The Room Beyond by Stephanie Elmas

The Room Beyond by Stephanie Elmas is a ghost story. When Serena arrives in Marguerite Avenue to apply for a job, she is intrigued to find as she walks the street that next door to number 32 in number 36.  Strangely, number 34 does not seem to exist. A mere curiosity, perhaps?

Also a curiosity is the job that Serena is seeking. She is applying to be the nanny, the companion, the teacher or perhaps the partner in crime of Beth who, Stephanie Elmas tells us, is just four years old. This little girl is rather odd. She has only just graduated from toddler status, but throughout the tale she seems to display the maturity, vocabulary and sensibility of middle age, let alone precocious adulthood. Serena is intrigued from the start by the origins of this little girl, and she does not believe everything she is told.

Beth’s apparent wisdom beyond her years may test some readers’ ability to suspend belief. But there are rewards for those who do, because The Room Beyond becomes an engaging read, not least because Author Stephanie Elmas’s style is always lucid and clear, and yet can offer a telling turn of phrase. When books include a child as a principal character, writers tend to use the implied innocence as a vehicle for delivering statements that no-one else dare say, or noting observations that the mere conventional either miss or fear. Mercifully, Stephanie Elmas just avoids over-using Beth’s child status, though she remains very much at the centre of the developing story.

A time shift takes us back to 1892, to a time when number 34 Marguerite Avenue definitely did exist. We get to know the Whitestones and the Edens, Mrs Hubbard who cooks and several characters, Miranda, Lucinda, Tristan and Alfonso included, whose lives become intimately intertwined. There is intrigue in this street, where much goes on behind the curtained windows.

Back in the present day Marguerite Avenue, Serena gets the live-in job offered by the Hartreve family and thus enters the household to get to know little Beth, whose hidden origins immediately interest the new nanny. Then there is a discovery that Eva, a morose teenager, knows much about the toddler’s birth and is partially willing to talk. Eva’s revelations ought to be momentous, but Serena takes them in her stride, a response we soon begin to associate with her. Eva is a strange, waif-like, almost ghostly youngster, but we hardly ever seem to get to know her as she drifts in and out of the story.

The character of Serena, the modern-day narrator, is intriguing. She’s an injured young woman. She lost her parents in a road accident. She herself is scarred and harbours a morbid fear of glass. Even more intriguing about Serena is her rather unpredictable impetuosity. When she feels an urge, she gives its expression free reign and, throughout, she displays an almost rampant sexuality that simply will not give “no” as an answer. Serena meets a number of possible liaisons and, when the fancy takes her, liaises. One particular encounter gives rise to something that develops like an obsession for Serena, who as a result becomes ever more obsessed with the non-existence of the house next door. Who might have lived there, and for what reasons it might have been removed from history? Perhaps it still exists. Perhaps we merely convince ourselves that it’s not there. And if all of this is not enough, we have another character who paints black paintings that hang in a house full of eccentrics!

Back at the end of the nineteenth century, there is yet another strange figure. Walter Balanchine is part tramp, part wizard, part psycho-analyst, part éminence-grise. He wanders in and out of the story, leaving enigma and mystery wherever he treads. Like the present-day Beth, he seems to appear whenever something more than the expected might transpire.

Overall, The Room Beyond is a satisfying, but un-demanding read. With so many characters, two time periods and several settings, we could never expect to reach an end where all the ideas are worked out, all the loose ends tied up. Stephanie Elmas’s style remains a delight and so the text always flows past and through its events with ease. But by the end, for this to be fiction of its genre, there may be rather too little tension, alongside too little of interest to excite literary interest. But The Room Beyond does present an interesting, engaging tale that is well told. Stephanie Elmas, herself, cites a debt to Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who wrote mysterious, eye-popping works that sent middle-class housewives flying to the bookshops. The Room Beyond hopes to emulate this success by presenting a new gothic Victorian sensation drama, but with the present day entwined within. Via the character of Serena, Stephanie Elmas may well have achieved her goal.

One On One by Philip Spires is now available

Pure by Andrew Miller

Pure by Andrew Miller promises rich, illuminating and even exciting experience, intrigue mixed with history, science blended with romance. Set in the year 1785, the novel inhabits pre-revolutionary Paris, focusing on a small area near rue Saint Denis, where there is a church. In the church there is a neglected organ, which cries out to be played. And, also nearby, there is a graveyard, Les Innocents, a much inhabited though disused and derelict plot, if inhabited might be the word to describe the subterranean tower blocks of coffins.

