People often say “Oh, I love Brideshead” or “It was all a bit Brideshead”. I suspect most of them are referring to the hugely successful 1981 Granada Television adaptation rather than to Evelyn Waugh’s wistful 1945 novel.

I missed the TV version (although there was a 2008 film directed by Julian Jarrold which I did see) because it clashed with my weekly choir rehearsal. And convenient catch-up lay a long way into the future. Of course, I’ve seen bits of it since with glorious Castle Howard and Jeremy Irons looking very young. I read it for the first time then because everyone was talking about it and have come back to it now because they still are.

I think the first thing to remember is that this isn’t just a nostalgic look back to the heyday of the great country house. Almost no one in this novel is happy – or not for long. And of course the titular word “revisited” is crucial. The framing prologue and epilogue take Charles Ryder as narrator back to Brideshead as a serving officer during the second World War.. It is now a military training base and house and grounds are not being treated with respect, care or veneration. It’s a metaphor for the decline of aristocratic life.

In short – in case you’ve been on another planet for the last forty years  – Charles Ryder meets louche, lost, hedonistic, teddy bear-clutching Sebastian Flyte at Oxford in the 1920s and becomes involved with the rest of the Flyte family, who are Catholics, through visiting their ancestral home, Brideshead. “Dysfunctional” is putting it mildly. The head of the family, Lord Marchmain, is living in Venice with his mistress. Lady Marchmain is brittle and difficult. The heir, Brideshead, whom they call “Bridey” is reclusive while the daughters Julia (wildly attractive, married shallowly and adored by Charles) and Cordelia (at first a knowing child and later a stolid adult) are frothy and anxious – although they eventually find vocations of a sort. The most stable person at Brideshead is Nanny Hawkins who looked after them all and lives contentedly in the attic. Behind all this the house is the constant through the twenty years or so the book covers although country life as people like this knew it, is disappearing fast.

Rereading in 2021, I was surprised by the overt and obvious homosexuality given that this novel was written 22 years before the legalisation in 1967. There is clearly a sparky warmth between Sebastian and Charles which, whether it ever becomes physical or not, goes beyond ordinary friendship. And Anthony Blanche is a delicious character – camp, colourful and bitchy – who at one point spirits Charles off for a chat in what the latter later refers to as a “pansy bar”.

The tortured anguish of inherited Catholicism is fascinating too. If you are indoctrinated in childhood you are conditioned for life – as any Jesuit will tell you.  Waugh (Catholic himself) understands so well that common sense and science will never quite prevail. However much Julia wants and tries to lapse she is haunted by self-destructive guilt. Even Lord Marchmain, who has loudly rejected it all and, while he still can, refuses to see a priest, crosses himself on his deathbed. The structure of the novel gives us Charles, a non-Catholic rationalist, as the commentator on all the agony which residual faith –  however wavery – imposes on those who were born to it.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say “I love Brideshead” although Castle Howard which stood for it in the TV series is pretty scenic. I do think, though that it’s a thoughtful novel. And, as Waugh wrote in a 1959 preface he assumed, back in 1945, that country houses were doomed to disappear as monasteries had in the sixteenth century. He failed to forsee what he calls “the present cult of the English country house” adding that “Brideshead today would be open to trippers, its treasures rearranged by expert hands and the fabric better maintained than it was by Lord Marchmain”.

There are rumours of a new BBC dramatisation in the pipeline. A 21^st century take on it could pose new questions and introduce a new generation to a good novel. But as nearly always, I’d rather read than watch.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Arthur Sullivan by Ian Bradley

It’s Dickens at his angriest –  at least in the first half of the novel. He is relentlessly (excessively?) sardonic and the wry wit barely covers his outrage that innocent children should be treated as Oliver is in the workhouse and until he “escapes” to Fagin’s hell hole in London. Frying pans and fires come to mind. The “message” is pretty transparent.

This is an early work, published in serial form in 1937/9. Its author was only 25 at the outset. That accounts partly for the rawness – later novels such as Great Expectations and David Copperfield are better constructed and more measured. Oliver Twist isn’t even, technically, a Victorian novel. The first section was published in February 1837, four months before Victoria’s accession. At one point there are fears amongst Fagin’s lot that Noah Claypole will turn “king’s evidence” which makes you jump until you recall that we’re still in William IV’s reign.

Of course I’ve read Oliver Twist several times before – but not lately. As a theatre critic, however, I’ve seen numerous stage and TV adaptations and more  performances of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! over the years than you could shake a stick at. Inevitably such images are inclined to overlay  one’s memories of what Dickens actually wrote.

