What Are You Reading

[Fading Fast]

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, first published in 1952


Good fiction encompasses a wide variety of writing styles and topics, but one sleeve includes "small" books that immerse you in the culture of a place and time that is "nothing special" – other than that all places and times are special to those who live in them.

Excellent Women takes you to post-WWII London, but to a not-at-all fashionable or wealthy residential neighborhood. Instead, what were once nice Victorian homes are now mainly carved up into smallish flats like the one occupied by Mildred Lathbury, an early thirties "spinster."

While that word offends today, it was a genuine term of the era and a status Lathbury lives daily. The war has quietly hardened her into a self-sufficient woman who will only marry if she truly believes marriage will improve her life. To wit, wonderfully, she's not desperate to find a man.

That doesn't mean those around her, including her friends and other "excellent women," don't want to find a man for her, but Lathbury knows her own mind and what exactly an excellent woman is...and she's not sure she likes being one, but won't accept a mediocre man.

Never defined, but by implication, an excellent woman is an unmarried middle-class woman of traditional religious/social values who does the necessary "background" work - church, social, charitable efforts – that sustained wartime British society and now keeps it functioning.

These women man the booths at bazaars, prepare group meals at churches, visit the sick and elderly, and mend, fix, and launder things that need mending, fixing, and laundering without asking for applause or compensation beyond a reasonable amount of quiet respect.

There is a modest plot, but the value in Excellent Women is just living in a world you would have no other access to sans a time machine. Despite the war being over, rationing is still in force as England is adjusting to losing its Empire and all the benefits that went along with that.

Tea is the social grout that fills all the spaces: bored, have tea; new visitor, offer him or her tea; the sun is up, have some tea; it's overcast, have some tea. And what do you have with the tea?

Well, that's the problem because of the rationing, so they make do with some awful-sounding things like whale curry. Dear God, who thought of that awful combination? "We have easy access to whale meat." "People hate it." "Put some curry on it." "Sounds like a plan."

You know who doesn't complain? The excellent women don't. They fix the best meal they can and soldier on. The church is having a "jumble sale;" the excellent women arrange it and staff the stalls. A parishioner is old, sick, and alone; an excellent woman helps care for him or her.

Lathbury has even blended social work into her modest job at the Society for the Care of Distressed Gentlewomen. None of that, though, would make a plot, so moving into the flat under Lathbury is a married couple, Helen and Rocky Napier, who are not part of Lathbury's usual social circle.

Yes, it's a "stranger comes to town" plot where Helen, an anthropologist and awful housekeeper, shows Lathbury a different – and reasonably selfish – type of woman, while Rocky introduces Lathbury to a charming man with no real character. She's all but flying blind.

She isn't really, though, as Lathbury is a smart, quiet observer who quickly starts to understand them. She also begins to understand that her rector, Julian Malory, at the High Anglican church she attends is falling for the pretty new subletter who is better at looking good than doing things.

It's a sad observation for an excellent woman to make, but her skills are not highly valued on the marriage market. Her good friend, a "bachelor" (seems g*y, but tricky to write that in this era), could tell her that, as could Everard Bone, an anthropologist she meets through Helen.

Bone is a serious man who goes to Lathbury's church. Also, just back from doing field research in Africa, he is working hard on an academic paper about the trip. He and Lathbury don't flirt – these are not flirty people – but orbit around each other now and then.

Hard for Lathbury is the small community's belief that Malory was supposed to marry her – not how she sees it at all – and that, otherwise, spinsterhood is her likely outcome. Lathbury, with a modern take, despite being very much of her time and place, sees it as her decision.

It's her independent thinking that makes her stand out in a culture that didn't value that in anyone, but especially in modest middle-aged women on a glidepath to total insignificance. It's Pym's way of saying, "You can't make me insignificant if I don't see myself that way."

Pym's writing in Excellent Women, especially its astute look into a tiny corner of British society, echoes that of Penelope Fitzgerald, who also could take a small community and show its connective tissue – the good and the bad – in the nuances and asides of daily life.

What happens to Mildred Lathbury? You'll have to read right to the end, but she stays true to herself in the big picture, while letting others define her more than you will probably like in the smaller picture. Or, maybe she likes hiding in plain sight in her excellent woman costume.

