regshoe | Entries tagged with author: w. e. johns

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier (1936). This is one of three books to which Annick Trent compares an upcoming romance novel, which inspired me to pick up the copy I'd had sitting on my shelves unread for eight or nine years. I got about a third of the way into it, and was rather enjoying the atmosphere and the dramatic adventure—smugglers (and worse) in early nineteenth-century Cornwall—but had misgivings about a few things... and it was at this point that I began dimly to recollect why I'd left the book unread on my shelves for years after liking Rebecca and The House on the Strand, which was that I'd heard something about what else was in it besides the thrilling adventure story, and, oh dear.

Well, I seldom DNF a book, so now I can report accurately on exactly what else is in it:

Girls, find yourself a man who treats you WRONG! Rude, careless, disrespectful, sexist—the lot. Got enough better judgement to realise you don't actually want to be with him?—perhaps even to have other priorities which you'd like to choose over him? Irrelevant! Attraction is everything; judgement, reasoned wishes and in fact all other desires are nothing, because you are a Silly Irrational Woman and it's all you'll ever be capable of. Happy ending! :)

P.S. weird-looking disabled people are evil.

I was going to say 'the one thing that could be said for it is that it's got a good strong sense of place', but then in the final chapter du Maurier manages to turn even that into something screamingly offensive. Impressively terrible.

Worrals in the Wilds by W. E. Johns (1947). The war is over, but Worrals and Frecks still find plenty of adventure, here by flying off to rescue Bill, who's gone missing in South Africa in mysterious gold-mine-related circumstances. This was a fun adventure, as always; it contains some great Worrals moments, some nice Worrals/Frecks material, and I was internally cheering when I realised that Worrals was going to get to steal yet another vehicle. However, it's now been three books in a row with some serious racism issues, and for that and another reason I think that probably ought to be it for me with this series. It's been fun, and I may well re-read the first four books at some point! Thanks to Biggles fandom for the introduction. :)

How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman (2013). I knew Goodman from the BBC Historical Farm television series, and this book has a similar sort of sensibility to 'Victorian Farm' and 'Victorian Pharmacy', being all about everyday life for ordinary Victorians. It's structured around a typical day, beginning with chapters on personal hygiene (getting up and having a wash) and clothing (getting dressed) and continuing through meals, housework, jobs and the workplace, childcare and schools, leisure activities, and finally sex and sexuality (going to bed). It's a fascinating overview, full of interesting titbits of information; Goodman writes engagingly and makes great use of her own hands-on historical experience, describing what it's really like to operate Victorian machinery, wear Victorian sanitary towels, do the laundry Victorian-style, etc. The overall impression, besides the hardship and poverty of it all, is of how variable and complicated everything was: the book gives a good sense of how practices and opinions changed over the period and how different ones coexisted. However, touching on such a wide range of topics means it can't explore anything in very great depth; and the odd lack of references prevents the reader from easily following up on things they want to read more about, which this sort of book would otherwise have been perfect for. There's not even a general 'further reading' list! Very disappointing, though otherwise I do recommend the book.

Call for the Dead by John le Carré (1961). Various thoughts about this, in rough order of relevance:

This first of the George Smiley novels is apparently a relatively light, gentle book, before things get really grim and harrowing later on in the series. This book deals with, among other things: the long tragedy and legacy of the Holocaust, and the motivations of Jewish survivors who go on to become Communist spies; the British protagonist's recognition of the complex and somewhat-sympathetic motives of his enemies in that context, including one who was his own colleague during the war; the all-but-murder of one of the antagonists by the protagonist (besides the three unambiguous murders that have already happened), and protagonist's serious feelings about that; two instances of near-fatal head injuries sustained by major characters in attacks; AND the protagonist's complicated heartbreak over his wife just having left him. I'm really not sure I want to know what the rest of the series is like.
It is also an enjoyable twisty murder mystery, but I think that was all a bit much.
Le Carré has a few annoying modern prose style habits, e.g., his use of present-tense set phrases ('that is', 'God knows', etc.) in a past-tense narrative: that can work if you have an omniscient narrator with a clear voice, who can narrate events in the past and also address the reader in the present, but I don't think it works when your past-tense narration is clearly inside a character's head, as it is here.
I am kind of shipping Smiley and Mendel.
Book design thoughts. This is the first book in the series which also includes The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and with the edition I got from the library you will not forget this, because its front cover has 'THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD' on it in letters only somewhat smaller than the title of the actual book, with 'An earlier work from the author of' in much smaller letters above that. However it also has the wordcount on the front cover (45,000; gosh, this book is dense), an innovation which has my cautious approval.
I cannot figure out how this tax evasion/money-laundering (?) scheme works, and it's maddening. Can anyone else make the numbers add up? The speaker runs a car hire business; the person hiring the car is not in on the scheme; quid = pound, bob = shilling (1/20th of a pound), tenner = ten pounds:

'Bloke wants a car for a day. You take twenty quid deposit in notes, right? When he comes back he owes you forty bob, see? You give him a cheque for thirty-eight quid, show it on your books as a loss and the job's worth a tenner. Got it?'

(Now contemplating a post-war AU where Worrals becomes a spy instead...)

Here we go, then! I'm up to fifteen books in my reviews backlog, so I'd better post it before it gets any longer...

( Thoughts on books of the last couple of months )

There we go! That is rather too many recent dates, I think; perhaps I should read something nicely Victorian (or earlier?) next.

Still catching up...

Deephaven and Selected Stories and Sketches by Sarah Orne Jewett (1877-1884). This is a collection including the sort-of-novella Deephaven and a series of shorter pieces of writing. Deephaven, very much like The Country of the Pointed Firs, is narrated by a lady from Boston who goes to spend the summer in an old port town on the coast, gets to know the locals and writes about the place and people in lovely descriptive detail—but it adds the interesting new element that our narrator takes this holiday with her dear friend, another young single Bostonian lady whose family come from the town, and the descriptions of Deephaven itself are occasionally interrupted by passages about this friend's many admirable virtues. I really enjoyed it, and it's historically fascinating in several ways. The stories and sketches are a bit of a mixed group, mostly more descriptive writing about settings and people and similarly beautiful. Of course I wasn't expecting a story called 'Tom's Husband' to be anything other than het; in fact it's about a married couple who swap gender roles with mixed success, and has an interestingly ambivalent ending.

Kirsteen by Margaret Oliphant (1890). Oh, I like Margaret Oliphant. I like her a great deal indeed. Subtitled 'The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years Ago', Kirsteen is about the Douglas family, who live in Argyll in the early nineteenth century, and the daughter Kirsteen's adventures as she escapes from the house ruled by her tyrannical father and makes her own way in the world. It's a fascinating moment in Highland history, when the effects of the Jacobite past are still keenly felt and yet the Highlands are increasingly integrated into the wider British and imperial society. Kirsteen's grandfather was out in the '45 and the resulting loss of the family's old lands obsesses her father, who has regained something of a fortune through slavery and now sends his sons out to postings in the East India Company (while ignoring his daughters); the Duke and Duchess of Argyll (carefully never named, but it's clear who they are) are important side characters, and their worldly success is contrasted with the Douglases' obscurity—but all the Douglases, including Kirsteen, are absolutely sure in their old Highland pride that they're as good a family as the Campbells. Kirsteen ends up running away from home and making her fortune as a mantua-maker in London, which provides an opportunity for some complicated class difficulties, besides obviously being an interesting and unusual thing for a female character in her position to do. And then there's the other really interesting, unusual and admirable thing about this book, which its romance.

Spoilery discussion:

At the beginning of the book Kirsteen has an understanding with a lad from a neighbouring family who, like her brothers, is going off to India to fight in imperial wars. She waits faithfully for him... and then he's killed in battle. And she swears she'll remain single all the rest of her life, and then she does just exactly that. And—this relationship is genuinely important to Kirsteen, and she's devastated by her lover's death and it's treated as a real tragedy for her; and yet Oliphant is pretty clearly strongly suggesting, through her descriptions of Kirsteen's own life and her reactions to the more conventional lives of other female characters, that Kirsteen is ultimately happier and better off in her single life than she would have been had her lover lived and she married him. The book ends with her as a successful and happy old maid in Edinburgh years later. This is farther even than Hester went, and I really, really admire Oliphant for writing it! I wonder what contemporary readers made of it.

