The Women Friends: a Book Review

The Women Friends

I know, I know. I’m a binge reader. I can go for months without reading anything, but if I’m on holiday and the mood takes me I can read half a dozen books in as many days. So it is just now: oh, the joys of holidaying at home when the cloud is down and there’s a chill wind blowing. 

I won’t bore you with every book I’ve read since my last blog, partly because some of them are quite samey, and also I’ve always vowed not to review books I don’t think are very good. (There have been some of those, too.) But I tore through a novella last night that was both good and different. 

The Women Friends: Selina is by a Facebook friend of mine, Miriam Drori, and her co-author Emma Millar, and I bought it (as I so often do) to support an author who writes for a small independent publisher, in this case, Crooked Cat. It’s a novella set in Vienna between the wars and it’s the story of Selina, who (briefly) models for artist Gustav Klimt and falls in love with one of his other models with whom she sits for his famous painting, The Women Friends.

It’s not a period of history I’m particularly familiar with, and I know nothing about art, but that really didn’t matter. The two authors set the scene wonderfully, and they cover a range of characters in what’s almost a cartoon of a louche, hedonistic society that’s sleepwalking towards its nightmarish end. 

Selina’s sexual awakening comes from the Jewish woman Janika, and she goes on to have another affair with a woman called Anja. The story got considerably darker, as Anja became drawn into the unsavoury politics of the far right with what appear to be the best of intentions, but we know the course of history. It was only going to end one way. It’s a credit to the authors that I was desperately hoping that somehow Selina would be able to save all her friends who fell on the wrong side of the nazi party for their race or their sexuality. (No spoilers, though.)

It’s a beautifully written story, and highly evocative. For me the relationship with Janika, clearly the love of Selina’s life, petered out a little: I never like it when a main character disappears from the story. Klimt died very early on, too, and the story moved away from the artistic circles not long after that point, which was a little odd given that the whole premise of the books appeared to be the painting and the two women in it. That said, the blurb implies there will be more in a series and if there are, I’ll be looking out for them.

1930s Crime Revisited: The Mitford Murders by Jessica Fellowes

I yearn for the golden era of crime writing — so much so that I’m thinking of writing a series myself, though that will have to wait until I’ve got rather further with the ongoing contemporary series. I’ve always been a fan of Christie, Sayers, Marsh and the like, and the current trend for reprints of some of the less well-known of that genre is a positive pleasure to me, and has given me many hours of pleasant reading. 

With that in mind, I turned to a contemporary take on the 1930s genre with relish — a cosy historical, if you like to call it that. It’s called The Mitford Murders by Jessica Fellowes, and if the name Fellowes rings a bell in connection with the upper-class Mitfords then so it should. Jessica is a scion of the (Downton Abbey) Fellowes dynasty, and has written the companions to the tv series. 

With that in mind, I was expecting sumptuous detail on the lives of the minor aristocracy, and I wasn’t disappointed. Nurserymaid Louisa fetches up with the Mitfords as she attempts to escape from her unfortunate background (dead father, weak mother, exploitative uncle) and becomes confidante to sixteen-year old Nancy. When Nancy gets a bee in her bonnet about the murder of a war nurse on a train (on which Louisa was a passenger), the plot is born. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I loved the detail and the story, with plenty of twists that I didn’t see coming. If I have a grouch it’s that some of the investigation seemed a little bit simplistic, and that Nancy didn’t come across as the precocious, brittle and not particularly pleasant person she seems to have been from other books I’ve read. 

The book was nicely written and flowed well enough, though the pace slowed at a few points so that I put it down and went off to do something else. That said, I did keep picking it up again, though it wasn’t what I’d call a page-turner. I particularly loved the way that Louisa’s rather innocent romance with hapless railway policeman Guy runs alongside Nancy’s determination to find a man, regardless of whether or not he’s a crook. 

The concept of putting a fictional character in the heart of real events isn’t original — Laurie Graham, in particular, does it wonderfully well in both The Importance of Being Kennedy and Gone With The Windsors — but it works. That said, the book is billed as the first of a series and I’m not quite sure how long this can be spun out. The tagline is ‘six sisters, a lifetime of mystery’ but with the younger sister not born when the series begins and the oldest close to leaving home on a lifetime of adventure, I’m not quite sure how it will work as a series. 

I’ll just have to read the next book and find out…

Can You Write Too Well? A Review of Haweswater by Sarah Hall

Mardale Green begins to emerge from its watery grave

So, the other day I began reading Sarah Hall’s Haweswater, a book which begins with water lapping around the wheels of a cart leaving the Cumbrian dale of Mardale as the eponymous reservoir fills with water. First thing the next morning I walked along the lane leading into the hamlet of Mardale Green as it emerged after a period of drought. Then I went home and finished the book. 

What a book it is (mainly in a good way). For me it reads like a tribute to a lost Eden, a richly-written description of a beautiful land. Hall implies that it’s a lost landscape, but it isn’t. It’s very much there and endlessly attractive. (Do you have a spare hour? I can show you my photos.) 

What’s lost isn’t the landscape of the dale, but the way of life. 

This is the problem I have with the book. It’s the story of Janet Lightburn, resistant to the flooding of the valley, and her intense (for intense, read violent) affair with the man from the Manchester Water Company, Jack Ligget. But I didn’t really care about Janet, or Jack, or anyone else. Hall manages to drown her characters in the richness of her prose characters, and I never felt I knew or understood them enough to care. 

I can see what the author’s trying to do, with her switches of tense and her broken sentences, but it doesn’t work. Part of the problem is that the book is reminiscent of the 1930s rural-misery-memoir genre of Mary Webb and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, in which life in the countryside is relentlessly miserable and the stones of (insert rural area here) are stained with blood and lead only to tragedy. Of course, it doesn’t help that the genre was so wonderfully debunked by Stella Gibbons, and I do find myself wondering whether I’d have viewed Haweswater differently if I hadn’t read Cold Comfort Farm, but who knows?

No spoilers, of course, but I wasn’t surprised by the way the story turned out, and nor, I’m afraid did I particularly care. While I loved the descriptions of the landscape, and even the many pages devoted to the building of the dam (unnecessary to the story) kept me reading, I could’t engage with the characters. At one point Jack “watched the scene like a silent picture” and that’s pretty much how I felt about it. 

I feel a bit guilty about thinking this way, because the writing (those odd broken sentences apart) is pretty damned good, but for me fiction relies on characterisation and narrative drive, and in those respects it falls far short. I’ll reread it, though, if for not other reason than the descriptions of Jack climbing High Street or the hard, hard work of farming on the fells, or whatever. But in terms of character, it was over-written, with description substituting for emotion. 

Despite what I’ve just said, I did like this book — just nowhere near as much as I desperately wanted to.