Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Long Summer Day

It seems ages since I last read anything by Delderfield, but if anything the time since I last read his work has only made me appreciate it more. Long Summer Day, like To Serve Them All My Days, is a leisurely read, and a quintessentially English one at that. Beyond the pacing and prose, the former has in common with the latter that a wounded veteran (in this case, of the Boer war, and physically as opposed to psychologically) determines to put any thought of war behind him by retreating deep into the English countryside.

And so it is that Paul Craddock survives the Boer War to learn of his father's death - and a far greater inheritance than he expected. This he spends on the purchase of a rundown estate, Shallowford, which he determines to make over for the better of all residing there. Too, Squire and tenants alike must grapple with the rapid changes in society, from the introduction of the motor car to the debate over women's suffrage. Here, Delderfield has created a vast array of supporting characters, each unique enough to be memorable, but similar enough to fit nicely into a single estate without creating undue conflict or tension. Long Summer Day is also suffused with the foreboding of future entanglements with Germany: that the Kaiser is building his fleet is regularly put to the reader. There can be no doubt that Shallowford is on the cusp of the end, as Laurie Lee wrote, "of a thousand years' life."

As I've noted about Delderfield in the past, the one complaint, if I'm to have one, is that this book, too, is a tome, totally some 800 pages before all is said and done. That is not to say that I didn't enjoy it, but rather to say I'm quite certain I would have enjoyed it equally well at, say, 550 pages. (I should acknowledge, though, that this is the exact opposite of my complaint regarding the last book I read, Mademoiselle Chanel, whose author I accused of erasing entire years from Chanel's life for the sake, one presumes, of brevity. So perhaps there's just no pleasing me.)

All told, this book is a wonderful, leisurely stroll into a world that doesn't exist any longer. Its length requires a serious commitment of time on the part of the reader, but Delderfield has never failed to make an impression on me and I somehow feel richer for reading his works.

Monday, September 19, 2016

Mademoiselle Chanel

From the opening pages, C. W. Gortner's Mademoiselle Chanel put me in mind of Melanie Benjamin's work. Like Benjamin, Gortner plunges his reader immediately into the story, in this case the life and times of Coco Chanel. This he does thoroughly, and well, and the bones I have to pick here come only from knowing too much, if you will about Chanel from prior reading. (Thank you, Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life.)

For example, I drove myself crazy thinking I'd made up that Chanel spurned two marriage proposals from Balsan, before confirming that I wasn't going crazy; Gortner had simply played with the facts. Novels such as these often leave the reader unsure where real life ends and fiction begins. I would have liked a bit of clarification from Gortner at the end of the book, but this is a relatively minor quibble, and one that shouldn't bother those who haven't, say, recently read a biography of Chanel.

A bigger quibble is with Gortner's transitions, which often seemed abrupt, and too frequently were used to compress (or entirely erase) entire years in order to move more quickly through Chanel's life. Moreover, the transitions from what was happening in the broader world (World War I, Black Tuesday, Pearl Harbor, D-Day...you know, nothing major) and Chanel's life, often felt forced, jolting the reader from one topic to another with little (or no) warning. Taken together, this quality detracted from the overall book.

I've noted previously that Coco Chanel, orphan-turned-couturier, was almost certainly one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century. She survived untold hardships and a pretty serious morphine habit (glossed over by Gortner, but remarkable in and of itself) to be the leading light of the French fashion scene for decades. Gortner's work brings this multi-dimensional woman into focus for a new audience, and certainly a wider audience than is likely to read a biography. For that alone, he deserves credit. Although not perfect, Mademoiselle Chanel is still a highly readable and engaging work of historical fiction.

Sunday, September 11, 2016

Cider with Rosie

As regular followers of this blog may already know, I often read memoirs, not a few of which have been British (see all of James Herriot or Goodbye to All That). Laurie Lee was born in middle of the Great War, deep in green England, and begins his memoirs by warning readers that some of what he recalls may have been obscured by the fog of young memories. Quickly I understood his meaning, as I often felt I was reading a lot of pretty words, as opposed to a lucid story.

As I was reading, felt more like a collection of anecdotes centered around the dotty and colorful characters who peopled Lee's childhood than a work that captured the zeitgeist of rural, post-war England. Only after reflecting that this was the same time period captured by Edmund Love did I realize that in describing these individuals, Lee was reproducing the time and place - and how very, very different they are from Love's midwestern memories. Lee was not kidding when he wrote that his generation saw, "the end of a thousand years' life."Coincidentally, where Lee ends is nearly where Herriot begins. Between them, a reader is privy to some half-century of life in rural England.

Cider with Rosie ends rather abruptly, with Lee an adolescent on the cusp of leaving home, an adventures he remembers in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, a continuation of Cider with Rosie, which, at this time, I do not anticipate reading.

Saturday, September 3, 2016

My Man Jeeves

P.G. Wodehouse's work has been on my reading list for some time now, and all the more since learning of Faith Sullivan's Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse. I am rather fond of Sullivan's work, and took her endorsement of Wodehouse as further evidence that I should move him up my list. And so.

My Man Jeeves is a collection of Wodehouse's short stories, the vast majority of which feature - you guessed it - Jeeves. (Jeeves, of course, is the smarter-than-the-master butler who is forever getting his idling employer and said employer's kith and kin out of various jams.) I have mixed feelings on this collection. At a minimum I will say it took time for me to warm up to Wodehouse's style; title character Jeeves; and, not least, Jeeves's emplyer Bertie Wooster.

Originally published in early 1919, the life and times described in these pages are a world apart from anything most (all?) modern readers know. The language, too, causes the reader to sit up and take notice - British, yes, but also terribly old-fashioned. And unlike a historian, Wodehouse wasn't writing for today's audience, providing context as he worked. Coupled with the fact that Wodehouse's work is in many ways a parody, the overall affect can be a bit jarring.

Make no mistake, I'm glad I read all of the stories in My Man Jeeves. I'm simply not sure I need to follow his adventures any further.