CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN by ROY HATTERSLEY

Campbell-Bannerman is one of a series of books, published by Haus Publishing, focused on 'The 20 British Prime Ministers of the 20th Century'.  It has at its subject, arguably, the most obscure member of this elite group.

Henry Campbell-Bannerman (originally just Campbell but latterly known to all as 'CB') was Prime Minster for less than three years - from December 1905 when the Liberals won by a landslide, to April 1908 when ill health forced him to resign in favour of Asquith.  He died that same April and in so doing became the only Prime Minister to die at 10 Downing Street.

Another factoid was that he was the first Prime Minster formally to be designated with that title, (some) predecessors may have been called PM informally but in official terms were in fact First Lords of the Treasury.

The foregoing is trivia but as Hattersley succinctly and clearly describes, CB scored some notable triumphs during his short tenure in the highest elected office.  He was, for example, responsible for a more generous settlement than many advocated, via the Vereeniging Treaty, with the Boers after the Boer War - generosity which led to the formation, for good or bad, of 20th century South Africa.  

CB was also directly responsible for removing liability from Trades Unions for damage caused by strike action; and thirdly, perhaps most consequentially, he began the process which removed the real veto the House of Lords had over any Commons legislation changing it, in time, merely to a right to suggest amendments or to delay.  In so doing CB was at the beginning of the movement to establish the House of Commons as the supreme legislator in Great Britain.

Hattersley clearly likes CB.  He is impressed by his radicalism and the fact that before and during his term as Prime Minister, he entered meetings with an open mind rather than a pre-set position.  This did not, on occasion, contribute to his political potency but it did, over time, increase his standing in the eyes of his colleagues, his political opponents and the country at large who all came to recognize they were dealing with a thoroughly decent man albeit one without the normal style and flash of the politicians we know today.

This is the first of the Haus Publishing series I have read and I have to wonder, given they all seem to be more or less the same length, how much more compression is required in, say, the  books about Lloyd George or, indeed Churchill than appears here.  As I said, Hattersley is succinct and he expects his reader to know something of late 19th and early 20th century British politics and of domestic and Imperial history.  But he is also straightforward and frequently, if gently, entertaining.

In the spirit of the latter comes the newly elected CB's response, to the former Tory PM Arthur Balfour who "returned to Parliament in a contrived byelection [and] attempted to win over the House with an exhibition of elegant wit and contrived classical reflections - a technique which had made him the darling of the late Victorian Tory benches.  In two dismissive sentences the new Prime Minister destroyed him.  Enough of this tomfoolery.  It might have answered very well in the last Parliament, but it is altogether out of place in this ... 


Campbell-Bannerman by Roy Hattersley, published in 2006 (paperback) by Haus Publishing. 161pp.


  

THE DROWNED SON by DAVID GUTERSON

People like to talk about the calm before a storm, and that is true, there is a close stillness in the air and the sensation of hanging in limbo, the potential electricity crackling loudly in its absence. People rarely talk about the calm after a storm. The washed-out feeling, the silence when the rain finally stops.  Alaska comes from the Aleut word for ‘the place against which the sea breaks.’ Off the coast of Alaska, a storm hits the fishing boat on which the son is serving. He dies with vomit on his lips and a flashlight in his hand. The sea breaks against his family too, his mother and father blaming each other and feeling no forgiveness and living in the silence after the storm.

There is bitterness here, there are the angry words of those who no longer understand why they ever loved each other. There is the selfishness of grief, the recognition that it makes people ugly and the hatred of ugliness in someone you used to find beautiful. There is the man who survived the fishing boat, who brings ugliness into the memory of their son, by disclosing his imperfect past and undignified death. There is an internal and external despair at the self.

It is a book without hope. The father’s personality, his hardened stance against cowardice, his only comments about his wife and daughter being their unattractiveness, seems more deep rooted than a reaction to grief. The mother’s icily stiff words and refusal to blame herself even slightly shut her off from sympathy. For the son, with his dreams of reading psychology and opening a pizza parlour, hope is futile for he is dead within the first sentence. Alaska is wild and open and beautiful, yet the novel is claustrophobic and dark. It is a book for the beginning of winter, and it is as perfect a tragedy as one could hope to read. 