So it’s very enlightening to come back to it now and I tried very hard to put images of Harry Secombe, Ron Moody and Oliver Reed out of my head. Actually, entertaining and tuneful as Oliver! is, it’s a sanitised, over simplified, truncated travesty of the Dickens which inspired it.  It omits half the novel.

For a start both Fagin and Sikes, as Dickens created them, are utterly appalling men with few redeeming features: some of the nastiest villains in fiction. There’s nothing charismatic about either of them. Fagin, in particular, has no loyalty at all to anyone except himself and to a modern reader the idea of his living with and exploiting boys has sinister undertones which presumably couldn’t be made much of in 1837. Yet, how well Dickens understands human psychology. Being condemned to death by hanging finally costs Fagin his sanity as he sits in prison for those last few days – which I imagine was quite common. It’s actually pitiful, despite the revulsion we feel for him.  Sikes is haunted by Nancy as he tries to escape the consequences of murdering her – which makes him slightly more rounded because there is a shred of remorse in there somewhere.

Of course there are plot-holes. Although Oliver eventually gets some help from a tutor with reading and writing, he is already literate when he arrives in London. How come? No one has taught him and he hasn’t been to school. Then there are the usual Dickensian co-incidences. How likely is it that the house to which Sikes takes Oliver to burgle is the home of a young woman, Rose Maylie, who turns out to be his aunt? Or that she has an indirect connection with Mr Brownlow who just happens to be the victim of the first pocket  picking excursion Oliver is taken on? And just fancy Noah Claypole and Charlotte coming to London and immediately happening on the same gang which tried to absorb Oliver. And so it goes on. With Dickens, that’s the deal.

The casual anti-semitism grates. Of course a sensitive, sensible reader makes allowances for different cultural attitudes nearly two centuries ago but Fagin is strongly characterised for his Jewishness and frequently referred to as “The Jew” thus conflating his race with his villainy. Surely Dickens wasn’t trying to imply that all Jews are evil?

It’s a meaty novel and I’m really glad that I’ve reread it. What inspired me? It was the usual serendipity. I was preparing a talk about dogs in literature and wanted to check some references to Sikes and Bulls-Eye. That meant a thorough flick through. Within minutes, I was marvelling and resolved to read it properly – again. This happens to me a lot.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman

It has long been my contention – and I always stressed it to students – that the best way of acquiring eclectic general knowledge is to read lots of fiction. Every story has to have a setting and a background and there are bound to be things therein that you didn’t know. You, the reader, absorb facts unconsciously and without effort. Or to put that more succinctly just go with what my students used to call Mrs Elkin’s Mantra: “People who read books know things”.

Well I knew nothing whatever about the eighteenth century Huguenot silk weaving community in and around Spitalfields in London but I certainly do now thanks to Sonia Velton’s warming entertaining novel (2019) about two women who get caught up in it.

Esther is the non-Huguenot wife of a stern, unappealing – and ultimately hypocritical and vengeful –  third generation silk producer who now employs journeymen to weave for him. She is a secret artist who would desperately like to design silks but, conventionally, women are precluded from such work. The title refers to one of her designs, painstakingly mapped in squares for transfer to the loom.

Sara, daughter of a cook, is sent to London to employment but is intercepted by a ruthless female brothel keeper and works for some years as a prostitute. Then, for various reasons, she is enabled to move to Esther’s household as a maid. The tense relationship between these two very different women runs through the novel like a thread in one of the woven silks it describes.

As the plot unfolds we get, along with other things, the early days of trade unionism amongst bitter and belligerent weavers, several irregular liaisons, a horrifying account of childbirth and a great deal of corruption and self-interestedness. With one tragic exception the men do not, on the whole, come out of this story very well.

It’s a good read with lots of strong characters and I emerged reeling with what I’d learned. I’d never even thought about, for example, about what soon challenged this skill and craft of these workers – cheap imports of cloth like calico from India. Neither had I realised what a huge step it was for a man to complete his master piece and be accepted as member of a livery company rather than spending all his life doing piece work for someone else. And I certainly didn’t know that “cutting the silk” on the loom – vandalising the work to make a political point – was a hanging offence.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Walking with my sister recently, we bought takeaway cuppas in a waterside coffee shop to sustain us for the return route. On the shelf of donate-for-charity books by the counter was a pristine copy of The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (2018) which I hadn’t heard of at the time although it’s actually a runaway best seller. “You should read that” my sister said. “It’s really good both on adversity and on the South West Coast Path”. So we put something in the RNIB box and I took the book.