Word has come down from the King - a king who, as we know, will himself be coming down in the near future - that the area is up for re-development. No, this is not a modern tale of fractured communities, corruption and greedy developers, but an eighteenth century examination of fear, religion and, in some ways, the supernatural. It is a cemetery that is to be dug out, its contents reassembled and then moved, and there are beliefs associated with that age, or perhaps any age, that might be aroused.

Jean-Baptiste Baratte, an out of town engineer with only a small amount of work to his credit, is chosen to carry out the task. He moves to Paris and finds rooms near his project, rooms cheek by jowl with the varieties of life one expects to find in a city jammed with humanity. There’s a strange girl called Ziguette on hand. She is clearly going to play her part in the plot. But whether that part will be in relation to the engineer’s work or play is initially unclear.

Of course there is no shortage of service industry or local free enterprise in eighteenth century Paris. And so there is no shortage of sensuous encounters, wine, food, grime, laundry and other related activity that humans might pursue while they claim to be alive. An occasional famous name calls by, and other characters wander in and out of the tale. The dead, of course, are always around.

But there is also a political dimension, and larger historical possibilities, because this is pre-revolutionary France, where an Austrian harlot plies her expensive and highly visible trade at public expense. And there is also a philosophical dimension, since this purports to be the dawning of an age of reason, where Voltaire satirises those ideas that foster the kind of fears that the digging out of a cemetery might generate.

If these are the themes, then it is the job of the engineer Baratte to assemble them, along with his team of labourers, to achieve an end. And that is where Andrew Miller’s Pure rather fails to deliver. The elements are all there - the sensuality, philosophy, politics, history, intrigue and, not least, the sense of time and place. But none of these aspects rises above the incidental. Neither the literary atmosphere nor the immediate narrative strands seem to come alive. The political and philosophical angles are around, and crying out to be developed, but they appear in hints and asides, without any involvement. Pure becomes a perfectly satisfying read, a sometimes vivid novel that takes the reader to a particular place and time. But strangely it never really seems to come alive and, when surprising events emerge, it feels like they have been concocted to prevent further drift. Pure is a book that could easily disappoint, for it promises much. Though there are aspects, particularly the political and philosophical angles, that are not fully realised, perhaps not even attempted, it remains a worthwhile and satisfying read. And in the end it reminds us, as a city of the dead is cleared out, that in the very near future French society was to embark upon some clearing out of a different kind. 

One On One is a new novel by Philip Spires

Trespass by Rose Tremain

Trespass by Rose Tremain is a novel that repeatedly meditates on and around the theme it takes from its title. The author’s glittering but deceptively simple prose dances through the magical realities of the characters’ lives, but always has in mind an overriding concept of space which is personal, a space which is also inevitably and necessarily invaded by interaction. Such invasions, such trespass upon another’s territory will leave footprints, imprints that set into memory and thus themselves become part of the space we call ourselves.

Trespass might be read as a conventional who-done-what. There is a rural house in southern France, where a brother and sister live. Aramon is decrepit and deceitful. He is untidy, avaricious and an alcoholic. He has also had a history of blackouts, and these are nothing new, not mere boozed-up sleep-ins. He has suffered them since childhood, adolescence at least. Audrun, his sister, or perhaps not his sister when opinions are shared, has tolerated his excesses throughout her life and now, living in the cottage that abuts his land, she apparently continues her pursuit of the quiet life. Audrun bears her own imprints of the past, brandings of origin and parentage that have threatened to devalue her very existence. This has apparently given Aramon the right, in the past and continuing present, to trespass on his sister’s space and to use it as is he has assumed ownership. It’s an invasion that Audrun has always resented.

It seems that Aramon has to be sober to admit his illness. His blackouts might be fits, though episodes might be a politer term. They have happened at various points in his life. They are associated with passion, with moments when emotion gets the upper hand, or alienation dominates, moments such as those when the possibility of realising a fortune excites previously unimagined possibilities in his imagination.

Such source of possible excitement arrives one day in the form of a probable purchaser of the house, a man who seems to have money in his pocket, more money than Aramon can even imagine, it seems. Anthony Verey is an antique dealer for London. He has had many years in the business and knows his stuff. He has been lucky - except he would probably claim mere good management - to have developed a loyal following of clients, who over the years have maintained his trade. But the clients have thinned out and now the business is running down. Anthony, as a child always rather protected by his elder sister, Veronica, now looks at her lifestyle with some envy. She lives in France, has a relationship with Kitty, who is an artist, and seems, at least from Anthony’s increasingly pressured point of view, to be living an idyll.