 

[Harp]

^ Dovetailing Pym is Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out, which recounts the post World War I
fate of two million British ''surplus women'' left adrift without marriageable males in war's wake.
A fascinating tragic study of human nature conflicted and challenged.

 

[Harp]

I read Larson's Devil largely because my maternal great-grandfather left Brooklyn for a Columbian Exposition engineering position. Became fixed Chicagoan with marriage and hooked up with the Chicago Transit Authority elevated rail line design and track layout. Larsen's book isn't for the squeemish but I had to put it down occasionally myself. Really depraved reading and some recalled touch n' go pauses with disgust. Today's newspapers are similarly cast such evil deeds but deliberate intentional fiendish criminals expose the Jekyl-Hyde cretins among us.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Rainbow and the Rose by Nevil Shute, first published in 1958


Herman Wouk was often dismissed as "mass market" or "not literature," but regardless of the critics, people loved his well-researched and thoughtful books with their engaging storylines. Nevil Shute, writing twenty years earlier and in another country, has a Herman Wouk vibe.

Shute's books are smart, engaging, and enjoyable to read. Like Wouk, Shute didn't write formula stories (no offense, as his books are engaging, too, but Arthur Hailey kept writing the same story, just in different settings). For Shute, each novel is its own world.

In The Rainbow and the Rose, Shute explores the world of early flying when it was full of risk. Pilots were heroic and women responded, but the pilots' life expectancy reflected the risk. Check out Only Angels Have Wings (1939) to see this concept wonderfully brought to film.

Shute, like Wouk, is also a romantic at heart, so an affair or two of some sort is usually woven into the tale. Here, it gets a touch confusing, as Shute wraps a modern story around a long and complex flashback that is quite engaging, but keeping the two separate takes some work.

In the modern story, set mainly in Australia, a senior commercial pilot, Ronnie Clarke, takes on a dangerous voluntary rescue flight to try to save the life of his old friend – the man who taught him how to fly – Johnnie Pascoe.

Pascoe himself was on a rescue flight when he crashed and perhaps fatally injured himself in a remote part of Tasmania. After a nail-biting opening when Clarke tries to land a doctor on a mountaintop airstrip from another era – he has to abort – Clarke stays on to try again.

While spending the night in Pascoe's house – this is a remote area, so few hotels, etc. – Clarke starts to reminisce about Pascoe and then has a dream/fugue that takes us back to just after WWI when Pascoe, an ace, was a pilot teaching others how to fly out of a small airstrip.

Pascoe was a good guy whom women responded to, but not all of them treated him nicely. Right there you know this is not a modern book, or the genders would be flipped. His background includes an actress wife who abandoned him for better career prospects.

Coming from a wealthy family, she took their baby and skedaddled across the pond to America, leaving a heartbroken pilot behind. Later, he recovers when he meets a married woman whose husband is in a mental institution – it works better in the book than it sounds here.

Unfortunately, that affair struggles for obvious reasons, but forms the core narrative that you'll want to read fresh for yourself. After that engaging tale, it's an older Pascoe and a young stewardess who takes an almost motherly interest in him.

Yes, there is a climax that you'll want to read fresh – yet, you'll probably have figured it out by the time you get there. This, however, is not a plot-driven book, but a character- and early-flight-driven one. Shute pens several scenes that almost make you feel the freedom of early flight.

And the danger. Up there – by yourself, in your biplane, with your one engine – you experience freedom but also the danger of knowing that one mechanical failure will be the end for you. It's early flight writ large and small: fun, freeing, dangerous, and exciting.

You also come to care about the characters, including, of course, Johnnie Pascoe, and also Brenda Marshall (not the actress, but a cute as heck fictional aviatrix), and Ronnie Clarke, and a few others who are complex personalities who give you a little extra faith in human beings.

Shute slowly builds a relationship between Pascoe and Marshall the way relationships sometimes develop in real life: it's business to friendship to something more, but no one wants to take that first step to something more and maybe ruin the friendship.

That's it: you read Shute to see something of humanity and of the world. In The Rainbow and the Rose, it's early flight and love entanglements. If you're new to Shute, maybe start with one of his better-known books, but this one is good if the subject matter appeals to you.


N.B. Some of Shute's better-known books are On the Beach, A Town Called Alice, and No Highway, but check out The Trustee from the Toolroom for a book you think sounds average that will have you spending your entire day waiting to get home to read some more of.