In One Person by John Irving

ANOTHER fantastic read from John Irving. One of the things I love about Irving are his epic family tales (Until I Find You for example) where an emotionally isolated young man seeks to know himself and his family. There’s a real lost father theme and also a close male-female relationship that borders and sometimes crosses over into the sexual but is really about knowing and accepting one another. And the characters are always extreme, bizarre in many cases, wonderfully eccentric. Dig a little deeper and you find you do actually know people like them I think. This book is about Billy/Bill/William who is bisexual. He struggles with his sexual identity all through school and early adulthood, trying to make sense of who he is against the backdrop of homophobia (and everything else of a ‘different’ sexual nature-phobia) of the 70s, 70s and on. I loved this book because it charts Billy’s discovery of himself and growth into confidence and self-acceptance with humour, tenderness and intelligence. It’s hard to imagine how a straight man, as I believe Irving is, could have put himself so realistically into this first person narrative.

Trains and Lovers by Alexander McCall-Smith

This novella is too elegant. It is a series of confessions about love made by four passengers in a compartment in a train on the way from Edinburgh to London. There is a long winded explanation about love and confession at the beginning but honestly it just didn’t do it for me. I thought it was more banal than anything else. The subtlety of it, and I’m sure other people will find it subtle, was lost on me.

Wait for Me by Deborah Devonshire

This is the memoir of the youngest of the Mitford sisters who married the Duke of Devonshire. It’s a memoir of a way of life that I think must be all but over now. It’s quite fascinating because first it is another version of the Mitford story and lovers of the Nancy and Jessica Mitford books will enjoy the biographical details of their lives enormously. Because it is a memoir it sorts out exactly who is who in that family as well – Nancy the caustic eldest daughter, Dianna the beauty who ran off and married Sir Oswald Mosely, Pamela the practical one who ran farms and bred dogs, Unity who went to Germany and allied herself with the Nazis, Jessica who married a communist but ended up in the USA, and Tom Mitford, the only son, died during WWII. Intertwined with the family story is the story of Deborah’s marriage to Andrew, who became Duke of Devonshire, and their quest to restore and maintain Chatsworth, one the great houses of Britain. There’s lots to learn in this story. I was only vaguely aware of the Labour government’s introduction of death duties that forced these old families to sell up most of their property. While social justice is one thing, it can also be blind to a country’s history and hundreds of these old places were sold and knocked down and the land redeveloped as ugly modern estates before the public changed its opinion – too late. The people the Deborah talks about, who are part of her everyday life, are the world’s elite: everyone from Aly Khan to Fred Astaire to the Kennedy family to every noble person you’ve ever heard of in Britain. It’s interesting in a gossip magazine sort of way. Her casual statements (‘..a kind friend lend us a plane to go down to so-and-so….’) are so out of our world that it actually stops you reading for a moment, the way serious swearing used to do when you read a book twenty years ago. I found this book difficult to read for any length of time because although essentially chronological, it is still very episodic. She reminisces within reminiscences and the narrative thread is not strong enough to be compelling. All the people in the book become tiring too – you need to take regular breaks to remember come to terms with the cast of thousands. But overall it’s a really interesting insight into the way Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, and her family have lived.

Queen Lucia by EF Benson

This is an utterly delightful satire of middle class pretension written in the 1920s. It’s of the same ilk as Crome Yeloow but on a more domestic and perhaps I should say more bitchy scale. It deals with Lucia, who is the ‘queen’ of her small village out of London and her devoted friend Georgie and the circle of other middle class village dwellers who she has revolving around her every whim. Lucia is the one that sets the standard, the one who everybody wants to impress, the one who arrives last at every event to make then wait. She’s a little like Hyacinth Bucket. In this story another lady moves into the area and the trouble begins as Lucia is unwittingly outclassed and outmanoeuvred by the new arrival. It made me laugh out loud in so many places – EF Benson has a deft hand and understated witty style that I just adored.

How to Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran

I got this book on the strength of Marika Hardy’s recommendation and it really is a book for the modern day feminist ie a person who thinks we are all just ‘the guys’ and if the men aren’t/are doing it, well the same applies to the women. It’s long been my definition of feminism though I’ve been attacked by several uber feminists who thought I didn’t live up to the definition of a feminist. I don’t know whether I was supposed to hate men or not wear makeup or what to qualify, but I don’t care anyway. I found this book quite endearing really. Caitlin Moran is such an honest and forthright person, and she voiced so much of what has been going on in my brain over sixty years that it was almost comforting to read it. I know I’m alright when I read her experiences, I’m not alone and I’m not stupid. She talks about all the standard things that best women, the decisions they are forced to make, the compromises, the questions that confront them: surgical enhancement, having and not having kids, abortions, our ‘pin up’ girls, pornography, a whole range of things and she is unapologetic about her views. And it all comes down to ‘the guys’. I really enjoyed this book and shall probably read this one again. Pity it’s on my Kindle and will be difficult to lend around.