The Man Who Won the Pools (1961) by J. I. M. Stewart

A young electrician in Oxford wins an enormous lottery jackpot and has some educational experiences among the higher and lower classes.

There is a psychological tradition in the classic British novel and a perhaps stronger melodramatic one. Stewart, both under his own name and as Michael Innes, borrowed from both, but it was the melodrama that never let him go. Sometimes its grip on him seems so strong, even in his 'straight' fiction, that one wonders if it could be just from lack of trying, consciously opting for the easier choices. A lottery win is, of course, pure melodrama to begin with, but the novel starts in what could at least seem a psychological vein, and as usual Stewart can be quite subtle about his characters' interactions and inner states. That's what makes jarring the sudden melodramatic turns of events which puncture this narrative at regular intervals. It's like there were two different books in here spliced together by different authors - one of them, quite possibly, Michael Innes, as some of the incidents wouldn't be out of place in a John Appleby thriller. It's a likeable but slightly disappointing novel, especially when one knows what Stewart was capable of (The Last Tresilians - also not without its share of melodrama, but under much tighter control).

The main subject seems to be the British class differences, and the conclusion is, apparently, that they can't be surmounted by love or money. The only way across is the way of the mind - an education. And that, perhaps, not so much a way across as the way that makes class differences immaterial. At the end of the book the working class protagonist and an Oxford undergraduate he's befriended discuss Piero's Flagellation - while the former is planning to study engeneering at Cambridge. It's almost like a meeting of Snow's two cultures and the birth of a new Renaissance man from a proletarian mould. Stewart I think voted Labour so it may well have been an idea dear to him, whether or not he could accept it as at all realistic. All in all, the book reads rather like a fantasy - almost like something out of H. G. Wells, who also followed the melodramatic tradition and was even deeper involved with Labour. Only with Wells it would have been on a larger scale - a miraculous substance, let's say, instead of a pools win, which would have sent the whole of humanity into IQ stratosphere, to embrace knowledge and social progress. What I would have liked from Stewart is a novel about a man who made all that money and then discovered its limitations. But such a subject would probably have been less open to melodrama (and, anyway, it's sure to have been covered by Henry James or somebody like that).

Circle of Friends (1966) by Julian Mitchell

In Part One, the narrator, Martin, a young socially unadjusted Englishman, is knocking about New York, jobless and penniless, when through a chance invitation to a party he meets the rich Henrietta and her theatre director husband Freddy. Drawn into their circle of friends, Martin has a brief liberating experience, a sort of crash-course on being accepted and on relating to the people around him.

Part Two, narrated by Henrietta's son Lawrence, has the group of friends staying at Henrietta's country house in England and rehearsing a play, Fielding's Tom Thumb, for a village fête. All sorts of undercurrents are implied but not perceived by the 18-year-old Lawrence who is completely and hilariously involved in directing the play.

Part Three, with a confusion of narrating voices, finds Freddy suing Henrietta for divorce, citing Martin as co-respondent. Things get complicated as the novel's focus is intentionally blurred. Both Martin and Lawrence, whose individualities provided viewpoints and frames of reference for the earlier events, become sidelined, but so is everybody else. The author seems to contrast a personal and a general view of the situation, with objectivity equally elusive to both, and actual events meaningless or immaterial next to their varying interpretations which alone influence the outcome. Pynchon says somewhere that there is no hope of understanding a situation unless all the particulars of everybody involved are understood first. Julian Mitchell seems to imply that a situation dissolves in the influx of detail; analysis of the particulars uncovers chaos rather than produces order or understanding. In Part Four, the somewhat shell-shocked Martin tries to make some sense out of what happened and also dissolves into a new life of which nothing shall be known.

Both the structure of the novel, shifting viewpoints among multiple narrators, and its concern with a woman's place in society and her vulnerability to social prejudices, strongly and parodically echo Wilkie Collins, but the tone, especially in the first half, is closer to Woody Allen (a less frivolous, much more subtle Woody Allen). Aside from postmodernistic narrative tricks, Julian Mitchell is interested in the relation of theatre to life and America to England. The latter problem is ambiguously posited. On the face of it, there is much criticism of the class system and the strait-laced traditional English mentality. But at the same time the Americans are shown as unable to appreciate subtleties of character and complexities of a situation - especially as represented by Freddy, who is also seen to be a failure as an 'art' theatre director, but making an immediate hit with (presumably crass) commercial productions.