The Drowned Son, Bloomsbury Birthday Quids

THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by THORNTON WILDER

To what extent is life governed by external forces? Everyone who has caught the eye of a stranger in a crowd must surely wonder what their life story is, how they came to be standing opposite you at this precise moment, and whether you have anything in common with them. Then you pass on your way, and forget their face, for meetings of this nature are fleeting and private, and not really meetings at all. When the Inca rope bridge collapses, killing those standing upon it, Brother Juniper observes and collects the life histories of the dead, trying to find a pattern and to make sense of the apparent chaos.

            The dead are tangentially connected, primarily through questions of familial loyalty, love, and geography. The Marquesa de Montemayor, a great writer of letters, whose ugliness led to isolation in high society, dies with nothing but love for her indifferent daughter. Her companion, a young girl raised in a convent, feels lonely but cannot express her misery through letters, and the two realise that they share a life of cowardice. The twins, Esteban and Manuel, were raised in the same convent as the companion of the Marquesa, and have the closeness that only twins can obtain. Love for a actress drives them apart, and the blood tie is strained to breaking point. The casual nature of disease kills one, and the bridge the other. The actress’ valet is also on the bridge, pained from the realisation that his protégé has become the mask that she donned to fit into the high society shunned by the Marquesa for being superficial.

            The empty vanity of the actress, the Gatsby-esque dream of raising oneself, forces her away from those she loved. Yet the ephemeral nature of her beauty is shadowed by the fate of the ugly Marquesa; society has many barriers outside birth and status, and those rules shape the lives of the people who fleetingly touch that world whether they understand them or not. The twins and the Marquesa’s companion are drawn from the opposite end of society yet they cannot escape the slow destruction of mutual relationships any more than those with money and power.

            Brother Juniper’s collection of work on the destruction of the bridge is considered heretical, and he dies in the name of knowledge and truth. Those on the bridge die as their love dies, as their families fall apart, as consistency and justice and loyalty collapse just as the ropes under their feet collapse. There is no peace for those who crossed the Bridge of San Luis Rey, it is not a punishment from God nor a release from their shattered lives. The book is neither sorrowful nor joyful in its conclusion, but it is as delicately written as the lives of those within it. 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, paperback Penguin Modern Classics, 124pp

LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES by JEAN COCTEAU

I know it sounds like a bizarre thing to say, but I had the consistent feeling, through Les Enfants Terribles, that I was reading an Enid Blyton story gone bad. 

This, like much of Blyton, is a tale of children without adults.  From the outset, Paul's and Elisabeth's mother is ill.  She then quickly dies and other adults occupy only minor roles in what is essentially a modern take on a Greek tragedy written, so I gather, during Cocteau's cold-turkey period in 1929 when he was breaking a serious opium addiction.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the plot is strange.  A tale first of two, then three then four children, all orphans, who live together - closely together - first in Paul's and Elisabeth's mother's Paris house and subsequently in a house owned by Elisabeth's momentary husband who dies in a car crash immediately after the ceremony leaving her to understand marriage as a series of meetings with lawyers.

A normal English version of the title is Children of The Game and it is The Game, a mental journey played in the interstices between sleeping and waking which drives the first three children (including Gérard, Paul's schoolfriend) through their later youth and adolescence.  The Game requires mementoes, treasures, a need to be together and to create a Blytonesque camp in the bedroom (a room seldom left - at least by Paul).  

A key treasure is a photograph of Dargelos, with whom Paul was obsessed while at school and whose stonefilled snowball,  which strikes Paul in the chest, results in Paul never attending school again.  But Dargelos doesn't fade; Agatha - a nascent mannequin who joins the group in the second-half of the book - turns out to be the spitting image of Dargelos re-establishing the obsession and unwittingly tightening the incestuous coils which tie Paul and Elisabeth together.

The pair are indeed terrible, consistently striking each other - even on a rare holiday in public - making faces at all around them, stealing, undertaking consistent verbal attacks and yet, at the same time, bathing together, defending each other, indeed loving each other.

