More books read recently

'A Favourite of the Gods' by Sybille Bedford

I had never heard of Sybille Bedford until Ruth picked up a biography of her a while back (Selina Hastings' An Appetite for Life) after reading a review of it. At around the same time, Mum’s book group read this novel as one of their book choices. Ruth recommends the biography, but as it doesn’t make much sense to me to read a biography of a writer without having read any of their books, I thought I would read this first. I seem to have written far too long and rambling a review of this moderately dull novel, but I can’t be bothered to edit any further so here it is.

The novel opens in the late 1920s. 15-year-old Flavia and her mother Constanza are on a train, travelling from Italy to Brussels. They have just crossed into France, where they are planning to change at Nice to pick up the express train, when Constanza discovers she has lost a ruby ring she was wearing. Seemingly most of the train’s staff get involved in looking for the ring, while Flavia and Constanza miss their stop at Nice (because Constanza refuses to get off the train without her ring) and carry on through various stops along the French coast. They eventually get off at a small unnamed coastal town where they book in to the local hotel. At Brussels, Constanza was to meet up with Lewis, the man she was due to marry, while Flavia was to carry on to England for educational purposes. However, the Prologue ends with Flavia noting that they stayed where they were for eleven years.

Part I is set in Rome and looks back over Flavia’s American grandmother Anna’s marriage to her father, a prince. It details, somewhat tediously, Anna’s wealth, beauty and abilities to charm anyone she comes across, and also relates how beautiful, spirited and clever her daughter Constanza was. Part I ends with Anna, having finally been told of her husband’s 20-year-long affair of which everyone else in Rome already knew, seeking legal advice and leaving Rome for London. She leaves her younger child Giorgio with his father, but takes Constanza with her, additionally setting up some legal thing that prevents Constanza’s father Rico from having any access to his daughter. Constanza has to say goodbye to her father, who has been a decent enough man to risk losing his daughter rather than use her as a bargaining chip. We feel sorry for Rico – at least, I did.

Part II is set in London, where Anna and Constanza have now settled. Constanza throws herself into London social life and has a good time. (We later learn that even Rico’s daughter knew about the affair of which her mother was oblivious.) In due course Constanza meets a young Englishman, Simon Herbert, who has lived in Rome and is acquainted with her father. World War I breaks out. After the end of the war, Simon asks Constanza for a divorce in order to marry his lover (Constanza has been taking lovers for a while now, but doesn’t seem about to request a divorce on the strength of that. Perhaps that was being Italian for you).

In Part III, Constanza flits about Europe. Anna continues taking a different house according to the season, before eventually settling back in Italy after the war ends. The story ends by joining up with the Prologue, with Constanza and Flavia living at the (possibly fictional) French fishing port of St-Jean-le-Sauveur. This section is pleasantly atmospheric, with talk of villas, sardines, red wine – and ends with Constanza meeting yet another new beau. (I admired Constanza’s distaste for being anyone’s wife, and unwillingness to be tied down – desires that, presumably, wealth would have made it much easier to indulge.)

I reasonably liked the book – in the sense that it’s well written, nothing wrong with it, etc – but it stops only just short of being quite boring. Bedford litters the novel with a number of Italian (and occasionally French) words that necessitated a pause while I asked Google to translate them. And even a few English words – while I consider myself to have a good vocabulary, I was stumped on “persiflage”.

I assume the title of the book refers to Constanza, the more-or-less heroine, though Constanza’s mother Anna also plays a significant part in the novel. Anna is the most atrocious person – she manipulates those around her by sulking, taking to her bed and refusing to eat whenever she is annoyed at something. She spitefully burns a letter from Rico seeking a brief audience with Constanza in London, threatening a court injunction to prevent him having access to his daughter, leaving Constanza to draw the conclusion that her father simply does not want to see her. After her death in the later stages of the novel, she delivers a coup de grâce by having hand-delivered to Constanza an envelope containing what turns out to be a revised version of her will leaving all of her considerable estate to Constanza’s feckless brother Giorgio as a last act of spite. I liked Constanza on the whole, though I wanted to shake her for some of her decision-making – she irritatingly agrees to be the Guilty Party in the divorce in order to save Simon’s fledgling parliamentary career when it is Simon who has requested the divorce and loses custody of Flavia to her mother as a result, and, more horrifically, when presented with Anna’s revised will after Anna’s death, considers that it is legal and she must abide by her mother’s wishes, even though it would have left her more or less destitute. Luckily, only Constanza and Flavia know about the revised will and, sensing her mother’s indecision, Flavia burns it and tells her mother it blew off the veranda into the sea. Thank God for Flavia.

