Category: Fiction

The Haunting of Lamb House by Joan Aiken

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The Haunting of Lamb House by Joan Aiken is a novel published in 1991. Lamb House, a Georgian building in Rye, Sussex, has been home to several writers over the years. Henry James lived and wrote there, as did E F Benson and later on, Rumer Godden. James wrote The Turn of the Screw there; Benson wrote his Mapp and Lucia novels, in which the house itself features, as well as many ghost stories there. It is now a National Trust property. Joan Aiken was born in Rye and lived not far away all her life.

This is an atmospheric and fascinating novel, an intriguing mixture of fact and fiction. It is composed of three linked stories. In the first, Toby Lamb, son of the builder of the house, tells the tale of tragic events in his childhood and youth. This is a very credible recreation of life in early eighteenth-century Sussex. We find out towards the end that what we have been reading is his own manuscript, written later in life, which he conceals behind a wall in the house.

Many years later, Henry James becomes the occupant of the house. This story is written in the third person in a style rather like James’ own. He feels as if the house has chosen him, rather than the other way round. A mysterious fire leads to some reconstruction work and the discovery of the manuscript. There are troubling similarities between Toby’s story and James’ own life. James considers publishing the manuscript as it is, but his brother William dissuades him. James considers that Toby’s use of the first-person style is a weakness and he re-writes it. He shows his new version to his friend and fellow-writer Edith Wharton. She considers that the work is not up to his usual standard.

After James’ death the house passes to E F Benson. He too has the feeling that the house is calling to him in some way. This story is the shortest of the three, written in the first person in the style of one of Benson’s ghost stories. Behind a garden wall he discovers another secret garden in which he erects a writing hut. It is while writing there that he sees the apparition of a man in black, a figure who featured in the first story, when Toby saw him in the garden. I shall not spoil things by saying who he is. A meeting across time resolves things in a satisfying way but also with a suggestion that the cycle will carry on when Benson says: “Perhaps you and I, Hugh, will be the next pair of ghosts to take over the lease. Perhaps we shall be occupying the secret garden here in the year 2030!”

This is as much a meditation on ideas of literary quality and posterity as a conventional ghost story. James is disconcerted by the fact that Edith Wharton’s novels sell so much better than his own, which he considers to be of higher quality. Benson is aware that although his own novels are successful, they do not really go deep enough.

Joan Aiken’s reader’s note is slightly misleading, perhaps deliberately so. She says that Toby’s story is completely fictional, yet elements of it, such as the visit of King George, are part of the history of Rye. She acknowledges that she has drawn on writings by and about James and Benson for their stories. She says that the ghosts are entirely fictional. What she does not say is that the description of the man in black is taken almost word-for-word from E F Benson’s 1940 autobiography, in which he describes an encounter with what he took to be a ghost.

How much you like this novel will probably depend on how much you like the writing of Henry James and E F Benson and whether or not you have been to Rye. For an admirer of E F Benson’s ghost stories like me, it’s a real treat. I have the feeling that there’s been something of a competition over the years as to whether Lamb House should be a literary shrine to James or to Benson. I know James is generally considered the superior writer, but Benson wrote not only in the house but about the house, so for me that secures his claim to it. After all, he lived there much longer than James, from 1918 until his death in 1940.

I have also written about E F Benson’s stories The Temple and Pirates.

Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald

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One of the things I like about being a bit older is going back and reading books that I read many years ago to see whether they pass the only test that matters in literature, the test of time. How accurate were my earlier judgements and how much were they a product of the enthusiasm of youth?

Tender is the Night, published in 1934 is not quite as well-known as Fitzgerald’s earlier novel, The Great Gatsby. It is longer and more complex than Gatsby, and does not quite have that sense of perfect construction. It’s a more difficult read but perhaps a more satisfying one.

I always preferred it to Gatsby though, and going back to it, I’m stunned at just how good I still find it to be.

It is the story of American psychiatrist Dick Diver and his marriage to wealthy heiress Nicole Warren, who is his patient before becoming his wife. This takes place mainly in the glamourous locations of the French Riviera and Switzerland in the 1920s. There is also the wider background of the aftermath of the first world war, something we are reminded of during a visit to the abandoned trenches of the western front.

At that time a favourable exchange rate meant that Americans found the dollar went a long way in France. At Gausse’s hotel on the Riviera, the Divers have gathered a group of friends around them, including alcoholic composer Abe North, French-American soldier Tommy Barban and would-be writer Albert McKisko.   

This tale of wealthy American expatriates in Europe inevitably recalls the writing of Henry James and Edith Wharton, but there is a lush, poetic feel to the language here and the title is taken from Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. Yet it is faster paced and there is a fluidity of time that shows the influence of modernism. We are in a different era, the characters are more volatile and there is an undercurrent of violence here with events such as a duel and a shooting featuring in the story. Some of this is similar to the world depicted in Hemingway’s Fiesta.

It’s a very American novel in that most of the references to the British are negative, mentioning the decline of the empire, and one of the few British characters, Lady Caroline Sibley-Biers, is quite decadent.

The novel has a clever flashback structure, opening in the south of France at what is actually the middle of the story, before going back to the beginning in Switzerland in 1917 then resuming in the 1920s and going on to the tragic ending. This gives a mystery element and a dramatic tension to the whole opening part of the novel. What is the secret behind the Divers’ idyllic world and seemingly perfect marriage?

This is enhanced by the whole of that opening section being seen through the eyes of Rosemary, the young film actress who is attracted to Dick Diver. We see the Divers and their seemingly perfect world through her eyes. Dick is attracted to her as well, but it is not immediately apparent why a seemingly happily married man might be tempted to stray. The tensions in the Divers’ marriage are gradually revealed.    

Throughout the novel Fitzgerald subtly varies the point of view. This is particularly effective in conveying the way in which Dick declines and Nicole rises, as their relationship changes. At first, the reader hardly notices what is happening, as Dick begins to drink more, and his charm and perfect manners begin to drop away, alienating their circle of friends. The tipping point of the story after which the balance between them shifts is when Dick has an affair with Rosemary in Rome, gets into a fight and is beaten up by the police.

There is some very murky psychology on display here. Nicole’s mental troubles have been caused by sexual abuse by her father. Dick is as much her doctor as her husband, a figure of authority. “Control yourself!” he snaps at her as she begins to unravel. The film that has made Rosemary a star is called Daddy’s Girl. Her mother, too, is a controlling figure who encourages her relationship with the older, married man.

The novel has an autobiographical element, based as it is on Fitzgerald’s marriage to Zelda and their life in France.

Finally, Dick is corrupted by wealth, drink, and endless leisure, his plans to do pioneering work in psychiatry abandoned and his career in tatters. At the end, Nicole and Dick divorce and he disappears into an obscure life as a local doctor back in America. With Nicole cured and now married to Tommy Barban, Dick has served his purpose as far as the Warren family are concerned. “That’s what he was educated for” her older sister cynically says. She had planned for Nicole to have a doctor husband all along, she just didn’t necessarily think it would be Doctor Diver. The reader knows it was a real love, on both sides. As Nicole said “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.”

The final image is very poignant, as Dick says goodbye to the beach in front of the hotel where the story opened. He and Nicole created a world and now it is all gone.

The later parts of the novel are almost unbearably sad. It is beautifully written and an absorbing, heart-breaking reading experience. It was Fitzgerald’s own favourite of his books and he was rather puzzled by its relative lack of success on first publication, but its reputation has risen steadily ever since.  

The Pursued by C S Forester

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The Pursued is the third of C S Forester’s inter-war crime novels. It was written in 1935 but not published at the time. The manuscript somehow went missing, to be rediscovered and finally published in 2011. Like the two earlier novels it’s a tale of dark deeds in suburban London, but it’s slightly different in that here the female characters are given more prominence. I suspect that the real reason it was not published at the time was a frankness about sexual matters unusual for an English novel then. It’s also perhaps the closest of the three to the writing of Patrick Hamilton, with the same sensitivity to the position of women in that era. Like many crime novels of this vintage, there is an echo here of the events of the real-life Thompson and Bywaters case.   

Housewife Marjorie Grainger, ten years married with two small children, returns from a night out visiting an old school friend. She finds a strong smell of gas in the kitchen and her sister Dot, who has been babysitting, lying dead on the floor with her head in the oven. At the inquest it is revealed that Dot was pregnant and a verdict of suicide is returned. It is a mystery as to who the man responsible could have been. Dot was twenty-eight, had always lived with her widowed mother and her job did not bring her into contact with men very often.

Marjorie is puzzled by her discovery of two broken wine bottles in the dustbin. She has already noticed her husband Ted’s unusual excitement on the night of Dot’s death. Then she finds that he has lied about his movements on that night. And he works at the local gas showroom and is knowledgeable about gas appliances.

When her chatterbox four-year-old son blurts out what he saw on the night of his aunt’s death, Marjorie realises in a flash that it was Ted who had an affair with Dot, got her pregnant and then killed her by getting her hopelessly drunk and leaving her with the gas tap turned on. It appears that Marjorie’s mother, Mrs Clair, has reached the same conclusion, because she says that the boy will not repeat what he has just said. It’s crucial to what happens later that the two women never really have a direct and open conversation about what they both suspect.

Marjorie suggests that Mrs Clair could now come and live with Ted and her. Ted is not keen on this and proposes instead that Mrs Clair, who lives nearby, takes on his junior employee George Ely as her lodger.

The auditors are due at Ted’s firm, so rather than cancel the usual family holiday in Sussex, they agree that George should take Marjorie, her mother and the children in his new motor car. For Marjorie, this is a longed-for break from her sexually demanding husband who she no longer loves and now believes to be a murderer.

For Mrs Clair, it is something rather different. She has realised that if Ted were convicted of murder, it would ruin Marjorie’s life and taint the children forever by association. She is coldly planning a different sort of revenge on Ted. During the long sunny days, she takes every opportunity to bring Marjorie and George together. She suggests that they go out for evening trips in the car. As she has intended, the inevitable happens and Marjorie and George become lovers.

When Marjorie tells her mother that she does not want to return to her husband and hints at her belief that he is a murderer,Mrs Clair pretends to misunderstand. She plays the innocent leaving Marjorie to think that she alone knows the truth and that her mother has no idea that she and George are lovers. George and Marjorie spend the last few days of the holiday in a panic about what they are going to do. Ted is George’s boss. Ted’s manager Mr Hill is very strait-laced, and will sack anyone at the merest hint of impropriety. Marjorie realises that it may be fear for his job that led Ted to kill the pregnant Dot.

Marjorie returns to the family house but George is unhappy about this. He doesn’t want her to submit to George’s sexual demands. There is a path running along the back of the houses next to the railway line. George uses this to visit Marjorie for snatched moments of passion in the garden. He is a tender and gentle lover, younger than Marjorie and a complete contrast to her husband. What neither Marjorie or George realise is the extent to which they are being manipulated by her mother.

Meanwhile, Mrs Clair is planning her next move, buying a hatchet from the hardware store and hinting to the local police constable that Ted is in a peculiar state of mind.   

Marjorie has put Ted off with excuses about her monthly cycle but she knows that he will work that out soon enough. When she finally tells him that she will not submit to his demands anymore, he threatens to hurt her daughter if she does not give him what he wants. A distraught Marjorie runs to her mother’s house. This is the crisis that Mrs Clair has been working to bring about. The now furious George, Marjorie and Mrs Clair return to Marjorie’s house. Mrs Clair is carrying the hatchet in her bag, and utters the fateful words “we’re going to kill him”. This dramatic moment is not the end of the story by any means.        

This is a short novel, only just over two hundred pages, but it’s very intense with a lot packed into it. Forester is a master of succinct prose and there is not a word too many. The final most tragic part makes the reader think about the difference between moral guilt and physical guilt, and the plot shows how chance events can disrupt the best-laid plans. This is not a novel that the reader will forget and it leaves one at the end thinking about just who is a villain and who is a victim. A final twist in the very last sentence reveals that for one character at least there has been a sort of natural justice.

Does Mrs Clair take her motherly devotion too far? Or is the course of action she chooses the only one she can take, given her circumstances and those of her surviving daughter?

For this is the world of shabby suburban London, where the furniture and carpets are threadbare, people have just enough money to get by on and the neighbours take a keen interest in each other’s doings. This was the time when it was a woman’s role to run the house, with even a fit young man like George not expected to lift a finger to help. Ted expects domestic and sexual slavery from Marjorie as no less than he deserves in return for earning the money. For women the only alternative is to live in a cramped bedsit in a boarding house for professional women as Marjorie’s schoolfriend does.

I was surprised at the end to find out that Mrs Clair is only fifty-nine. She is constantly referred to as elderly and I thought she must be over seventy at least. That’s another way in which the world has changed.

The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler

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Having read a Philip Marlowe continuation novel, Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne, I felt it was time to return to the original novels by Raymond Chandler. A long time ago, he used to be a real favourite of mine. How would his writing seem to me now, a lifetime later?

I assumed that I had read all the Philip Marlowe books, so when I took The Little Sister out of the library, I thought I would be re-reading it. As I started reading, it did not seem very familiar and I realised that I had missed this one.

What a treat it was to have a Marlowe story come up fresh! I think it might just be the best of them, having a slight edge over The Long Goodbye. What I had forgotten is the intensity of Chandler’s writing, the visual quality that makes reading him feel like watching a film noir in one’s mind’s eye. He is such a marvellous prose stylist. Let’s face it, he’s a considerably better writer than many other American writers of the second half of the twentieth century who have more “literary” reputations.  

He didn’t invent that distinctive first-person style, but he did refine and perfect it. Every now and then we get a hint that Marlowe is an educated man. “Browning, the poet not the gun.”, for example. This justifies the language in which his thoughts are framed.

So many of the writers I have liked over the years use a style that derives from Chandler. Len Deighton borrowed quite heavily from Chandler in his early novels, perhaps most of all in Billion Dollar Brain where the assassin uses the same killing method as in The Little Sister. Derek Raymond went so far as to adopt “Raymond” as his pen name. Philip Kerr used a world-weary, Marlowe style detective to examine the Third Reich.

This time, I’m not going to bother with a detailed description of the plot. Chandler himself was famously unconcerned about that side of things. During the filming of The Big Sleep, when asked to confirm a detail in the plot, he said he had no idea. What plot there is here is driven by the search for some photographs that could compromise the career of a rising Hollywood star. But why are people prepared to kill to get them? 

It’s the atmosphere, the sense of place, the feeling that Marlowe is involved in murky goings-on that he can’t quite understand, that are so compelling. Marlowe’s not really a logical detective in the Holmes manner, more of an intuitive one like Maigret.

This story seems even more cynical than the others. It’s full of quotable passages, including the famous line about Los Angeles: “A city with all the personality of a paper cup”. There is a description of a well-off lawyer: “He looked as if it would cost a thousand dollars to shake hands with him.”

Perhaps it is the Hollywood setting that makes this one so good. Chandler had seen it all from the inside by the time this was published and he uses his knowledge to great effect. He had worked very successfully in the film industry, writing the original screenplay of The Blue Dahlia and adapting Double Indemnity. As the movie mogul says “Save fifty cents in this business and all you have is five dollars’ worth of book-keeping”.

The reference to the studio owning “1500 theatres” is a reminder that this was published in 1949 and set in the late 1940s, just before the legal challenge that forced the studios to sell off the cinemas, thus ending their monopoly of the business that was more or less a licence to print money.

It’s a detective story but also a look at the dark side of Hollywood glamour. Money values have become the only values in Los Angeles, making the city a target for all kinds of criminal interests and vulnerable to corruption. This is something more than a murder mystery and Chandler is a serious writer who cannot be confined to a category marked “detective story”.

He is contemplating serious matters here as in this description of Marlowe coming across a dead man: “Something had happened to his face and behind his face, the indefinable thing that happens in that always baffling and inscrutable moment, the smoothing out, the going back over the years to the age of innocence.”

Ding Dong Bell by Walter de la Mare

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This small book of four linked short stories was published in 1924. Knowing that De la Mare wrote extensively for children, you would be forgiven from the title for thinking that this is a children’s book, but it is not. Before the first story, there is a selection of quotes from authors such as Shakespeare, Robert Burton and Thomas Browne. These are reflections on mortality and the passing of time, that set the tone and the theme for the stories to follow. I think the bell of the title is the passing bell.

Each story is set in a rural churchyard and features characters contemplating the inscriptions on the gravestones. These epitaphs and inscriptions are quoted in full, in italics within the stories. I assume that these were written in the traditional style by De la Mare himself, but there is no author’s note, so no way of telling if any of them were found in actual churchyards. Probably not, as they fit the stories so well. De la Mare showed his love of rhymes and verses of all sorts with his anthology Come Hither.

If this all sounds rather gloomy, it really isn’t. As so often with De la Mare, there is that nagging doubt about what has taken place that leaves the reader thinking about the story long after finishing it. Not that too much really does take place in these stories, they are as much meditations as descriptions of events.

In the first story, Lichen, a young woman waiting for a train at a country station passes the time by investigating the churchyard opposite in the company of a fellow passenger, a local old man. He is not an enthusiast of modern developments such as steam trains. “I see no virtue in mere size, or in mere rapidity of motion. Nor can I detect any particular preciousness in time ‘saved’, as you call it, merely to be wasted.” The story has something in common with De la Mare’s poem The Railway Junction. By the end the old man has become a “kind of King Canute by the sad sea waves of progress”.

In Benighted, a couple find themselves stranded in remote countryside and pass the warm summer night in a churchyard. Their reading of the inscriptions appears to have an implication for their future together and the story is presented as an episode in their past.

In Strangers and Pilgrims, the verger of an old church, who is accustomed to showing visitors around it, finds something unusual about his guest, dressed all in black, who is searching for a particular inscription. This is the longest and most complex of the four. Much of it is a conversation between the initially taciturn stranger and the talkative verger, on subjects such as the nature of the past and whether or not the dead can return. At the end there is still a mystery about the visitor’s identity.

For me, the last story, Winter, is the most effective. The narrator recounts his fleeting vision of an uncanny figure in a bleak and silent snowbound churchyard, an encounter that has stayed with him for years. “But such things are difficult to describe – to share. Date, year are, at any rate, of no account; if only for the reason that what impresses us most in life is independent of time. One can in memory indeed live over again events in one’s life even twenty years or more gone by, with the same fever of shame, anxiety, unrest. Mere time is nothing.” It is striking that the apparition is as put out to see the narrator as the narrator is to see him. Then there is the ambiguity of the figure’s final question: “Which is yours?”    

By the time the reader reaches this last story it has become apparent that the book is structured around the four seasons.

De la Mare’s way of writing about the countryside is quite unusual. It’s highly visual and evocative yet somehow slightly unreal at the same time, almost more intense than reality. You find yourself wondering where exactly such a place might actually be. It’s quite different to E F Benson, say, where you can identify the real place even when he doesn’t name it. It’s more akin to the kind of painting that offers a vision of the landscape rather than a directly realistic transcription of it.    

It was the description of the story Winter in the 2013 essay Ghosts in the Material World by the critic John Gray that set me on the path to explore De la Mare’s stories. I am so glad I did because I find something in his writing that I don’t find anywhere else.

I have already written about some of his other stories, such as The House and The Almond Tree in greater detail.

My 1936 edition of Ding Dong Bell comes with a quote from The Daily News that sums this book up rather well: “An odd, loveable little book, stamped with its author’s original imagination and filled with his haunting sense of wonder and beauty.”

The book also has what looks like a woodcut on the title page, that depicts the sort of scene found in the stories, but the artist is not credited.

Plain Murder by C S Forester

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Plain Murder was the second of C S Forester’s crime novels and was published in 1930. It’s really a portrait of what came to be known later on as a psychopath, although Forester does not actually use that word. It’s comparatively short and fast-paced, with not a word wasted and a good balance between plot and character.

Forester writes in a rather detached style, and the overall effect is like a cross between Patrick Hamilton and Georges Simenon, with a similar sense of the characters being trapped by circumstances and their own limitations. The nineteen thirties atmosphere is like a black and white photograph. It’s no surprise that these books have been called “London Noir”.        

It’s set in an advertising agency and when the story opens, three young men who work there are discussing what to do about the fact that their scheme to bribe clients has been discovered. Morris is the ringleader and he has rather pushed his colleagues, Oldroyd and Reddy, into going along with it. They fear dismissal without a “character” (a good reference), which would make it almost impossible to get another job. This is London on the verge of the great depression with no welfare safety net.

Morris realises that the manager, Harrison, has not yet told the owner of the company that he is going to sack the three of them. Noticing that the next day is Bonfire Night, he persuades the other two that the only way out is to murder Harrison. Oldroyd has a pistol and Reddy has a motorcycle; their participation is necessary for the plan to work and Morris convinces them that he alone will be criminally responsible. He carries out the killing, the noise of the shots covered by the fireworks, and then scornfully tells the other two that they are accessories to murder who could face hanging if discovered, so must keep their mouths shut about what he has done.

Morris appears to have got away with it. The police make no headway with their investigation and he is promoted to take Harrison’s place. The irony is that the working-class Morris is a much more vigorous and dynamic manager than the rather languid Harrison ever was.

Morris becomes more and more convinced of his cleverness and superiority, both as a successful criminal and someone who is going places in the world of advertising. Meanwhile, young Reddy’s conscience is troubling him deeply. Morris realises that Reddy is likely to blurt out exactly what has happened. He begins to think that he will have to be disposed of too. He approaches this problem like an artist thinking out a creative difficulty. Inspiration strikes when he sees his wife pushing their son’s pram at the top of the hill on the estate where they live. If she let go, there would be nothing to stop the pram running down the hill into the busy traffic on the main road at the bottom.

He contrives a meeting with Reddy and invites him to tea. While he is there, Morris slips away and tampers with Reddy’s motorcycle. Shortly after he leaves, the drive chain comes off because Morris has loosened it; the brakes won’t work because Morris has loosened them too and Reddy is unable to lose any speed as the bike accelerates down the hill and into the stream of traffic where he is killed. The police assume that the drive chain snapped accidently and the brakes were damaged in the subsequent crash. Forester suggests that the German police system, where every citizen has a file, might possibly have led the police to connect Reddy to Morris. If they had realised that Reddy worked at an office where the manager had been murdered in mysterious circumstances and that he had just left the house of another man who worked there, they might have taken a different view of events.

Morris has got away with it again. He now feels that he is a sort of superman and he starts to view other people as “mere tools and instruments that he could use and throw aside”. Forester tells us that the main characteristic of a criminal is “an unusual idea of the importance of his own well-being compared with the importance of the well-being, or the opinions, or the ideals of other people”.

The business goes from strength to strength and more staff are required. The owner brings his daughter to work there and Morris thinks she is a very attractive girl. If only he was not shackled to his wife! Here is another little problem for him to give some creative thought to. He is detached from reality now, completely misinterpreting the young girl’s mild flirting. And he realises that Oldroyd is becoming a problem for him too.

To go beyond this point would spoil the book for anyone who has not read it. I’ll just point out that there are three murders, one that the police can’t solve and two that are never thought to be murders at all. No-one is punished, or at least not by the law. The resolution is very satisfying to the reader. It’s a novel that is almost a hundred years old and has lost none of its power.

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

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As well as novels, Richard Hughes (1900–1976) wrote poetry and plays. He was also the author of the first-ever radio drama, Danger, broadcast on the BBC almost one hundred years ago. That makes it a good time to look again at what is probably his most famous work, the novel A High Wind in Jamaica, published in 1929.

I don’t think I’ve ever come across another book quite like it. I’ve re-read it several times over the years. It is relatively easy to read but reveals new depths over time.

The story seems quite simple. Sometime in the late nineteenth century, after a hurricane wrecks the family home, a group of English children living in Jamaica are sent by their parents to go to school in England. The ship they are travelling on is attacked by pirates, who realise when they sail away that they have unwittingly hijacked the children as well as the cargo. The children take all this in their stride and at first assume it is all part of the plan for the voyage.

After some aimless cruising round the Caribbean, the pirates try to offload the children in Cuba. The rather incompetent pirates eventually manage to transfer the children to another ship and they arrive in London as intended. Yet during their time with the pirates two people die, one adult and one child. When this comes out, the pirates are put on trial and sentenced to death for murder. That’s it, more or less, except that there is rather more to it than the bare bones outline reveals. The story may be straightforward but the narrative method is not. What looks like a children’s adventure is more a piece of psychological modernism.  

It has a haunting, dreamlike atmosphere, particularly in the beautiful descriptions of the lush Jamaican countryside and the long slow days at sea, yet it is punctuated by sudden violent shocks. It has an exotic setting, pirates, and a cast of young characters, but it is not a children’s book. It’s a sea story but it doesn’t feel much like anything by C S Forester or Joseph Conrad. It’s a novel of empire that takes a fairly sympathetic view of the black inhabitants of Jamaica, given the time it was written.

The main character is a ten-year-old girl and much of the story is seen from her point of view. The novel starts with a first-person narrator, but we are never quite sure who he is or what his relation to events is. We gradually lose the sense of him as an individual and the story settles into omniscient narration, which allows Hughes access to the thoughts of all the characters, adults as well as children. It enables him to show how the adults and children misunderstand each other completely. They live in two quite different worlds, based on assumptions that they can’t communicate to each other. This is done with great skill, because the language never seems too sophisticated for the children or too simple for the adults. I think Henry James might have been attempting something similar with What Maisie Knew, but didn’t bring it off with the clarity of language that Hughes achieves.

It’s quite funny in places and much of the book is heavily ironic. Characters misunderstand each other, or misinterpret events because they have a partial knowledge about what has really happened. Only the reader knows the truth.

There is also a dark undercurrent lurking all the way through this book for the careful reader. Without giving too much away, it can be summed up by the lawyer’s questioning of Emily near the end: “When you were with the pirates, did they ever do anything you didn’t like? You know what I mean, something nasty?”  

The London scenes have an almost “Martian” quality, when the children, who have only ever lived in Jamaica, cannot imagine how a steam train could work. “Why do we have to sit in that box?”, as one of them says. The fog-bound streets of London contrast strongly with the sunlight idyll of their early years as Emily is absorbed into the normal life of a Victorian little girl, despite her experiences on the pirate schooner.

Towards the end, the novel takes on a page-turning urgency as the reader wonders how all of this is going to be resolved. What understanding is the adult world going to have about what really happened on the pirate ship? The real irony is that when Emily blurts out the truth at the trial, it is misinterpreted and the words “did she not know what she had done?” come as a shock to the reader, having two possible meanings.   

Published well after Freud, but set back at some unspecified period of the late 19th century, we are a long way on from Victorian ideas about the innocence of childhood here. The story demonstrates quite the reverse, in fact. The phrase “little savages” might be appropriate. It seems curiously ahead of its time, particularly when Emily realises that she might not have the same opportunities in life as the boys, when she grows up.

The American title was The Innocent Voyage, which is more appropriate, I suppose, but somehow not as poetic as the title under which I know it. It’s often seen as a forerunner of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but apart from the exotic setting it is quite different, really.

The biographer Michael Holroyd has written very perceptively about this novel. He got to know the by then elderly Hughes when he was researching his biography of the painter Augustus John.       

Silence Observed by Michael Innes

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His real name was John Innes Michael Stewart and he was a Scottish literary academic. Under the name J I M Stewart he published works of criticism and fiction. He’s best remembered today as Michael Innes, author of the long-running series of detective novels featuring inspector John Appleby.

With the first of these, Death at the President’s Lodging, published in 1936, he more or less invented the donnish mystery story, later developed by Colin Dexter, among others. The last one appeared in 1986.

The books have a highly distinctive tone, featuring elegant prose, peppered with literary references, and a pre-occupation with upper-middle class manners. There is a lot of genteel conversation and they often feature country house settings. There is a vein of absurdity or eccentricity to the point of fantasy running through them. These are not realistic police procedurals.

This may sound off-putting, and the books probably are something of an acquired taste, perhaps not for everybody, but what saves them in my view is that Innes was both a shrewd psychologist and a master of plot. Most of the Appleby novels are compelling and enjoyable. Silence Observed, from 1961, is one of the best, I think.

The plot features artistic fraud, another favourite Innes theme. The title refers to the rule at Appleby’s club, as well as the discretion that he finds applies to sales of rather dubious works of art and the veil of silence that descends when eminent people discover they have been tricked.

Like all Appleby’s cases, it covers a very short period of time. The opening conversation in Appleby’s London club takes place in the morning and after a murder that night and another the following day, the case is resolved on the night of the second day. It’s a peculiarity of the Innes novels that the prose is dilatory but the stories fast paced.

This is a short novel, just under two hundred pages, but it illustrates all Innes’ strengths as well as some of his weaknesses. He has a real flair for dialogue, as well as description. The settings, such as Appleby’s club and a decaying old house in Essex, come vividly to life. There’s an exploration of a seedy shop in Bloomsbury that takes Appleby on to the roof tops of London in a scene worthy of G K Chesterton or Margery Allingham. The brief burst of action at the end is perhaps less convincing. Innes had a taste for frantic chases resembling John Buchan and they don’t always quite come off.

By this stage, although it seems somewhat unlikely, Appleby has become Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. He moves in the upper echelons of society. What saves the depiction of this from mere snobbery is the other case that is occupying Appleby’s thoughts. It concerns an eighteen-year-old boy in Stepney who has kicked an elderly shop keeper to death for a small sum of money and will inevitably be hanged. He reflects on this while investigating art fraud among the well-heeled.

With Innes, there is always a sense of an erudite and highly intelligent author having a bit of fun, and he passes this on to his readers. 

Only Innes could present a fake manuscript by the now obscure poet George Meredith as having been forged by a character from a Rudyard Kipling story. And only Innes would have Appleby notice that one of his police constables is called Henry James.

At the End of the Passage by Rudyard Kipling

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I’ve been re-reading some of my favourite Rudyard Kipling stories, as I do from time to time. I consider him one of the best of short story writers, but it has to be said that there are few writers whose best and worst are so far apart. His stories range from the unforgettable to the unreadable. At the End of the Passage is one of the good ones, I think.

Four young colonial administrators in India are in the habit of getting together once a week for a game of whist. They are prepared to travel a considerable distance to do so, because they are the only Europeans for miles around. Over dinner they discuss the difficulties they face and the way life in India is misunderstood back in England. The host, Hummil, is in a thoroughly bad temper and the doctor stays behind to find out what is the matter. It turns out that he has not slept for days and is haunted by nightmare visions. He has even seen his own double sitting at the table.

The doctor gives him medicine to help him sleep and disables his guns, in case Hummil is tempted to shoot himself. He offers to send him off on sick leave, but Hummil refuses because his probable replacement is married and he thinks that neither the man nor his wife are physically robust enough to cope with the environment. I won’t spoil the story for those who have not read it by describing what happens after that.

