TENNIS AND THE MASAI by NICHOLAS BEST

Nicholas Best's short novel about a young schoolmaster and wannabe soldier, coming of age at a prep school in post-Independence Kenya's Masai country, is no masterpiece but it is a fine light comedy and should be better known.

The book's strength lies with its cast of eccentric characters including the headmaster of Haggard Hall, Desmond Gale, an ex-army man and former adventurer, "of a type well known in Kenya", the Padre with his enthusiasm for racing pigeons (notably 'Siege of Paris'), Gentleman's Relish and cricket, Lady Bullivant a brook-no-nonsense, riding-to-hounds colonial of a type familiar to viewers of the TV series 'Two Fat Ladies', and the regularly absconding pupil, Smith-Baggot, who through the book's pages seems to spend as much time in the bush as he does in the classroom (but nonetheless, with a certain amount of 'help' does get a Common Entrance to King's School, Canterbury).

I have yet to mention the book's principal figure, Martin Riddle - the young schoolmaster - whose move from Purley Way in Surrey to Haggard Hall (and back again) creates the framework which supports the text.  Riddle is perhaps a little obvious, a mummy's boy who fails his Army entrance tests primarily because of a lack of self-confidence but who, responding to the force of circumstance, does rather well in Kenya and is thus set up for the future.

But I should include, primarily for the joy of the succinct introductory description of her, the school's matron Mrs Fisk, a former air stewardess. "She was in her early thirties, heavily made-up, with a hairstyle that spoke of private fantasy."

And I should also include at least one of the school's retainers, Mogadishu, an anti-Catholic and the only one of the Africans who knows how to roll the cricket pitch properly.  

Thoroughly enjoyable.  While not in the league of school novels by Waugh or, indeed, Huxley, Tennis and the Masai certainly lives with Ellis's AJ Wentworth BA and benefits immeasurably in being set far beyond England.

Tennis and the Masai by Nicholas Best, Hutchinson, 1986 176pp.    

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