A Favourite of the Gods was published in 1963. Sybille Bedford was born in 1911 in Germany, to wealthy parents, but seems to have lived most of her life elsewhere. This Spectator review of Hastings' biography calls it a soundtrack “to one version of the 20th century”, a reference to Bedford's privileged background and lifestyle. This novel’s moneyed heroines, who take houses and flats in whichever European city takes their fancy with no concern for the cost, seem to fit with that.

'Remarkable Creatures' by Tracy Chevalier

Enjoyable story based on the real-life fossil-hunting activities of Mary Anning in and around Lyme Regis in the first half of the nineteenth century. Chevalier outlines in a postscript which bits of the story are based on fact and where artistic licence was taken. The story focuses on the friendship between Anning and fellow fossil-hunter Elizabeth Philpot and is told from their alternating perspectives.

Elizabeth Philpot is one of three unmarried sisters living together in a cottage in Lyme Regis, funded by an allowance from their married brother John, a solicitor. The sisters have been obliged to leave London to live somewhere that will enable a reasonable standard of living; John is evidently under obligation to provide an annual allowance for them but this would not have stretched far in the capital. The younger Mary Anning is a working-class girl, the daughter of a cabinet-maker who dies prematurely leaving the family in poverty. Philpot first meets her outside Mary’s father’s workshop, tending a table of fossils to be sold as curiosities (“curies”). Despite their age and class difference, the two strike up a friendship based on their shared interest in fossils. Elizabeth focuses on collecting fossils of fish, to add to her personal collection; Mary, unable to indulge in such hobbies as collecting, looks for anything she might be able to sell to improve her family’s finances.

One day Mary finds what seems to be the skull of a much larger creature, an icthyosaurus (though Mary initially terms it a crocodile, and later an “ichie”), which attracts the attention of people beyond Lyme Regis. Much of the rest of the story focuses on Elizabeth’s attempts to ensure Mary gets fairly paid for her finds, which are by now enhancing others’ collections, and to get Mary recognition from the men-only world of fossil collecting and the scientific study of fossils; this culminates in Elizabeth stoutly travelling alone to London and trying to gain entry to a Geological Society meeting (women aren’t allowed in) in order to defend Mary against an accusation that she has faked a plesiosaurus skeleton by sticking together bits of two separate creatures.

It hadn't occurred to me that the question of what fossils represented might have raised thorny and controversial issues vis à vis Christian belief: if fossils were the bodies of creatures that no longer existed, did that mean that God could think better of some of his creations and allow them to die out? Her faith a bit shaken, Elizabeth consults the local vicar, who won’t have any truck with such notions and advises her that God placed the fossils in the rocks when he made them, in order to test people’s faith. Elizabeth leaves unconvinced, but with her faith in the vicar a bit shaken.

'The Rake's Mistress' by Nicola Cornick

A Mills & Boon Historical romance.

It’s 1803. Rebecca Raleigh is a glass engraver, living alone above her workshop in Clerkenwell. Rebecca learned her trade from her uncle, who ran the workshop and died a few months before the story opens. Since her uncle’s death, the business has lost custom and Rebecca has fallen on increasingly hard times. Her friend Nan gets her a lifeline in the form of a lucrative engraving commission from the Archangel Club, an exclusive London club for gentlemen of “exotic tastes”. After a meeting at the Archangel to discuss the commission, Rebecca is being driven home in one of the club’s coaches when she runs across Lord Stephen Kestrel, an upper-crust young man who has been the victim of a prank that has resulted in him being stranded in the street in a state of partial undress. Through this encounter with Stephen, Rebecca meets Stephen’s older brother Lucas, who initially wrongly assumes Rebecca to be a courtesan who has seduced his brother, leading to their having a fiery exchange within the carriage. Turning up at Rebecca’s workshop the next day to return the cloak she’d lent Stephen to cover himself, Lucas ends up placing an order for some engraved glass as a wedding present for another of his brothers. Lucas and Rebecca are increasingly overtaken by strong feelings for each other and, after rescuing Rebecca from a masked ball at which she has rejected the advances of the unpleasant Lord Fremantle, they spend a passionate night together.