The insightful, precise emotional descriptions of Hester are here too, and overall it is a really, seriously good book and you should read it.

Surfacing by Kathleen Jamie (2019). Picked up from browsing the nature-writing-adjacent selection at the library. This book is a collection of essays, a mixture of shorter descriptive pieces about specific moments from Jamie's experiences significant in a small or large way, and a few longer pieces. I found the shorter stuff difficult to get on with—Jamie is primarily a poet, and I don't have the kind of brain for modern poetry, and I think these were a bit too much like it for me—but I enjoyed the two longer sections on archaeological digs which Jamie has visited. One is in a remote village in Alaska, where the local Yup'ik people are involved in an excavation of their ancestors' five-hundred-year-old settlement; the other is a Neolithic/Bronze Age site in Orkney, along similar lines to the more famous Skara Brae. Lots of fascinating stuff about both of them and their meaning in the world, highly worth learning about and beautifully written about here.

Worrals Goes East by W. E. Johns (1944). The fifth book in the Worrals series and another terribly dramatic adventure. Here Worrals and Frecks have travelled out to Syria to investigate a Nazi propaganda-smuggling operation suspected to be being carried out by women—hence, women are best placed to investigate it. The superior officer who's supposed to be overseeing the investigation perhaps doesn't really grasp this point, because he keeps trying to undermine Worrals and Frecks's efforts on account of they're just girls, what can they possibly know or do or etc., but happily Worrals and Frecks are more than a match for both the enemy and sexism. Given the setting there's a certain amount of period racism, but besides that the adventure plot is exciting and devious as ever. It's also quite a bit more violent than previous Worrals books; Worrals actually shoots a man dead at one point, and the climax of the book is a battle between our heroes and the propaganda gang. There is an excellent Worrals/&Frecks moment where Worrals saves Frecks from eating a poisoned sweet at the last moment and reacts like this to learning that Frecks is all right: Worrals got up, and with a hand that trembled poured herself a drink of water. “I don’t think I ever came nearer to losing my head in all my life,” she said in a strained voice. Definitely a good idea to keep going with this series!

Sweet Thames Run Softly by Robert Gibbings (1940). An account of a trip made by Gibbings down the Thames by rowing-boat just before the outbreak of the Second World War—or, at least, that forms the basic structure of the book, but Gibbings's writing is as meandering as the Thames itself and he keeps wandering off down side-paths: memories from his childhood in Cork, anecdotes about academic colleagues, bits of natural history of which sightings on the river remind him. As nature writing it's a very good book, detailed and creative; Gibbings observes brilliantly and writes beautifully about the wildlife and scenery of the river. And I did enjoy the rambling style and random tangents. Unfortunately Gibbings is also a straight man from the early twentieth century and very sexist in a particularly skin-crawling sort of way sadly typical of that class of people. The parts of the book that don't involve describing women are genuinely very good, but that did rather let things down.

Worrals on the War-Path by W. E. Johns (1943). The fourth Worrals book, and just as exciting an adventure as ever. In this one the main plot is instigated directly by Worrals, who suggests an ingenious scheme for flying planes from Britain to Malta: the flight is too far to do in one leg and France is occupied by the Nazis, but Worrals—making use of her ever-expanding pre-war backstory, now looking slightly improbable for the eighteen-year-old she apparently was in the first book—suggests making a secret stopover base in the Cévennes, where she once spent a month's holiday, and she and the loyal Frecks go to France and make preparations to receive and refuel the planes. Of course things don't go entirely according to plan, and Worrals and Frecks have to contend with various dastardly foes and cooperate with old friends, some more expected than others. Actually only about three-quarters of the book is taken up with the adventure plot; the rest consists of lovely and detailed descriptions of French geography. I knew very little about the Cévennes before reading this book, but wow, that really is a dramatic landscape, a setting worthy of a Worrals book; there's also an interval in the Camargue, described very memorably, and I now want to go birdwatching there. This book contains 155 instances of the word 'said', or one for every 13 lines of dialogue; for a comparison, the figure for Flight of the Heron is about 1 in 5, which is not actually as dramatic a difference as I was expecting, but does show Johns's style pretty clearly.

The Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby (1927). I always find when I read a new Holtby book that it's very like and yet very unlike the others I've read. This one has a rather different focus from e.g. The Crowded Street: it follows Joanna Burton (huh, I've only just realised she has the same surname as Sarah in South Riding) from her carefree youth through her hasty marriage during the First World War, her husband's illness from a combination of TB and gas attacks and the struggles of their life on a farm in the North Riding after the war, where most of the plot takes place. A forestry camp is set up in the dale with workers from Finland and various eastern European countries, causing various dramas in the local village and for Joanna, especially after the camp's interpreter, a Hungarian named Paul Szermai, moves into Joanna's house as lodger. (She repeatedly compares Szermai to characters from ballads, particularly Tam Lin, which I liked). From here the drama develops. The story is concerned with issues like the interactions between men and women and to what extent they are desirable and/or inevitable and the tension between the forestry workers and the xenophobic locals against the background of post-war European politics, and Holtby shows the insightful understanding towards her characters that's also familiar from her other books. The ending is perhaps a little over-dramatic in a similar way to the ending of Anderby Wold; between that and some off-putting plot elements (squicky in the moment; perhaps seriously dodgy if one thought about them at more length, or perhaps Holtby is making some kind of point about those gender issues), I sort of lost emotional investment in the story. I don't want to revisit that, so I won't be ebooking this one after all. By the way, the street after which it's named is real, which is rather neat; I also like how Holtby uses the same set of fictionalised place names in all her books about the ~~East~~ South Riding.

And the remainder of The Road Not Taken: How Britain Narrowly Missed A Revolution by Frank McLynn (2012), of which I read the first part earlier this year. The remaining chapters covered the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 40s, and the General Strike of 1926. I did not find these as interesting as the earlier part, especially the General Strike—to which McLynn devotes four chapters, much more than any of his other missed revolutions; political history that recent is too much like how politics still works now, and depressingly reminiscent of the news. But it was good to read the rest of the book and get more of a sense of McLynn's point about the development through history of these failed revolutions, although the high-level political-historical theorising at the end went rather over my head. McLynn goes over various explanations for why Britain, in contrast to other countries, has never had a real revolution—including the hierarchy of society and the place of the monarchy; the avoidance of disruption caused by foreign invasion (including a weird digression about freak waves at sea to explain why invading Britain has historically been so difficult); early industrialisation and the resulting non-survival of a peasant class into the modern era; and various others, and I think ends up at the conclusion that it's complicated. All good context for those Jacobite chapters. McLynn has also written what I believe is regarded as the definitive biography of Charles Edward Stuart, so I may see if I can track that one down at some point.

Worrals Carries on and Worrals Flies Again by W. E. Johns (both 1942). These are the second and third Worrals books, but I had a bit of a bother working out which order to read them in. Faded Page lists Flies Again as the second book in the series but Wikipedia says Carries On comes first; the mystery was resolved, however, by this Worrals website, which explains that Flies Again was published in book form first but Carries On was written earlier, having been serialised in a magazine. So there you go; I decided to read Carries On first, and it is clearly set earlier. Hooray for dedicated and informative old book fansites! Anyway—both books are filled with thrilling adventures, action and drama and excitement, spies, aeroplanes, secret passages (I especially liked the underground secret-passage-cum-canal along which the characters make an escape in a boat at the end of Flies Again) and so on. Worrals and Frecks continue to be a great team, and there's a lovely moment in Flies Again where Frecks sees Worrals's plane crash and thinks she's died and is distraught, but then it turns out Worrals wasn't in the plane and she's fine and they are happily reunited. Worrals theoretically has a boyfriend now, but Johns is either very delicate or simply perfunctory about actually detailing romantic content and it's ignorable (and he's a nice enough lad and I like them as friends, so this is ideal!). Flies Again is sadly marred by some ableism (there's a rather horrible grim irony in having your heroically Nazi-fighting characters say things like 'I don’t mind Nazis, but I draw the line at having a half-wit around.'—yeah, Johns, you know who else feels that way about 'half-wits'???... but never mind). Altogether the series continues good fun. Also it's becoming very noticeable that Johns is one of those authors who hates and shuns the word 'said', and uses as many colourful replacements as he can think of; in a more serious book this would be annoying but as it is it kind of becomes part of the charm.

