient British construction.

The strange shifts of time and place, the mysterious bugle calls in the distance, coming from a location that Reynard can’t quite pin down – it is never clear what is “real” and what is taking place in Reynard’s mind. The landscape itself seems to play a role in all this. For example: “Leaning now, against the gate into the fields, it seemed to him that the very countryside itself was exerting upon him an invisible, indefinable pressure, producing in his fatigued brain an intolerable sense of confinement”. I think the novel is the literary equivalent of the work of some of the painters of the era, such as Paul Nash and Keith Vaughan, where a recognisably English landscape is given a surreal twist.

What is the mysterious “emergency” that is constantly referred to? The Cold War? The Labour Government? A projection of Reynard’s troubled sexuality? Or all of these?

I can imagine a film of this book. It might have something of the atmosphere of David Rudkin’s TV play Penda’s Fen. Indeed, I wonder if Brooke’s novel was an influence on Rudkin’s play, where a young man, troubled by his sexuality, finds a mystery in the landscape. What I can’t imagine is the BBC of today going anywhere near such a project. Perhaps if Mark Gatiss could be persuaded to get involved?

And yet, although it is rooted in the immediate post-second world war period, Brooke’s novel is curiously ahead of its time in some ways. If the term “psychogeography” comes to mind, The Image of a Drawn Sword also has something of the more recent concept “folk horror” about it.

Haunted by the past: E F Benson

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

When is a ghost story not a ghost story? We talk about being “haunted” by the past and so on. It would be a shame to give away too much of the plot of this story to those who have not read it. Let’s just say that a man, the last survivor of his siblings, has the idea of buying his childhood home and recreating it as it was during his happiest years.

It seems an impossible project, but then circumstances combine to make it possible. The enigmatic title refers to a game the children used to play in the garden. In the story we are presented with a lush, idyllic dream of Cornwall. The overall effect is rather reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling’s story They.

Benson was well-connected in the world of early 20th century supernatural writing. He was one of the audience when M R James read his first ghost stories to a group of undergraduates at Cambridge, and he maintained a friendship with James. He knew Henry James too, staying with him at Lamb House in Rye. Benson took over the lease and made Lamb House famous as “Mallards” in the Mapp and Lucia novels. He saw a ghost there, an incident fictionalised in Joan Aiken’s 1991 novel The Haunting of Lamb House.

He wrote more than fifty “spook stories” as he called them, among the most famous The Bus Conductor, a story of premonition coming true. His best stories are quite the equal of anything in the genre. His descriptive talents and sense of place mean that you can recognise a real-life location even if he does not name it.

However, it has to be said that the creation of suspense is not his strongest point. What he does have is the ability to be supremely effective in stories that involve predestination, the sense of proceeding to an inevitable conclusion. Pirates has this, and also another element that makes Benson distinctive in the genre; the ghosts, if ghosts they are, are benign rather than malevolent. It stands apart from his other stories, being richly nostalgic and consoling, somehow, rather than frightening.

The story becomes all the more interesting if one is aware that it is fairly autobiographical, and the Cornish setting is indeed where Benson spent his childhood years with his large brood of brothers and sisters when his father was Bishop there. Pirates was published in More Spook Stories in 1934, towards the end of Benson’s life.

By writing the story, Benson was doing what his character did within it, re-visiting the scenes of childhood. He is not the only writer to have done this at the end of a long career. One thinks of Agatha Christie’s Postern of Fate, where the house is again, a re-creation of her childhood home. There is also Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, set around Greene’s childhood landscape of Berkhampstead.

The ending of Pirates leaves scope for a follow-up, but I can’t say too much about that without spoiling this marvellous story for those who have not had the pleasure of reading it yet.

Waterloo to Lynmouth 1914 with Henry Williamson

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

65490019

Perhaps the most lyrical of all English train journeys in prose fiction is this one, undertaken by Phillip Maddison in the early summer of 1914.

Phillip is the author substitute for Henry Williamson in his huge semi-autobiographical saga, A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight. Five volumes of the novel sequence are devoted to the First World War. How Dear is Life, in which this train journey appears, is the fourth volume and covers the transition from peace to war. It was published in 1954.

The novel opens with Phillip starting his working life as a clerk in the same insurance office as his father. He joins the territorials and, when the war begins, volunteers for overseas service on the assumption that the territorials will be used as support behind the lines. However, after heavy casualties, they are needed in the front line and Phillip finds himself thrown into the chaos of combat at the first battle of Ypres.

Phillip’s journey to North Devon for a holiday with his aunt is the first time he has left London, and he is keen to see as much as he can from the train. He stands at an open window all the way “without one moment that was not full of interest”. At Weybridge, he looks out for the Brooklands motor racing circuit. To his disappointment there are no cars actually racing.

This is the stopping train and as it goes on, past Salisbury towards Exeter, Phillip displays his keen interest in the appearance of the people on the station platforms, the way they are dressed, and so on. We realise that for a teenager of 1914, this is the equivalent of going abroad for the first time. Of course, the reader knows what Phillip does not, that he is shortly to go abroad, courtesy of His Majesty the King.

After Exeter, “a city as remote as the sun”, the train goes on towards Barnstaple, and Phillip notices the river, first on one side of the track, then the other. This is the river Taw, a reminder that we are in the countryside with which Williamson will always be associated, thanks to Tarka the Otter.

The weather has been sunny all the way, and “after Exeter the fields of red-gold wheat seemed to have been saturated with the everlasting blaze of the sun”.

After the eight-hour journey from London, Phillip changes trains at Barnstaple. He transfers to the narrow-gauge Lynton and Barnstaple line, which closed in 1935 and is described here in great detail by Williamson, at something like its peak. Phillip notices that the Lynton engine “had a big polished dome like an immense fireman’s helmet rising out of the middle of the tank”.

He is excited to see buzzards, but when he asks a travelling farmer about them, he can’t understand what the farmer says.

A local vicar invites Phillip to sit with him in the observation car at the back of the three-coach train, and we are treated to a description of the country alongside the line.

Particularly striking is the Chelfham viaduct, higher than the arches Phillip has seen on the line into London Bridge station. The vicar explains that it is white because it is built of local materials. Phillip notices that as the train ambles on, the vicar is taking what looks like dust out of his pocket and throwing it on to the embankment. He realises that they are seeds; and explains that he has done the same thing himself at home.

Phillip relishes the journey: “The longer it took the better. To ride in such a train was an adventure which he would like to go on forever.”

At Chelfham station, “no one got out, no-one got in”. This is a deliberate reference to that most loved of rural railway poems, Adlestrop. It is Williamson’s tribute to its author, Edward Thomas, himself killed on the Western Front. Appropriately enough, I wrote this piece on Armistice weekend 2018. I myself marked the centenary by reading Williamson’s novels.

Eventually, Phillip is the last passenger left on the train, alone in his reverie: “It was a dream country, floating on sunshine, the world lying far below. Were some of the shaggy men with dogs, drovers of cattle, descendants of the Doones?”

After nearly two hours Phillip arrives at Lynton to be met by his aunt. Phillip will return to this area later in the sequence, just as Williamson himself did in real life. It stands as a symbol of lost innocence and peace.

The Exeter to Barnstaple route remains open, now known, appropriately enough, as the Tarka Line. The Chelfham viaduct is still there today, although at the moment no trains pass over it. That could change though. About a mile of the Lynton and Barnstaple line is open as a heritage railway, and there are plans to re-open it along its full distance on more or less the original route. For now, if one wants to take the little train from Barnstaple, across beautiful Exmoor, it will have to be in the imagination, with some help from Henry Williamson.