Lady Susan by Jane Austen

It is obvious that this is an early work, and in fact Lady Susan was written when Austen was in her teens. It’s the story of the widowed Lady Susan, her sixteen year old daughter Frederica, and the friends and family upon whom Lady Susan imposes herself. She is a dreadful and immoral woman, utterly beautiful and charming, but a nasty piece of work. She flirts outrageously, leads men into thinking they can marry her and all the while carries on an affair with a married man. She tries to manipulate her daughter into marrying a man she doesn’t love. And so on and on as Austen begins her exploration of the themes that will reach their full maturity in later works: love, how society works, morality and immorality, the way people manipulate one another. And of course even in this early piece her language is wonderful. It’s a delightful piece of work, extremely short but funny and charming. It’s written as a series of letters between the main characters, which limits the perspective she can show, but is obviously experimental as well. There’s also a strong sense of naughtiness in it – I imagine just writing about this wicked Lady Susan was a bit of risk in itself.

May We Be Forgiven by AM Homes

Theo has just read me something from the paper about Chinese students and their families blockading the exam hall where they had just done their final school exams to protest about inspectors preventing them cheating. They said that they were disadvantaged since everybody in China cheats. This could almost have come from May We Be Forgiven. It’s a crazy book full of crazy situations, all of which are scathing satires on the American way of life. Early in the book the protagonist, Harold, who is a Nixon scholar, defines the American Dream, ie the opportunity for anybody to make good, and refers to Nixon’s part in promoting it. The events in the book are about the American Dream gone nuts. Essentially, and without spoiling the story, Harold is a mild mannered, somewhat spineless and unengaged professor of Nixon studies who becomes involved with his sister in law Jane. This involvement unleashes a series of events, which are fairly credible but very strange. I found the book long and, not knowing a great deal about Nixon, a little long winded when it talked about him, but probably appropriately so if you knew the history. The descriptions of institutions such as the schools, the criminal justice system and so forth are hilarious, brilliant satire and at the same time ridiculous – I hope! This book probably verges on chick lit but I really enjoyed it. It’s well written and compelling.

Miss Mapp by EF Benson

Second in the Lucia and Mapp series, Miss Mapp is another controlling character living in a small English village. She is more demonic than Lucia, nastier and more deliberately cruel, and you can’t like her as much. The story revolves around the town of Tilling (based on Rye where EF Benson lived) and involves a series of small town characters including Major Benjy, Captain Puffin, Mrs Plaistow and Diva, Miss Mapp’s arch enemy and outwardly, bosom friend. Life is all about who can get and disseminate the gossip first. Mapp and Diva spend a lot of their time trying to one-up one another and find ways to embarrass one another and make each other look foolish. This book describes a series of everyday events in the village, ranging from quarrels over new dresses to the arrival of Mr Wyse and Susan’ Plaistow’s attempts to entrap him. It’s all done across a backdrop of bridge and tea parties. This is laugh aloud stuff: Benson is witty and bitchy and obviously knows these types well . I’ll keep reading this series until they are all finished, the writing is so arch and so clever.

Noah’s Ark by Barbra Trapido

I do love Barbara Trapido. She gets right under the skin of her characters, who are so human that you identify with them completely. This story is about Ali who has been married to Noah, her third husband, for ten years. An old flame comes back into her life and she has to come to terms with that and finally to come into her own. It’s a story about relationships within a family and with friends and even with enemies, and is warm and funny and sensitive.

A Passage to India by EM Forster

When I went to one of the literature lectures at the NSWAG recently, the lecturer said this was her favourite EM Forster novel. Perhaps because I’m on holidays and not feeling very serious, I’ve found it hard to read. The poetic passages and the long descriptions of Indian religious ceremonies and the fraught emotional journeys of the characters were hard going. The themes of course were fascinating and showed prescience: Indian independence, freedom from the British, the pomposity and public school mentality of those British ruling India, the racism and tension that ran through both Indian and British societies. I can see how this book must have caused a furore when it was published in the 1920s. The story is abut four characters, Dr Aziz a Muslim doctor, Miss Quested, a British woman who has come out to marry one of the civil servants, Mr Fielding, an enlightened British educator and Mrs Moore, the mother of the civil servant. She’s the strangest of the characters, showing a sort of spiritual awareness and separation from the attitudes of the ruling class there. Anyhow when they go off for a picnic Miss Quested accuses Aziz of improper behaviour and that results in a court case that unleashes all the animosity between all the groups and puts a huge strain on the friendship between Fielding and Aziz. The question at the beginning, and at the end, is whether there can ever be a proper friendship between an Englishman and an Indian.

Dominion by CJ Sansom

I got tricked into reading this book by the bookseller’s blurb. It’s a thriller, plain and simple, set in a sort of historical context. The premise is that England capitulated to Hitler early in the piece and World War II never eventuated. The whole of Europe has become a fascist state and while nominally independent, Britain is completely under the thumb of Germany. Against this backdrop, the protagonist David gets caught up in the Resistance movement and is called upon to help rescue an old school friend who has important secrets that both the Germans and the British fascists want to get hold of. The story revolves around getting this man, Frank Muncaster, safely to America. I got quite bored towards the end and began flipping pages – except it’s on my kindle so I should say clicking pages I suppose. I found it a silly and unrewarding read.