Doctor Criminale (1992) by Malcolm Bradbury

Soon after the collapse of the Wall, a young journalist travels across Europe researching the life and work of a famous but elusive Eastern European philosopher.

'Old-fashioned' is a word that comes to mind often when reading this book, and indeed I think a LibraryThing reviewer uses it in his first sentence. What exactly gives it the old-fashioned feel is very interesting: I believe it's the fact that the author does not try to be clever about his subject - even when at his funniest or most ironic - and that he remains straightforward about it all the time, not aiming to disguise his not being clever. In other words, the book is as simple - perhaps naïve - as its narrator is meant to be, without winking to itself postmodernistically all the time. The narrator is slightly problematic: his voice, in its simplicity, is quite a bit older than his apparent age, and his big introductory scene, hilarious, at the Booker Prize ceremony, sets him up as a sort of enfant terrible which he certainly is anything but for the rest of the book (one almost expects the whole thing to disintegrate into a Holden Caulfieldish drivel after the first chapter). But there is something endearing about this mismatch of personality and narrative voice: the book comes from a time when a young man could afford to have a serious voice, at least about some things. Aside from that, it destroys any possibility of a realistic approach, quite in line with the novel's treatment of Europe as a fictional, transitional never-never land.

The novel's philosophic insights may not be profound, but they are not insignificant. Bradbury is a rare author who can be funny without losing sight of serious things. It's not quite effortless - one can see the construction elements all the time (and this is curiously in common with Bradbury's two famous students, McEwan and Ishiguro, who also seem to share some rhythmic similarities with him). But Bradbury's general likeability overcomes this (as it sometimes does not with Ishiguro and never does with McEwan). It reads a bit like a cross between Iris Murdoch and David Lodge, with perhaps a dash of the 'magical realism' that is explicitly referenced in the book when the narrator goes to a cultural conference in Argentina, re-reading the major 'magical realists' on the plane and then stepping into the literary community of Buenos Aires where everybody talks about Borges and every woman is a former mistress of his. I use quotation marks because I detest the term and much of what goes under it, but the technique works well for Bradbury who uses it sparingly, wittily and firmly within the European tradition. 'Magical realism' gets to be too much when it's smothered by exotic local colour (and flowery language), but Europe seems just the right setting for it. The fact that scores of actual and living public figures are mentioned and encountered in the pages of the book somehow only adds to the fictional haze enveloping the continent which Bradbury makes a character in his book. His non-judgemental, ironic, but also rather sober view of Europe as a network of corruption (in which East and West are symbiotic partners) may have been taken as jaundiced poetic license in 1992, but is mild stuff by today's standards. Yet when one considers the atmosphere of international jubilation in which the book was written, it must have taken quite a bit of clearheadedness to be so bleak about the underlying fabric of history.

Criminale, the brilliant intellectual allowed to travel freely between the East and the West during the Cold War years, betraying a little bit of each side to the other, must have had quite a few real life models. Yevtushenko comes insistently to mind - not that he could be called an intellectual - because so fêted in the West while at the same time so obviously an informer - also because, like Criminale, he managed to convert his public fame rather mysteriously into a very comfortable retirement package in the healthy climes. George Steiner and Georgy Lucacs must have also contributed to the character, both explicitly mentioned. What puzzles me is why Bradbury chose this name for his antihero, with all its blunt connotations.

Another and more general complaint is Bradbury's old habit - affectation? - of squeezing his conversations into long single paragraphs, so that it's sometimes a headache to keep track of who's saying what, especially if more than two persons are participating.

Among the curiosities that struck me on a personal level: the book has an epigraph from Freud, and as early as page 4 seems to get weirdly prescient about this reader's historical background:

There was budget crisis in Washington, high-street recession in Britain, the fiscal jitters in Tokyo, and bank fraud all over the place. In Brussels Napoleonic dreamers were reinventing Europe, if they could just find out where its edges started and stopped. There was conflict in Yugoslavia, ethnic and tribal tension everywhere. Over the European fringes, Saddam Hussein (former Takriti street-fighter, and BBC World Service man of the year), thinking it was passing brave to be a king and ride in triumph through Persepolis, had sent a genocidal army to murder, rape and pillage in nearby friendly Kuwait.

Etc, etc. Insert other names, reverse the roles here and there, and does anything ever change?

No Bail for the Judge (1952) by Henry Cecil

A prudish High Court judge criticises a colleague for an indiscretion, and explains how he himself, once appointed to the High Court, stopped even going to a pub for lunch to avoid the slightest possibility of doubt as to his moral character. The very same evening a combination of circumstances forces him to accept the hospitality of a prostitute. Five days later he finds her murdered and himself holding the murder weapon. This is a classic Hitchcock situation of the wrong man framed for murder and an innocent man being punished for tempting Fate with thoughtless words or actions. The story also develops in the typical Hitchcock fashion, with the mystery element discarded early on and the suspense tightened by the uncertainty of how, or if, the truth is going to triumph in the end. No wonder, then, that Hitchcock was planning to film this novel in the late 50s, with John Williams as the judge, Audrey Hepburn as his daughter and Laurence Harvey as the gentleman thief she hires to prove her father's innocence. The project is famous for its attempted rape scene involving Hepburn, which is not in the novel but which, one hardly doubts, Hitch would have made the centrepiece of the film. The whole thing would have been a curious reversal of the situation in Dial M for Murder, where John Williams comes to the rescue of Grace Kelly, falsely convicted of murder. One can't help regretting this was never filmed.

Cecil's books (I've read two so far) are popular entertainments with some simple lessons to teach about the principles of law and the legal justice system. The way their plots and narratives are put together may seem almost perfunctory: the author avoids anything like character development and following a coherent train of events to drive the story forward. What he goes for are long stretches of quirky or sometimes hilarious dialogue and brief, virtually inconsequential episodes of character interactions which seem like vignettes very obliquely related - or even totally unrelated - to the main story. Here's an example with a minor character picking up a prostitute:

'Hullo, lambkin,' he said, 'would you be all by yourself?'
'I would not,' she said, 'but I am.'
'That can be remedied. What about a drink?'
'I should love one.'
[...]
They walked down Bond Street. She stopped at one of the windows.
'That's a nice Utrillo,' she said.

Both such episodes and the dialogues sometimes manage to create for a moment a sense of atmosphere or character that seems almost an incidental by-product of the narrative. This approach may create the impression that the author does not really care about what he's doing (and certainly not about literary art). However, on consideration, the episodic and seemingly inconsequential structure of the story must be very similar to the way that a trial judge pieces together the strands of the often disjointed evidence in a legal case, reconstructing the events and the patrticipants' characters from a limited and tendentiously arranged amount of factual data. And Henry Cecil, of course, was himself a County Court judge, so it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to suggest that perhaps the curious way he constructed his narratives was related to what might be termed his legalistic worldview. And this would mean that such constructions are not arbitrary but, on the contrary, rather original. Be that as it may, I find his stories intensely readable, and the sense of a higher moral order they imply is a comfort and an encouragement, even if it highlights a conspicuous absence of same in the world around us.

A High-Pitched Buzz (1956) by Roger Longrigg

A curious little novel, one of those which fall between the cracks of literature and never get rediscovered. It chronicles a few days from the life of a young copywriter who reads Raymond Chandler and goes to see samurai movies in between his social engagements. The thin plot has a lot to do with life's little treacheries, and can be seen, if one wants to look at it that way, as an extension of Chandler's big theme: what is an honourable man to do in a dishonourable world? It is interesting how the same kinds of treachery are treated as a big tragic subject in the early 20th century - say, by Henry James or Ford Madox Ford, - and how by the 50s they become the everyday form, as illustrated in this book or in something by Pamela Hansford Johnson or Roy Fuller. The account of the office intrigue directed at unseating the protagonist's obnoxious boss could be written today - or perhaps indeed at any point of time as long as offices exist. Today, however, this sort of thing is taken for granted. It was only for a brief period that such things were at all considered by literature - precisely that kind of literature that got sidelined later as irrelevant. Perhaps the authors themselves were only semi-conscious of this commonplace villainy as symptomatic of something bigger and deeper and going wrong with the human nature. But this is not to suggest that this particular book tries to be very serious. However, when Henry, the protagonist, goes to visit his fallen boss at home, we discover something very different about the man from what could be expected. The style is perhaps a conscious borrowing from Evelyn Waugh - with pages and pages of absurdist but lifelike dialogue - but whereas in Waugh everybody was either ridiculous or Catholic, here the effect, or the outcome, is rather less straightforward. Ultimately, the protagonist is more puzzled than anything else - by the way people act, by the way things turn out, and even, to an extent, by his own motives. That puzzlement is perhaps the most valuable thing about this flimsy, easily likeable novel. Among the incidental pleasures are some turns of phrase which could be pure Chandler, or sometimes the definitely British vintage of the chandleresque idiom: Askew like an evil Brazil-nut behind his big shiny desk; or Leaning forward with a pathetic air of eager bafflement, like an English child at a French gangster film; or He grinned at me charmingly from the fireplace, up the side of which he was growing like a vine.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding (1932) by Julia Strachey