The Wrong Set and Other Stories by Angus Wilson (1949). Apparently Angus Wilson's writing is full of insightful satire and brilliant detailed observation, and he was also notable for being openly gay in the mid-twentieth century, so I was looking forward to trying his books, but unfortunately this one did not work for me at all. I think I can see why people who like it do like it—there is a lot of very precisely-observed social and character detail—but as it is, the whole thing just felt unappealingly, grimly sordid in a way a lot of 'modern' twentieth-century stuff does, and at no point did I really feel any reason to care about any of the characters or what happened to them. (Perhaps I'd have enjoyed it more if I'd been more familiar with the specific nuances of class, politics, culture etc. that Wilson is portraying or satirising, but perhaps not; e.g. compare Mary Renault, goodness knows a lot of her details fly right over my head but, whatever her faults, convincing me to care about the characters is not one of them). A disappointment; I might try one of his novels at some point, but maybe not for a while.

And I re-read The Gleam in the North by D. K. Broster (1927), as material for my Kidnapped crossover WIP, which is set in 1752-3 and uses some bits of plot from it (or at least I re-read most of it; I skipped the more upsetting bits, which are not relevant to the fic anyway). I feel about it pretty much the same way I did the first time: as a book it's a bit of an oddly-structured jumble, as a sequel to Flight of the Heron it'll never do, but Broster knew exactly what she was doing with the story of Archibald Cameron and the tragedy of the final section is brilliantly written. ...some mere transient farewell, some valediction on the brink of an earthly sea, some handclasp ere crossing one of their own Highland lochs when, as so often, the mist was hanging low on the farther shore.... I had tears in my eyes at the end, again. And it's given me plenty of stuff for the fic, as well as further avenues of relevant historical research, which are already proving interesting!

I'm a bit behind on my reading posts, so this is the beginning of a catch-up! Since my last post I've also re-read The Wounded Name by D. K. Broster and read Villette by Charlotte Brontë, but I think those both want their own posts—and Villette, a very strange and captivating book, could do with a bit more mulling over before I write about it—so I shall leave them for now.

Aurora Floyd by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1863). I decided to read this one because a) it had been sitting around on my e-reader for ages, after I read and enjoyed Lady Audley's Secret some years ago and b) I kept mixing it up with Aurora Leigh (the poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, quoted at some length by D. K. Broster in The Yellow Poppy), and I thought perhaps if I read them both I'd be able to remember the difference. Anyway! This is a sensation novel, and very excitingly sensational it is. Aurora Floyd, our heroine, is the daughter of a rich banker and an actress of humble origins, whom the banker saw on stage, fell head over heels for and married. Apparently this dubious ancestry makes her a good sensation novel character: she's wilful and cheerfully unconventional, bewitchingly beautiful, passionate about horses and racing, and she has a definite flair for making dramatic and dramatically bad choices in life. Aurora's mother dies when she is a baby, and we meet her as a young woman living with her father at his grand house in Kent and being courted by two rival suitors, a proud Cornishman and a jovial Yorkshireman. But there is a mysterious Dark Secret in Aurora's past, which rears its head to ruin one of her love affairs and turns up again after she marries the other suitor; the drama resulting from this forms the plot of the second two volumes, and finally and rather unexpectedly turns into a murder mystery—an early example, five years before The Moonstone, and it was kind of cool getting to see the mystery/detective genre developing out of the sensation genre in real time, as it were. At last Aurora's secret comes out, with dramatic consequences...