This combination of unrequited incest and the reappearance, at least by letter, of Dargelos, forces the end.  Gérard is always in love with Elisabeth and later, Agatha falls in love with Paul and he with her although neither gets the chance to tell the other as Elisabeth, turned Greek Fury, intervenes to block such expressions of feeling and to persuade Agatha and Gérard that they're the natural (if unhappy) pairing.

When the four reunite after the wedding, Dargelos, the uncaring or malicious god of the piece, has sent Paul poison knowing Paul to be fascinated by such symbols of mortality.  Eventually, Paul takes the poison and Elisabeth shoots herself.  Bring down the final curtain.   

Written very quickly and gaining from that, Les Enfants Terribles, is a product of the febrile 20s when societal rules had been destroyed by the First World War.  It is a shocking tale magnificently constructed. 

Les Enfants Terribles, Penguin (my copy 1973) - translated by Rosamund Lehmann

CHANTEMESLE by ROBIN FEDDEN

Chantemesle is sub-titled 'A Normandy Childhood' and is exactly that.  A memoir, written in middle-age by an Englishman who grew up on the banks of the Seine in an untroubled time before the Second World War.

It is an enchanting, innocent story of a near perfect pre-adolescence.  Fedden has the descriptive feel of the best of Zelda Fitzgerald - an extraordinary ability to evoke, in prose, a sense of light and shadow, of life and of landscape.

Fedden's part of the Seine valley, which he explores extensively, is populated by very local characters, none more so than the blind Battouflet who knows all but whose mind-map is fixed decades earlier.  We also have Mademoiselle Firmin, the Fedden family's nearest neighbour who agrees to go bathing with the children some months after her husband died in February:

"At last she got up and lowered herself down the steps that hung from the stern.  Then giving a self-conscious wave, she launched out and began to swim deliberately downstream.  ... The head bobbed away from us at each stroke, moving into the swifter current. ... and then, as we watched, it disappeared.  We waited for it to re-emerge.  Heads, we knew, always re-emerged, the face spluttering and smiling.  We waited in vain."

I said pre-adolescent and so the book largely is but there is a sexual undercurrent as Fedden becomes friendly with Clotilde with whom he has lessons (of a sort) and with whom, later, he waltzes and shares a range of adventures.

No character, even Battouflet, should however detract from the fact this book is a fine prose painting of a landscape long since gone.  The love affair was with the house, Chantemesle, and its environment and the characters, even Clotilde, serve to highlight the description rather than carry it themselves.

It is a exquisite piece of writing - and written poignantly from the heart.

"From the blue brushstroke on the water I could see the whole landscape - hill, forest, islands - beautiful as it had ever been and apparently still as close; but mute.  I was no longer part of it.

"A week later I left with the sense of disloyalty and loss.  Thirty years have not obliterated this sense, or the knowledge that I was most myself at Chantemesle.  I have written this to make amends, a gesture of love."



Chantemesle, a Normandy Childhood, Eland Books - paperback 2002.  100pp.

THE OLD CAPITAL by YASUNARI KAWABATA

I came across Kawabata via his semifictional masterpiece, The Master of Go, and was surprised to find this tale was not among the three books specifically cited to support his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968.  However, The Old Capital, one of his later works most certainly was, and deservedly so.

The book is a story of identity in post WWII Japan, specifically the 'Old Capital' Kyoto, struggling to refind itself through the traditions and formalities of earlier years.  Within this highly structured environment, the principal character Chieko, daughter of a wholesaler and sometime designer of cloth for obis and kimonos, is also struggling both to come to terms with two suitors and, more significantly, with her alter ego - in fact her twin - whose existence she discovers by mistake and whom two suitors mistake for her on several occasions.

The background to the whole novel is a series, apparently a never-ending series, of festivals - of the Hollyhock, the Gion Festival, the Festival of Ages and others.  Indeed the author tells us that Kyoto of the 1950s held so many such events that it would have been impossible to witness all of them in a single year.  The counterpoint is Chieko's increasing, and only partially relieved, uncertainty about her birth.

Her parents variously tell her that she was left on the doorstep of her father's shop, that they found her in a rose garden or that they stole her.  This last is closer to the truth but it is not until her orphaned twin Naeko appears, that we learn the something of the real history.

Naeko lives in the forest outside Kyoto where work - hard manual labour - is focused on preparing and treating Japan's best cedar logs for top-end buildings.  Her father, engaged in the same work, brains himself falling out of a tree and for some reason Chieko is left - to be discovered and, frankly, abducted by Chieko's 'parents'.

The story is never fully resolved - this is no Shakespearian Comedy of Errors .  The son of one of Chieko's father's clients, an expert weaver, meets Naeko first unaware and again because he has, at Chieko's behest, woven her a forest-themed obi.  He proposes to Naeko who has a mind to refuse him because she perceives, almost certainly correctly, that he sees her as an 'illusion' of Chieko.

This sense of 'illusion' (which Chieko contests) dominates the final section of the book and the reader is left to wonder whether Naeko herself is in fact the principal illusion as, on the morning after her first and only visit to Chieko's parents at their home, she walks out into the gathering snowstorm.

The Old Capital, Counterpoint - paperback 2010 (first pub 1962).  Translated by J Martin Holman

  

RAGNAROK by A S BYATT

In the dining room, between the Iris Murdoch and the Margaret Drabble, was the collection of A.S. Byatt.  By eleven, I had free reign of the books in the house, but these three authors were always off limits, as "I wouldn't get anything out of them yet."  At seventeen I was still considered too young, or perhaps naïve would be a better word, and thus they languished on the book shelves as the last bastion of 'adult' books.  This is my first.

Owing to a slightly bohemian religious upbringing, I was intimately aware of the Norse myths from a young age.  Ragnarok could be described as a simple retelling, framed by the thoughts of a young, thin child in the second world war, but that sounds like a slight.  It is not meant to be.  Byatt has drawn out the most beautiful and violent of the stories, stripped them bare of the romantic veil cast over them by 19th century artists, and left them raw and angry and born of the hostile landscape of Iceland.

Ragnarok is in prose, but begs to be spoken rhythmically like a poem.  Nothing could be more fitting for the myths drawn from the Eddur, yet the effect is subtle.  Lists are employed to give both a grandeur to the scale of the world, and a magnified view of what the thin child finds interesting.  They read breathlessly, litanies divorced from the Church but tied in to the English sense of cultural Christianity felt by any person with a sense of history.

The end is inevitable, and if one is aware of the myths, the method of the end is known.  However, none of this stops Ragnarok - both the book and the final chapter - from giving a strong, empty feeling of being at, "The black undifferentiated sky, at the end of things."

Ragnarok, Canongate, 2011

MY LIFE AND HARD TIMES by JAMES THURBER

Thurber is always a pleasure.  In his drawings and even more so in his prose, this myopic, irascible Ohioan invites the reader to enter the impossibly comic world of his seemingly endless relatives - an invitation which, for me at least, is impossible to refuse.

My Life and Hard Times is Thurber at his best.  Consider the story of 'The Day the Dam Broke' leading all the inhabitants of Columbus, Ohio to "Go east! Go east!"  Everyone ran with the single exception of Thurber's grandfather who was convinced those fleeing had broken from the ranks defending the city against Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry and therefore, himself, stood firm until knocked unconscious and dragged away by his family.  A wonderful tale made better by the fact the Dam had not, in fact, broken.

Other stories such as 'The Night the Bed Fell' and 'The Night the Ghost Got In' are treasures but by far the best in this wonderful collection, first published in 1933, is 'More Alarms at Night', a combination of two events which led Thurber's father, described as a "tall, mildly nervous, peaceable gentleman," to entertain the thought that "all of his sons were crazy or on the verge of going crazy."

To extract this story is to diminish it, but I'll try anyway.  In the first half, Thurber's brother wakes his father up at three in the morning with the words, "Buck, your time has come" (Thurber's father was in fact called Charles).  This leads to a confrontation with mother on the stairs who is certain her husband was merely having a bad dream. 