On a visit to France Anthony considers how he might replicate his sister’s perceived paradise by checking out a few properties, preferably secluded, remote perhaps, where he can rest, recline and recuperate. Funnily enough, Aramon’s farmhouse home has just gone on the market, with the deranged owner’s imagination lit up by the attached price tag that the estate agent has conjured.

But there are always problems… Not only o you have yet another foreigner wanting to buy up a piece of French real estate, yet another trespasser intending to invade, but also you have Audrun, the sister, inconveniently trespassing on the farmhouse land with her own little house within the boundary. And beyond that, Veronica’s life becomes less than a paradise as Anthony re-invades her space, when her partner begins to resent a renewed trespass on their stability.

And so we reach the point where trespass, somehow, somewhere, will transform into its alternative meaning of sin. Some of these people are suffused with guilt, remorse over what they have done or smothered by the weight of what has been done to them. A grand sin is committed. A trespass into another space, across another life, always leaves an imprint. Merely repaying the debt by visiting trespass in return is never sufficient to exact retribution, to secure reparation. And so a great sin is committed. But by whom? And for what motive? Whose trespass was a step too far?

Rose Tremain’s novel is a beautiful and often moving study of guilt, remorse and retribution. Her writing has a deep and exciting sensuality alongside a vivid sense of place. The characters become people, rounded personalities with their strengths and weaknesses, their passions and their frailties, people who must seek their own goals, often trespassing across the desires of others. Who might forgive them their trespasses?

Philip Spires website

After Many A Summer by Aldous Huxley

As novels go, After Many A Summer by Aldous Huxley presents something of the unexpected. It’s a strange, rather perplexing experience.  By the end, most readers will feel that what started as a novel somehow morphed into something different. What that something might be is probably a subject of debate. And exactly how of where the transformation took place will remain hard to define.

At the outset, any review of the book should state that this text is rather verbose, uses long sentences that tend to ramble, and presents paragraphs that can go on for pages. This is about as far as we could get from late twentieth century easy reading, though it was written only just before the Second World War. The narrative, if there is one, jumps from America to Britain, from the twentieth century to the end of the eighteenth, from third person reported events to the pages of a first person diary. Overall, the experience of reading After Many A Summer takes on a distinct feel of the random, rather than mere confusion.

Underlying the book’s progress is a search for an elixir of life. There’s a man of science and a doctor involved. There’s also the evidence provided by the memoirs of an eighteenth century diarist, an aristocrat who lived well into his nineties and chased skirt to the end. He develops - perhaps out of experience - a taste for fish entrails, specifically from the carp, and thus his writing influences the present, as twentieth century analysts believe that the fish innards might just have been the source of his longevity and preserved functions.

It would be wrong, however, to stress the word ‘plot’ in relation to After Many A Summer. It would also be stretching a reader’s imagination to claim it portrays characters. In essence, the book is only a novel because it lacks structure and because its author requires his musings to be voiced distantly by named protagonists, rather than by himself. Here Aldous Huxley subjects the reader to a string of almost random philosophical throwaways. Some of them descend to diatribe, but may - especially those that deal with the relationship between science and religion - are deeply thought provoking. Assembled, however, they do not constitute a novel and anyone who reads the book in search of linearity, literary tickling or elegance of expression will be deeply disappointed.

After Many A Summer is the kind of book that an interested reader might take up to read a page or two at a time. Since there is little thread to lose, it can be enjoyed in disconnected bites, the intervening estrangement allowing any ideas to ferment and settle. There are some real gems, but even these rarely elevate into the memorable.

Aldous Huxley’s book is very much of its time. The fall of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War takes place as the story progresses, and it is used as a vehicle for musings on the rise of fascism, totalitarianism, religion and the generally irrational. Overall, however, the book is a demanding and only partially satisfying read, which, on completion, does not eventually satisfy. Though it’s certainly not the author’s masterpiece, it is worth a look for anyone who has already read Huxley’s better known works.

A Change Of Climate by Hilary Mantel

In A Change Of Climate Hilary Mantel presents what is essentially a family saga, but in settings that add extra dimensions to the expected dilemmas. The family in question is the Eldreds. Ralph and Anna have shared an unusual if not an altogether unconventional married life. They have spent time in Africa as missionaries. They have devoted their time to helping others less advantaged than themselves. Ralph runs a charitable trust in Norfolk in the east of England. But they have also found the time and energy to raise children of their own and experience the day-to-day pressures of any family’s life. But there has been more, more that has not been voiced.

Volunteer missionary work took them to South Africa, to a township called Elim near Johannesburg. It was during the era of toughening Apartheid, a time when new powers threatened whole communities with eviction and resettlement to “tribal homelands”. Ralph and Anna begin to identify with their community and deal with certain people who held particular opinions about the way South African society was being organised. Their activities catch the eye of the local police and, as a consequence of their contact, Ralph and Anna are arrested and imprisoned.

For them there is a way out of jail, and it is a way that is not available, of course, to the others who had been associated with them in Elim, those who have to continue living with the injustice that seems to affect the lives of the Eldreds. Hilary Mantel’s novel, however, doggedly follows the Eldreds to Botswana, where the family apparently gives up thinking about those they have left behind. Known then as Bechuanaland, Botswana provides the family with an opportunity, but they are offered a posting that the previous incumbents did not appear to like. By this time Anna has been through a pregnancy and has been blessed with twins. It seems, however, that the mission’s previous occupants were correct about the undesirability of the posting. Problems ensue for the Eldreds. What happens to the couple in the latter days of their stay in southern Africa is crucial to the plot of the A Change Of Climate. But there are two or three aspects to these events, not just one relating to a child. Perhaps sometimes overlooked is the fate of the others involved with the tragic events at the end of the family’s time in Botswana, a fate that returns to haunt via an almost passing mention towards the end of the book. Guilt, it seems, has many manifestations, mostly ignored.

Back in Britain, the Eldreds devote themselves to assisting those less fortunate than themselves. Thus Melanie appears on the scene. She is young, self-abusing, antisocial and in need. But then all these characters find themselves in need - in need of comfort, reassurance, something that might salve the conscience, replace the loss, turn time around and allow a different path to be taken. Devoted to alleviating the suffering of others, neither Ralph nor Anna can cope with their own traumas. These have to be lived with and relived every day, the guilt they engender colouring most of their lives. Ways out of the impasse of coping are always at hand, however. When Ralph and Anna’s son takes up with the daughter of a local single mum who ekes out a living from standing markets and trading junk, an opportunity burns suddenly bright and new suffering and guilt is wrought in the furnace.

In the end, no matter what life throws at us, we all depend on one another and need the succour of others to survive. This remains the case, even when our ideals lead us blandly towards avoidable tragedy and our ensuing suffering impinges on the lives of others.

Hilary Mantel’s novel invites us to empathise with the suffering and guilt of Ralph and Anna Eldred. But what the book fails to examine in depth is their motives. Given the consequence of some of their actions, whether intended or not, these could surely have come under greater scrutiny.

The Lost Girl by D H Lawrence

In a very famous context, D. H. Lawrence is himself famous for using a word beginning with ‘f’, a word that is infamous rather than famous. Mentioning this word and then repeating it got the author into some serious trouble that was not resolved until decades after his death. In this book, The Lost Girl, Lawrence is clearly preoccupied with the word and the novel is very much focused on it and its associated act. Its anticipation, achievement, consequences and perceived implications seem to be the very stuff of the heroine’s life, but in this book the word never actually appears. So, like Lawrence, let’s use a euphemism, but let’s also be more direct than the writer. Let’s use ‘fabrication’, an activity that is central to the work of any author.

The Lost Girl is Alvina Houghton. The surname is pronounced with an ‘f’ sound in the middle, not an ‘o’, so its first syllable rhymes with ‘fluff’, not ‘now’. She is the daughter of James, a shopkeeper in a small Derbyshire town called Woodhouse, in the north English midlands. James has a shop selling Manchester goods, the mass produced textiles of the late nineteenth century. He is not the best businessman, however, and his activities shrink over time. His daughter, Alvina - that’s with a ‘y’ sound in the middle, not an ‘e’ - is rather plain-looking and apparently not too interesting either. She thinks quite a lot about fabrication from quite an early age, but she is a determined spectator when it comes to relationships. Her counsel, especially after her mother dies, is from older women, some of them determined spinsters.