Part of what makes the story so gripping is the vivid way in which Kipling conveys the harshness of the conditions and the effect that has on those who are not used to them. “There was neither sky, sun, nor horizon – nothing but a brown purple haze of heat.”

These men have a shockingly relaxed attitude to death. If they haven’t heard from someone for a week, they check up on him to make sure he is still alive. Suicides and deaths from cholera are quite common. They are all under thirty, but are described as “lonely folk who understood the dread meaning of loneliness”.

All this takes its psychological toll and here we come to the point. Has Hummil been driven slowly mad by all this, or is there a supernatural explanation for his mental afflictions?  

This 1890 story is presented with gaps in the narrative and ambiguities that anticipate the style of Kipling’s later work where the reader has to work quite hard to understand just what exactly has happened and what it might mean.

On the one hand, Kipling is presenting the lives of administrators in India in a realistic way to a readership that may be unfamiliar with life there. On the other, the story can be read as Kipling’s admission that the imperial enterprise is doomed to fail, because the environment is simply too difficult for those not born to it to thrive in.

That’s the funny thing with Kipling. He’s regarded as the great propagandist for empire, yet a close reading often reveals that he is actually saying something rather different.   

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon

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Siegfried Sassoon was already well-known as a war poet when Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man was published in 1928. Despite the title, it’s not really a memoir, but a journey from innocence to experience better described as autobiographical fiction or fictionalised autobiography. It is one of the works that helped to create the myth of the long Edwardian summer before the first world war, when in reality that period was one of social change and political uncertainty. Be that as it may, much of what is depicted here was swept away for ever by the war.

This is the story of George Sherston, a young man who has grown up as an only child living with his aunt. He has a modest private income and drops out of Cambridge to concentrate on what he calls his “career as a sportsman”. He devotes his time to fox-hunting and playing cricket in the peaceful, ordered and class-conscious world of rural Kent.

These activities may not hold much appeal for modern readers, but what makes this book such a good read and so memorable is the wonderfully poetic and evocative prose in which Sassoon depicts the countryside. The language is straightforward and precise. Sassoon has the poet’s instinct for exactly the right word. The smell of the air, the change of the seasons, the play of light over the landscape; it is all here, like the literary equivalent of a picture by Eric Ravilious.

This is a world in which Sherston can take his horse to a hunt in another part of the county on a slow steam train that stops at every station. A journey of twenty miles or so is an adventure and trips to London are rare. He delights in being on horseback early in the morning, experiencing the outdoors as those who must work in offices for a living cannot.   

He is completely satisfied with the limited horizons of this small but idyllic world. He accepts the social system and the way things are. He has no thoughts about any future career, or indeed the future in any form. He records his youthful triumphs, such as his innings in the flower show cricket match. This is surely one of the greatest of all literary cricket games and that chapter preserves for ever village social life at that time. There is also his winning ride in the Colonel’s Cup steeplechase.

Yet this is written in such a way as to make clear that Sherston is looking back at his youthful and rather innocent self from some distance in time, with a warm yet slightly critical eye: “All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities.” I have the feeling that this aspect of the book was influenced by Proust.

There are sly hints, too, of the war that is to come. There are several references to the great enemy of the hunter when jumping a hedge, barbed wire, and the Boer war is mentioned here and there.

Sherston is a slight outsider in this almost feudal set-up, where most of the hunters are farmers or landowners. His modest private income is not really enough to finance the life he aspires to. He moves in a largely male world, and seems to have no interest in meeting young ladies. He has intense male friendships, for example with Denis Milden, the young master of foxhounds. How the reader interprets this might depend on their knowledge of Sassoon’s life. It has to be said that Sherston is not quite Sassoon. He does not write poetry for example.       

By the later part of the book, Sherston is in the army. He experiences social embarrassment when he finds that most of the officers are men he knows from fox-hunting. He pulls some strings to become an infantry officer himself. It is not really made clear why, with his experience of horses, he does not join the cavalry.

By the end, Sherston has experienced the reality of war on the Western Front. Two of his friends have been killed in action and his aunt’s groom, Jim Dixon, the man who put him on a horse in the first place and encouraged his riding endeavours, has died of pneumonia in the trenches.

Sherston’s darker and grimmer wartime experiences are continued in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.

We are now a long way from the earlier part of the book when Sherston told us: “My memory of that summer returns like a bee that comes buzzing into a quiet room where the curtains are drawn on a blazing hot afternoon.”