Six months later, when all but father had forgotten this incident, Thurber who had been driven to distraction trying and failing to remember the name of the New Jersey city, Perth Amboy, wakes his father with the plea to:

"'...  name some towns in New Jersey quick!'  It must have been around three in the morning.  Father got up, keeping the bed between him and me, and started to pull his trousers on. 'Don't bother about dressing,' I said.  'Just name some towns in New Jersey.'  While he hastily pulled on his clothes - I remember he left his socks off and put shoes on his bare feet - father began to name, in a shaky voice, various New Jersey cities.  I can still see him reaching for his coat without taking his eyes off me.  'Newark,' he said, 'Jersey City, Atlantic City, Elizabeth, Paterson, Passaic, Trenton, Jersey City, Trenton, Paterson -.'  'It has two names', I snapped.  'Elizabeth and Paterson,' he said.  'No, no!' I told him, irritably.  'This is one town with one name but there are two words in it, like helter-skelter.'  'Helter-skelter,' said my father, moving slowly toward the bedroom door and smiling in a faint strained way which I understand now - but didn't then - was meant to humour me. " ...

My Life and Hard Times, 135pp, Penguin 1948.

JAMILIA by CHINGIZ AITMATOV

Jamilia is at its core a conventional love story but its setting in the steppe of Kyrgyzstan during WWII turns this tale of wounded silent boy meets married girl who brings him out of himself into something exceptional. 

Narrated by Seit, Jamilia's kichine bala, in other words the younger brother of her husband, the book describes the complex agragrian household of two closely related families where the older sons or jigits have all gone to fight the Germans.  The war comes closer first as the limping Daniyar makes an appearance and then as Jamilia, Seit and Daniyar are daily required to deliver war-effort wheat to the railhead.

It is this series of journeys by horse through the steppe that form the backbone of the story for it is here that Daniyar starts to sing, Jamilia to fall in love and Seit to become an artist.

As Daniyar starts to sing one evening:  "I was stunned. The steppe seemed to burst into bloom, heaving a sigh and drawing aside the veil of darkness, and I saw two lovers in its vast expanse.  They did not seem to notice me, it was as if I was not there.  I was walking along and watching as they, oblivious to the world, swayed together in tune with the song. ... Once more I was overcome by that indescribable excitement which Daniyar's singing always aroused in me.  All of a sudden I knew clearly what I wanted: I wanted to draw them."

A truly beautiful book.

Jamilia, 96pp, Telegram 2007 - translated by James Riordan.  SR

INTRODUCTION

The story, perhaps legend, behind Allen Lane setting up Penguin books is that looking through the offerings from a 'bookseller' at a railway station in the mid-30s, he could find nothing he wanted to read.  While this experience remains true for many of us today who do nothing about it, Sir Allen decided to produce a line of cheap, portable paperbacks with the results we all know.

This blog is not particularly about Penguin, nor is it per se about cheap books, but a bit about portability.  The team working on this blog - and we hope you'll join us - is united by the view that many books are too long, many books are far too long (Vikram Seth's, A Suitable Boy being a good example), that the massive 'holiday books' beloved of some publishers are an anathema and that any good or great author should, at least from time to time, be able to marshal his or her thoughts to produce a short novel, memoir or indeed history, of quality and sensitivity, of importance and durability, of literary merit and general appeal.

We do not attempt exactly to define a 'short book' except perhaps to say what it is not.  It is not a short story nor even, that contradiction in terms, a long short story ... but it might be a novella; it is not an essay nor is it (usually) one of a collection of tales that are commonly bound together (although it might be fair to exempt Conrad's three stories that make up 'Twixt Land and Sea in the Penguin Modern Classics edition - since these are excellent). It is not, in short (sorry), something that takes a long time to read even though once read it should stick in the mind for many a long day.

The aim of the blog is to list and comment on short books adding more as the weeks pass  Of course we aim to debate and dispute the particular qualities of each before (between ourselves) and after (across the Internet) it is posted here.  That said, there's a bigger and simpler purpose: we want to discover or recollect books that are, succinctly, short and deep and at the same time relatively easy to acquire in hard copy.

Why?  Because it'll be fun and stimulating.  We hope you agree.  Please post any suggestions for books to be included to: Theblogforshortbooks@gmail.com.