- The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells
This is a gently humorous, domestic novel of the kind that seemed to flourish in Britain in the first half of the last century (see also
Diary of a Nobody,
Three Men in a Boat, and also the
Mr Finchley book that I reviewed in last year’s threads). The novel starts with Mr Polly, a dyspeptic shopkeeper in his late 30s, ruminating on how his personal, professional and marital life has reached its present unhappy state, and deciding to walk away from it all in search of adventure. The novel then rewinds to his boyhood, and takes the reader on a Dickensian journey through his apprenticeships and early employment, his accidental marriage (!) and his discontented professional life, culminating in the spectacular act that leads him to walk away from it all. We then move forwards to his new life, in which he finds contentment and a more meaningful way of living.
Mr Polly himself is a slightly ridiculous, but not unsympathetic, character: he is an avid reader but mispronounces or mangles the magniloquent words that pepper his language. He yearns after romance and adventure but is condemned by his lower-middle class upbringing to lead a humdrum life as a draper’s assistant. You do end up rooting for Mr P, even while you recognise that he treats his wife a bit shabbily (and engages in some near-criminal activities!) – luckily, it all wraps up very conveniently for all concerned at the end. This was a good-humoured, easy read and I’ll definitely continue my exploration of HG Wells’ works this year!
- The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz
- The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz
If you’ve read
Magpie Murders, you’ll know what to expect: a homage to classic detective fiction with plenty of subversion of forms and norms. This time, the author himself (or at least, a character called “Anthony Horowitz”) is one of the protagonists, acting as hapless assistant and biographer to Daniel Hawthorne, an ex-cop who is called in to deal with “stickers” – cases that the police can’t wrap up within the usual 48 hours because they have unusual or tricky features. Hawthorne himself is an enigmatic and rather unlikeable figure with a Holmes-like ability to make uncanny deductions that turn out to have a basis in rationality and observation. Anthony is a bit put out that he, the author of so many crime novels, is relegated to the Hastings/Watson/Boswell role, and tries to come up with the solutions independently (nearly messing up the whole investigation, of course). I was a bit put out in the first book to have solved the mystery two-thirds of the way through, only for Anthony to come up with the same solution and have it immediately dismissed as impossible by Hawthorne (who came up with a much better one). I’m obviously not quite as clever as I thought!
The mysteries themselves are quite convoluted and bring together lots of strands, some of which turn out to be red herrings. In the first book, a wealthy widow walks into an undertakers and organises her own funeral just hours before she is brutally murdered. Are these facts connected? And in the second book, a divorce lawyer is bludgeoned to death with an expensive bottle of wine and some mysterious numerals are daubed on the wall beside him in Farrow and Ball paint (I lol’ed at that one). It’s possible to put together some of the clues scattered in the books, but the overall mysteries are so twisty that there’s still plenty to enjoy and be surprised by. I also very much enjoyed Anthony’s thoughts about how to write for TV, the way that the investigations collide with his (real?) life as a TV writer and novelist (there are some very funny scenes where Hawthorne disrupts a meeting with Steven Spielberg and a day’s shooting for Foyle’s War), and his anxieties about how to present the material that Hawthorne is providing (will the readers accept a character who is openly homophobic, as Hawthorne is? How much of his own observations should he insert into the narrative?). I have seen a few complaints on Goodreads and in blogs about Hawthorne’s prejudiced opinions, and about the way that a humourless feminist author is (satirically) portrayed – and some people might feel that Horowitz’s characterisations of women and minorities are a bit clumsy (as you might expect from a privileged man in his 60s). It’s nothing particularly awful, though – you’d have to be either very sensitive to these things or else deliberately looking for offence to pick up on it. Overall, these were a very enjoyable, playful twist on traditional detective stories, and I’d definitely read more if they become available (which is hinted at in the ending of the second book).
- Lady in Waiting by Anne Glenconner
Widely read on here, so I won’t summarise too much. I enjoyed reading about Lady G’s amazingly eventful (and tragic) life, as Lady in Waiting to Princess Margaret, train-bearer in QE2’s coronation, co-founder of Mustique, mother of five (including two who died from drug-related hepatitis C and HIV/AIDS, and another who was in a coma following a motorbike accident
), travelling saleswoman for the family pottery business. She seems to go through it all with the stoicism and stiff upper lip for which the British aristocracy is famed (in fact, I found her detachment rather unsettling at times) – I was reminded of Kipling’s “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”. Although there are enough interesting behind-the-scenes details to keep the voyeuristic masses happy, I did feel that she was still holding a lot back – I didn’t really get any sense of the Queen from the book, the picture of Princess Margaret was heavily sanitised (possibly by affection rather than deliberate obstruction), and she was clearly glossing over a LOT of things from her truly awful-sounding marriage. Despite that, I did very much enjoy the book, and I actually found it quite refreshing to read something that understated everything rather than wallowing in the emotions and
feelings (as
Cote might put it
).