Julia Strachey, a niece of Lytton, seems to have been a junior satellite of the Bloomsbury Group and written only two novels over the course of her long life. The first of these is a novella-length affair, set on a March day in a country-house where a modest wedding is taking place. The matter-of-fact opening is very good, promising all sorts of comic possibilities. From then on, however, the going is pretty uneven. The absurdity of the characters and their interactions in the chaos of the wedding day is well done and often very funny, somewhat in the Evelyn Waugh manner. The bride is swigging rum to deal with nerves, there is an escaped tortoise about and the bride's mother is not quite all there at the best of times. But the purely descriptive passages, attempts at creating a different mood somehow clash with this and bog the thing down. There is a twist at the end which retroactively sort of justifies the sombre intimations... but the story still fails to achieve a unity of tone and purpose that might make it memorable. It's not unlike Chekhov (doubtless revered even in Bloomsbury, and quite possibly a direct influence): snatches of humour do not dispel the underlying dreariness.

The Genius and the Goddess (1955) by Aldous Huxley

Published as a 'novel', this book has the length of a novella, but in point of fact it is a very long short story, being concerned with a small group of a characters and a very circumscribed part of their lives and relationships. So publishing this on its own may have been a disservice: one expects novelistic qualities, and perhaps judges the thing too harshly for their absence.

However, even as a short story, much of this is pretentious tripe. When the author calls one of his characters a Genius and another a Goddess, and proceeds to treat them as such (even if with a touch of irony, which may or may not be the case here), somehow one knows from the start that the author cheats, because his business is to flesh out a character first, and then, if appropriate, to give that character symbolic or allegoric attributes. Huxley neither bothers with the characters nor properly tells a story here: it boils down to an anecdote. But an anecdote full of philosophical comment, generalisation and would-be important ideas. Rivers, the character telling the story, practically in monologue, barely can report a line of dialogue before launching on an insightful interpretation of what the speaker meant, felt and thought. Instead of describing people's actions, he describes - at length - their presumed inner states, with a lot of fancy twaddle like She was a goddess, and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden, or She experienced the creative otherness of love and sleep. And he is nothing if not maddeningly didactic, very sure of the profound value of what he has to impart.

Another thing that I found peculiarly annoying was the taking for granted that Maartens, the quantum physicist and Nobel Prize winner, was in fact a genius by virtue of those facts alone. Now, almost 100 years on (the story is set in the 20s), we realize that humanity would hardly notice a quantum physicist more or less. Moreover, we know that all scientists produce their most important work when young, and then the quality of their output declines quickly. Maartens is an old man, but the whole purport of the story is predicated on the assumed fact of his enormous value to humanity and the need to keep him going at any cost.

The only interesting aspect of the book was the Man Ray photograph of the young Huxley, who is absolutely indistinguishable from the young Robert Aickman. I would have constructed a conspiracy theory around this fact - suggesting they might have been the same person - if I could believe Aickman capable of writing such unmitigated rubbish, not worth the three paragraphs I spent on it. Actually, the young Huxley seems to have been a decent writer, and one can't help wondering if it had been his LSD and mescaline experiments which enfeebled his mind and his literary capacities so dramatically.