However, although Lucas’ attraction to Rebecca is real enough, he has an additional motivation in pursuing an acquaintance with her. He and his brothers, led by their oldest brother Justin, Duke of Kestrel (yes, I know) are engaged in trying to crack a spy ring operating from the Suffolk ‘Midwinter’ villages, where the Kestrels’ home is. The spy ring communicates via a pictorial code and the code’s cipher is engraved on glass. Lucas has been doing the rounds of London’s glass engravers to try to identify the style of engraving that will match the examples of the code that the Kestrels have in their possession. In Rebecca’s workshop, he spots what he is pretty sure is the style of engraving they are looking for, on some pieces engraved by Rebecca’s late uncle George Provost. The Kestrels need to trace the identity of the person who placed those orders with the studio. Feeling guilty, and under pressure from the Duke to get more use out of Rebecca as she seems to be their only possible link to the spy ring, Lucas fesses up to Rebecca regarding his underlying motive to gain information from her. Rebecca is angry and lobs a good many fiery words at him. Lucas also declares that he wishes to marry her, and Rebecca tells him not to be so ridiculous. Lucas takes her by force to the Kestrels’ townhouse in Mayfair for a discussion with the Duke and the Kestrels’ friends Lord and Lady Newlyn. The outcome of these discussions is that Rebecca agrees to accompany the party to Suffolk, posing as a cousin of the Duke.

Lucas is convinced that Rebecca is telling the truth about her ignorance of anything to do with the spy ring, but senses that she is holding back information about her family background. Rebecca becomes agitated when questioned by Lucas about her brother Daniel, disclosing that Daniel is at sea but allowing Lucas to think that he is in the Navy when Lucas suspects this not to be the case. Additionally, both Lucas and Justin spot that Rebecca’s manner and level of assurance while in the Kestrels’ London home is not consistent with her being from a working background. In due course the Kestrel brothers find out that Rebecca’s family name is De Lancey, that her father was English gentry who married a French Huguenot girl and assumed her name as a way of sticking two fingers to his Parliamentarian father and that Rebecca's brother Daniel is a privateer and possible French spy. Lucas reacts badly to this and challenges Rebecca angrily, and they have another falling out.

The following day, while out in a nearby harbour town, Rebecca gets herself abducted by local gent Sir John Horton who is evidently aware of her true identity. Turns out John, plus local couple Lord and Lady Benedict, are the actual spies. They set sail in a yacht with Rebecca locked downstairs, but there’s heavy mist and the yacht runs aground. In a splendidly ridiculous sequence, Rebecca unscrews the glass of one of the portholes with her engraving scribe, climbs out, jumps into the water just as the yacht capsizes, and swims for it; as luck would have it, she is rescued by her brother’s ship which appears out of the mist in the nick of time and throws down a rope for her to climb up, which she manages to do despite presumably being weighed down by long skirts. Onboard, Daniel – who doesn’t spy for the French, he’s just an excitingly free-spirited outlaw – persuades Rebecca that Lucas is known to be an OK chap and that marrying him would probably be a good idea given that she’s poor and alone and all, and he (Daniel) is away at sea. On Rebecca's arrival back at Kestrel Court, Lucas declares his love for her and proposes again, and this time Rebecca agrees.

I enjoy the occasional romance novel and this isn’t a bad one. Lucas is a pretty attractive hero and the epilogue, in which Cornick additionally provides the austere Duke with a bit of romance, is a nice touch. TRM was apparently the third book in the ‘Bluestocking Brides’ series, the earlier two being The Notorious Lord (about Cory Newlyn) and One Night of Scandal (about the second Kestrel brother, Richard). (We learn on page thirteen of The Rake’s Mistress that Stephen Kestrel has two sisters in addition to his three brothers, but the sisters do not appear in the novel at any point. Maybe they do in the others. Or maybe I shouldn’t be too exacting towards a M&B). A close friend of mine may have just ordered both from the Amazon Marketplace. Well, these winter evenings are long and dark.