After some prevarication, Alvina eventually trains as a midwife. The skill offers her a chance of independence, but she chooses to revert to her preferred state of familial dependence. After all, Alvina will probably inherit her father’s business. Thus she continues her arm’s length relation with life.

There is a short affair with a local man, a rather goofy figure who goes on to Oxford University and probably lives long enough to make a packet. But clearly the safe option is not for Alvina, who equally seems utterly afraid of risk in any form. She clearly cannot bring herself to the fabrication she privately craves and so the affair, surely destined for marriage in the eyes of the locals, comes to nought.

Women close to The Lost Girl die. Others remain like perched birds watching over events. And, when James decides to leave the shop and sell off the little coal mine he also owns there is much consternation. There is even more to chirp about when he announces he is going into the entertainment business by opening up a little music hall, especially when Alvina declares that she will play the piano. Until this point, she had not mentioned being a musician. It is worthwhile remembering that we are in age when playing the instrument was almost part of any single woman’s trousseau.

And so the music hall presents its act, a motley crew of Red Indian impersonators, including a German called Max and an Italian called Cicio. Initially, the show packs them in, but the passing of time sees interest start to dwindle. But suddenly new opportunities arise for Alvina to think of fabrication, and fabrication with foreigners involved to boot!

And so the story of Lawrence’s The Lost Girl eventually fabricates its way from Derbyshire, and we leave Alvina in what looks like a new - though very old fashioned - life in changed circumstances. She seems now completely enslaved in her chosen womanly role, but we are at the start of the First World War and surely the role of women in society is about to change for ever.

The Lost Girl deals with many of Lawrence’s recurring themes, but its fabrication is often rather clumsy and its style often less than comfortable. It is, however, worth seeing through, if only to realise just how much both Lawrence and his fabricated characters - especially the women - are still locked in a soon to be changed mind-set about gender roles and social class.

A Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke

A Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke was published a century ago. Today it offers the modern reader not only potted, period critiques of important artists, but also a remarkable insight into how aesthetics change from generation to generation. John Charles Van Dyke’s assessments of some work will surprise today’s reader, especially his attitudes towards some contemporary artists who received rather hostile reactions from some quarters when their work was first exhibited.

The book deals with the European tradition. It makes no excuses for this. At the time, non-European art was perhaps less well known in Western critical circles. Perhaps also, it was regarded as somehow inferior, perhaps also merely because it was not European in origin. But Van Dyke does offer us a working distinction that excludes most non-European art from his survey, that of the difference between observation and expression. Only that which aims at expression, for van Dyke at least, is worthy of the label “art”. Somehow ancient Egyptian art makes it into the oeuvre, probably because it was also represented in museums that were close at hand and accessible.

Two painters in particular illustrate the difference in treatment between van Dyke’s age and our own, El Greco and Alma-Tadema. El Greco is hardly mentioned as a figure in sixteenth century Spain, his achievements apparently being regarded as rather localised on Toledo. Thus a figure now regarded as a unique stylist and visionary hardly figures in this text. Alma-Tadema, whose academicism and detail might today offer summary and epitome of the staid Victorian England that toyed euphemistically with the erotic is also dismissed. And one of the few English painters to be raised to the peerage, Frederick Leighton, also did not impress Professor Van Dyke. Neither, it seems, did Albrecht Durer.

Central to Van Dyke’s aesthetic is a judgment as to whether the painter not only represents, interprets and expresses, but also constructs a painting. Mere reality is never enough, it seems, life requiring the skill of an editor or architect to render its experience communicable. It is interesting to reflect on how much or little we still value this aspect of aesthetics in today’s painting.

Some of Van Dyke’s observations will at least entertain. Franz Hals, we learn, lived a rather careless life. William Blake was hardly a painter at all. A Dutchman is attributed with the faint praise of being a unique painter of poultry. Matthew Maris is criticised for being a recorder of visions and dreams rather than the substantial things of earth, while Turner is dismissed as bizarre and extravagant, qualities that today might enhance rather than diminish his reputation.

But Van Dyke’s book remains an interesting, informative and rewarding read, despite its distance from contemporary thinking. He is especially strong in his summary descriptions of the different Italian schools of the late Gothic and Renaissance eras. It is more than useful to be reminded of how independent these city states were at the time and how little they managed to influence one another. A Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke remains, then, an essential read for anyone interested in the history of art. Much has changed, but then there is much that has not.