The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953) by Marghanita Laski

If ever I read a more boring book, I cannot remember it offhand. A young middle class wife and mother recovering from TB has her consciousness transposed into the body of her unmarried counterpart in 1864. The unpromising idea is developed in a stultifyingly monotonous narrative which drones on and on without a single character developed enough to make him interesting, without a memorable or unexpected line of dialogue, without a word that enlivens the page. It's not that Laski is a bad writer, exactly; she just seems no kind of writer at all. Funnily enough, she (or her main character) spends some effort on pondering the paradoxes of time, in line with Houghton's book I have just finished, but those speculations couldn't be more inane. Maybe this all-embracing boredom results from the fact that Laski aimed not at telling a story but at making a point (Milly, the 19th century girl, is denied acceptance for all the things that the 20th century Melly takes by right and without a second thought). The ending is finally horrific and out-of-balance with the routine writing, but even that does not dispel the boredom, or the suspicion that Laski herself couldn't care less about her story or her characters.

The only thing that I knew about Laski up to now was that she'd hated the Ripley books as a reviewer and publicly advised Highsmith to bury the character as soon as possible. Now that I've come across her own notions of storytelling and character development, I am not surprised.

Julian Grant Loses His Way (1933) by Claude Houghton

Claude Houghton's obscurity (not even a Wikipedia entry!) must be due to a combination of factors. To begin with, he was one of the first writers who wrote explicitly about the gap between the positivist world view and the things that make life worthwhile. This un-PC approach can't endear him to the consumer. Another reason, perhaps, is Houghton's penchant for modernist subjects without the least inclination for the modernist use of language. The general feel of his books is almost bizarrely old-fashioned. His prose seems almost deliberately devoid of subtlety and nuance, his dialogue is theatrical, stylized, inauthentic, sometimes stodgy. Yet often somehow this comes together to a decidedly hypnotic effect. His sense of language rhythm is there all right.

Admittedly, it works better when this ostensibly naïve and simple writing is attributed to the first person narrator of I Am Jonathan Scrivener than when it's the authorial voice in Julian Grant. Still, it would be wrong to think of Houghton as hopelessly mediocre. His commentary on character and mores is refreshingly direct and often aphoristic. He has a sharp tongue, a sense of humour, and he is observant when he wants to be. Life in Bohemia is described as 'parties where everyone leans on something and discusses Vitality'. Exploring his options in a certain predicament, the protagonist suggests: 'Or I might become an English Communist. After all, I have a private income.' In fact, Houghton is best when he pays attention to detail, to the particular - something that, however, he is least of all concerned with. His main interests are metaphysical.

The novel more or less starts as the story of a sentimental education, in the manner apparently characteristic of the author, but then takes a rather unexpected turn towards an education in perversity. The protagonist begins as a naïve youth hungry for experience; the hunger overwhelms him and leads eventually to an 'emotional suicide'. And then he finds himself in the 'dream world' where he is confronted with a variety of symbolic visions and a lot of metaphysical speculation. This part alone would be enough to make the book unpalatable to a modern audience. Yet this is something that the young Robert Aickman may very well have read (in fact, almost certainly read). The ending boasts a distinctly Aickmanesque frisson: 'The men will want to have a good look at you. The women can't - because they're blind.' Here's another curious thing about Houghton: however much he may go wrong with verbosity or excessive allegory at some points in his narrative, he always seems to make things right in the end. You may be intermittently tempted to skip, but not to throw the book away.

This novel is another proof of how strongly the ideas of J. W. Dunne impressed his contemporaries, or those of them prepared to be impressed. In fact, when J. B. Priestley outlined his concept of the afterlife four decades later, in some aspects he stuck very close to Houghton's symbolic vision. And, of course, the implication of the would as a construct of consciousness would be echoed by Owen Barfield in the 50s. So, yes, the book is a curiosity, but a curiosity lying well within an established tradition. And while it is old-fashioned in form, its subject matter cannot be outdated, especially because so little fiction has been concerned with similar matters since Houghton's time.

The Narrow Corner (1932) by W. Somerset Maugham

The earlier chapters are splendidly atmospheric; after that either my mood went, or Maugham stopped bothering - I haven't figured that out. I understand now why Maugham is considered a second-rater: what you see is what you get, the story and characters are all on the surface. Aside from that, he treats the point of view in a cavalier manner that would have made Henry James's hair stand on end. Speaking of which, just as Fuller is obsessed with hair, Maugham is obsessed with teeth. To say that in this book teeth equal character would not be a huge exaggeration. Still, reading Maugham is mostly a pleasure because of his great facility with language: it is an object lesson in clear, direct, purposeful writing.

My Turn to Make the Tea (1951) by Monica Dickens

Monica Dickens, a great-granddaughter of Charles, quit her upper-middle class surroundings to go and work, in turns, as a servant, a hospital nurse, and a junior reporter on a provincial newspaper. Each occupation gave life to a book, with this one being the last of the three. It is supposed to be autobiography rather than a proper novel, and it has a few very brief moments where the author is seen to merge with the first-person narrator, but generally it is so vivid in incident and character, so fluid in its storytelling, that one can't help assuming a lot of artistic license. Life sometimes does imitate art, but not this consistently. Monica Dickens starts as a mildly annoying narrator - she seems to be looking on her low-class colleagues and neighbours with all the superiority of her origins, upbringing, education and taste, even at times with bitchiness. But gradually she - as the author and the character - comes to accept these people as her own, at least for a while. Yet whatever happens, she cannot entirely avoid the suspicion of just slumming there - and this gives the book an interesting ambiguity, with the narrator being an insider and an outsider at the same time, setting the book apart from others depicting a roughly similar milieu (like Slaves of Solitude or Of Love and Hunger). The final sacrifice by the narrator is more than ambiguous; it's not just that she does not really have all that much to lose, but also that by making the sacrifice she is at the same time rejecting the life among these people and going away to bigger and better things.

Dickens had her Sun and Mercury in Taurus, and it shows in the book in the abundance of earthy qualities. She does not shirk from the ugliness, the squalor, the vulgarity (especially in the earlier chapters, and very much in contrast to the light-hearted title). There is drabness and dreariness pervading the pages - very much in line with the other Dickens - but where Charles aimed at grotesque and caricatural effects, Monica almost goes for downright freakishness, sometimes near-horror. It is the world of the Ealing comedies, and just as addictive, but strictly the underside of it.

A Villa in France (1982) by J. I. M. Stewart

Stewart, a brilliant writer who somehow failed to quite make the top grade, wrote this late novel about a, well, clever writer with an inferiority complex. Stuck at what may have been a critical point in his development, there is an event which may or may not have contributed to his failure, and which he cannot forget. So he devises a little posthumous experiment - a prank - a hoax - perhaps a revenge. The set-up is brilliant and much subtler than the brief summary can indicate. The pay-off may be a let-down, but then again, maybe it was meant to be. Maybe the point is that life does not allow things to pay off in the ways we intend. Or, perhaps, that you must be a better writer to plan a better revenge. In fact, unfulfillment is the fate of virtually every character in the book. The heroine's father keeps planning a book on the mystery of Time (he reads Dunne at some point), but all he manages is an anthology of classical excerpts on the subject. The heroine herself is almost tragic in her progress from a precocious 9-year-old to a quiet, ordinary middle age. But is progress the right word? In a wry, very Innes-like scene, the father makes a naïve point about Time always flowing in the same direction. But the book perhaps suggest that while time flows forward, the characters pale into insignificance instead of developing their potential. I am not quite sure this was the author's intention, but the effect is unmistakable, and dispiriting.

The mechanics of the plot are curiously similar to the other two Stewart novels that I've read. In all three, the hidden springs of the action are connected to some family skeletons. It isn't much of a spoiler to say that homosexuality is what rattles in the cupboard, or shall we say closet, here. 'It does seem such rotten luck, to be made that way,' is the heroine's verdict.

Friends at Court (1956) by Henry Cecil

Legal wranglings in a perfect world where everybody's decent including the criminals, and justice is certain to triumph. Rather flimsy but extremely enjoyable. The literary equivalent of the better sort of British film comedies from the 50s. Also, I suppose, a kind of Wodehouse substitute for people who, like me, can't stand Wodehouse.

The Prevention of Corruption Act 1906 is at the heart of the plot (the little there is of it), and as I finished reading this today, Andy Coulson was arrested under the same Act - not frequently in use these days, I gather.