I enjoyed the book; Braddon is very good at sensation novel drama, and as omniscient narrator she often goes off into entertaining long, eloquent tangents on literature, morals and society. (My favourite is one that comes just after Aurora's marriage and amounts to 'well, it's customary for novels to end with the happy marriage, but that's silly! People's lives don't stop being full of interesting incident when they marry; why do we ignore the potential of the rest of our characters' existence? I'm not going to!') It is rather spoiled by some silly prejudices; the main villains of the book, set against Aurora's wealth and happiness, are a widowed and economically precarious governess/companion and an intellectually disabled servant dismissed from his lifelong post, and there could have been a good point in there about how marginalised people become embittered by mistreatment and resort to the wrongs society gives them plenty of incentive to commit, but Braddon takes the simplistic 'nope, they're just evil!' angle, even denying the murderer the more interestingly-complicated motive they could have had.

The Governess; Or, The Little Female Academy by Sarah Fielding (1749). This is apparently the first purposely-written children's novel in English, as well as the first boarding-school story, so I decided to give it a try and see how that excellent genre began. It takes place at a girls' school run by the aptly-named Mrs Teachum, and is almost mathematically precise in structure. Each chapter takes place during one day, and in each our narrator gives us a description of one girl who then tells her life story, retailing how she used to have some moral fault, which she overcame to become a good, well-behaved eighteenth-century child and model pupil. This is interspersed with stories—fairytales and a play—read by the eldest girl to her classmates, and discussions of the moral lessons to be drawn from each story. It is, er, kind of didactic. Much improving, edifying eighteenth-century morality for young girls is inculcated, some of it good (don't get into fights with your schoolfellows over who should get the nicest apple in the basket; don't be silly and vain; tell the truth; take responsibility for your actions) and some of it horrifying (obey your parents in everything; don't ever dream of the wicked evil of thinking for yourself in anything at all—I'm only slightly exaggerating the wording here; remember that fairytales are sources of moral lessons, and you mustn't get all excited about fantasy stuff like giants and magic because they're not real and that's bad; you can be upset if your cat dies, but don't be too upset because you owe your parents the pleasing sight of a happy, carefree child no matter how you actually feel). An interesting window into the eighteenth-century moral mind; in some ways it feels much like a children's version of A Description of Millenium Hall, with the all-female community engaged in rational and improving occupations and discoursing upon duty and morality amongst themselves and to the reader. Genre-wise, it's clearly a much earlier development than Tom Brown's School Days, with very little plot and only a bit in common with later school stories.

Worrals of the W.A.A.F. by W. E. Johns (1941). Yes, I have been convinced to read W. E. Johns! Not Biggles, though, that's too many books, but the idea of exciting adventure novels with female main characters—and only ten of them—was very appealing, so I gave this one a try. It is indeed a very good exciting adventure novel. Our intrepid heroine, Joan 'Worrals' Worralson, is a pilot in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force who starts the book wishing she had some more exciting things to do than ferrying planes back and forth. Pretty soon she does, as she and her best friend Betty 'Frecks' Lovell uncover a dastardly plot by some German spies and get into increasingly dramatic adventures: they investigate and discover more about the plot; Worrals is kidnapped by the spies and Frecks goes to rescue her; there are hidden airfields and secret passages and cunning plans in plenty. It's a very efficient book: not much more than a hundred pages long, it packs in a lot of twisting and turning action, a surprising amount of character detail and some commentary on the sexism Worrals faces and triumphantly refutes. I especially liked the interaction between Worrals—intrepid, clever and fearless—and Frecks—a bit silly, sometimes afraid but finding courage to save the day and/or Worrals. I wouldn't call it very femslashy, but there are definitely possibilities there. The only thing that slightly marred it for me was a feeling that a then-contemporary Second World War setting is both too recent and too serious for me to enjoy a dramatic adventure novel quite as well as e.g. something written in the nineteenth century and set in the eighteenth. However, it's a good, fun book and I intend to continue with the series!