And I’m very glad I did because it’s the most uplifting book I have read in a very long time. Raynor Winn’s husband, Moth, has just been diagnosed with a  terminal illness; corticobasal degeneration (CBD) which is similar to Parkinson’s Disease. And, though error and misfortune, they are suddenly homeless and penniless in their fifties. It could very easily be yet another misery memoir. In fact it’s anything but.

Rather than demanding a council house or throwing themselves on the mercy of friends they decide,  very much against doctor’s advice, to attempt the 630 mile South West Coast Path with two backpacks and a flimsy tent. It’s an utterly bonkers decision by any standards but it turns out to be the making of them. They start at Minehead and walk westward, using Paddy Dillon’s book The South West Coast Path as their guide although she constantly jokes against themselves that they rarely achieve anything like his daily mileage.

There are many moments of cold, hunger and anxiety but rarely despair and she is very wryly funny about the characters they meet on the path – especially the young bouncy ones with their expensive equipment who won’t believe how far “the old backpackers” have come. It’s an account of both endurance and determination constantly dogged by, literally, having to count every penny. How many times on the journey did they ask for free hot water and then put their own teabag in it?

In many ways the “hero” of this inspiring memoir is the coast path itself as it winds along the rugged coast of north Somerset, Devon and Cornwall and then – via wet, windy, misty Lands End and The Lizard eastwards towards Dorset. In fact they stopped in south Cornwall and went to live and work on a friend’s farm in another part of the country for a few months. When they returned to walk the last few hundred miles (in the opposite direction) from Poole, it feels like a homecoming. On one level this is a travel book (think Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods or Tom Chesshyre’s From Source to Sea) and will probably inspire many people to explore the South West Coast Path especially this year when opportunities to travel abroad seem pretty uncertain.

But The Salt Path is much more than that. This is about two people – who’ve been in love since their teens – striving together to find a way of moving forward under almost unimaginably difficult circumstances.  The underlying love story is what will stay with me, longest I think. This is definitely a happy book not a sad book.

Raynor Winn is now a regular long distance walker who writes about nature and homelessness. I shall soon read her second book The Wild Silence (2020) to find out more about her life before and after her astonishing walk. Such is the immediacy and openness of her writing that  she now feels now like an old friend  with whom I want to catch up.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Blackberry and Wild Rose by Sonia Velton

This is one of those novels which hits you so hard between the eyes that it permanently changes you and your attitude. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) is another example. So, in a different way, is Matthew Kneale’s The English Passengers (2000).  My overriding memory of reading A Fine Balance when it was first published  back in 1995 was being left gasping at the indomitability of the human spirit.  And twenty six years later it had exactly the same life-affirming effect.

We’re in – or near – an unnamed Indian city in 1975 when Indira Gandhi has just declared a state of emergency. Two tailors – uncle and nephew – have lost just about everything in their home village, thanks to corruption and cruelty so they travel into the city to find work. There their lives become tangled up with that of a youngish widow desperately trying to manage a small business and remain independent when everything is stacked against her. The fourth main character is a student who becomes friendly with the tailor nephew and lodges in the widow’s fairly humble home.

It’s a big brick of a book, Dickensian in its scope and proportions. Mistry gradually unwinds the back stories of all four, introducing as he goes a large colourful cast of minor characters such as Shankar the cheerful, friendly beggar whose body was “adjusted” in babyhood so that, legless he uses a ground level trolley and his boss Beggarmaster who emerges as a more complex character than first appears. Then there’s a professional hair seller, the rent collector and the man with the performing monkeys and children along with various relations and officials.

Beneath all this is a government employing many officious, professionally ruthless, people to “beautify” the city which means clearing out the homeless and – effectively – forcing sterilisations on almost anyone they can round up. The latter is a box ticking exercise and the authorities don’t care much who it is – from men in their eighties to lads in their late teens hoping to marry. And even in the sterilisation camps there is vengeance and vendetta.

And yet, whatever appalling thing befalls Mistry’s characters, this book is not ultimately a tragedy. The titular “fine balance” is between hope and despair and it’s the former which, despite everything, prevails most of the time. It’s a compelling read too. You might emerge from it feeling battered – as I have done twice – but you’ll also feel warm admiration for people who can simply “keep buggering on” with a smile. It’s a page-turner  horror story presented with appealing optimism.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn.