Six Degree of Separation: November 2020

Six Degrees of Separation is hosted by Kate of booksaremyfavouriteandbest.com.

This month we begin with any book with which we have ended one of our previous Six Degrees posts. 

I am going to start with one of my most loved 'coming of age' novels, Dodie Smith's wonderful I Capture the Castle, which I wrote about in September. This is what I said then:

'A stepmother who isn't at all evil forms part of the menage in Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle (again set in the 1930s.) Topaz has married the narrator's father after the death of his first wife, and lives with him and his family in a run-down castle in Suffolk. She is a Bohemian artist's model who likes to commune with nature and is given to swimming naked in the moat by moonlight. We are told that there are two portraits of her in the Tate Gallery, and her style has been described as;

Grace Coddington-meets-Veela (Esme Hogeveen, Garage, 24 November 2019)

Topaz (brilliantly played by Tara Fitzgerald in the 2003 film) has a good relationship with her stepchildren, and is determined to help her husband to overcome his 10 year writer's block so that the family can be returned to some sort of solvency. She's a fabulous, independent, generous, character.'

The narrator of I Capture the Castle is Cassandra Mortmain, and in the course of the book she too grows from a naive girl into an independent woman.

In Dorothy Baker's novel, Cassandra at the Wedding, (1968) Cassandra Edwards is travelling from Berkeley, where she is a brilliant, brittle, graduate student, to her widowed father's ranch for the nuptials of her identical twin Judith. The girls' father is a retired philosophy professor who now spends most of his time drinking; also living at the ranch is the girls' rather more empathetic grandmother. The girls shared an apartment throughout their undergraduate careers. Judith, a pianist, then moved on to the Juillard school in New York, leaving Cassandra alone in the flat with the grand piano that they had purchased jointly. Cassandra believed she and Judith had a very close relationship, and covertly assumed this would remain exclusive. Now that Judith is about to marry, Cassandra is determined to win her back.  

Along with Cassandra's relationship with Julia - and as identical twins this is already complicated - runs the issue of Cassandra's own sexuality. Although it is only ever referred to obliquely, Cassandra is gay, and, in the context of the times, this is a major issue for her;

'no one of my grandmother's temperament and sensibilities can understand what it's like to be bound to a way of life like ours - a situation we inwardly glory in, but one that we have to protect at every turn from a menacing mass of clichés that are thrust on us from the outside.'

Cassandra is a powerful character. She is manipulative and volatile, alcoholic, prone to dramatic scenes and ridiculous plans - but although I'm not sure I'd like to meet her, she is immensely magnetic and interesting.

This is a razor-sharp study of a dysfunctional family, and in particular of a neurotic woman whose hold on reality becomes ever more fragile.  Even on her way home, Cassandra contemplates jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, and later, when she cannot have her way, she once again turns to self-harm - with results that are in one way pure black comedy. The New York Review of Books described  Cassandra at the Wedding as 'a dazzlingly intense novel' and I agree wholeheartedly with that accolade.

Not all weddings are fraught with psychological complexities, but almost every wedding involves a few hiccups. In Posy Simmonds The Chocolate Wedding, we meet the usual brilliantly observed cast of Simmonds characters, this time at the country home of little Lulu's grandparents. Lulu is to be bridesmaid to her aunt, and preparations are in full swing for the big day. When Lulu and her little brother Willy are told to get out of the way and play with their toys, Willy ends up climbing onto the table and removing the tiny sugar bride, leaving the groom deserted. Lulu, who has filled her suitcase with her Easter chocolate supply, overindulges, is sick in the night and unable to go to the wedding. While everyone else is at the church, she has a dream - one in which, with the aid of some chocolate kittens and toy soldiers, she rescues the bride from the den of some very dodgy mice and manages to restore her to the top of the cake just in time for the reception. 

Simmonds has an outstanding eye and ear for all the foibles of upper middle class families; her comic strip featuring the Weber family (George, a lecturer at a polytechnic, Wendy, writer of children's books,  their numerous children, friends and neighbours) ran for years in The Guardian, accurately and hilariously reflecting life in a left-leaning North London household. I did wonder if her books (there are several collections of her comic strips, eg Pure Posy, Mrs Weber's Diary), being as they are such products of the 70s and 80s, would resonate with my own daughters - but I'm glad to report that they do, so the shorthand of 'so Wendy' or 'just like Belinda' (the Webers' oldest child, who disowns their hippy ways and hooks up with a merchant banker) lives on. 

In Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, reclusive chocolatier Willy Wonka has hidden golden tickets in five bars of his chocolate. Four are found by thoroughly obnoxious children, the fifth by Charlie Bucket, a poor boy who lives with his parents and grandparents in a tiny house. The five winners are invited on a tour of the factory, personally escorted by Mr Wonka himself. During the tour the four other children all give in to their worst vices, and are each ejected from the factory in ways appropriate to their bad behaviour. Only Charlie (with his granddad, who has accompanied him) is left, and Wonka then tells him that he has now proved himself a worthy heir to the factory, where he will now live. 

I must admit that this is not my favourite Dahl - I prefer Matilda and The BFG - but it's still an enjoyable story, and I liked both of the film versions.

A sweet factory also features in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - for yes, there was a book long before the famous film; it was published in 1964, and it was written by none other than Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. The plot of the book is rather different from the screen version, but it still features Lord Skrumshus, a wealthy manufacturer of confectionery, to whom Caratacus Potts sells his new invention, whistling sweets. With the sale proceeds Potts buys an old car, which he renovates; he and his family name it Chitty Chitty Bang Bang after the noises it makes when it starts up. The car starts to exhibit magical powers - it can fly and also transform into a hovercraft - and it eventually plays a major part in the Potts' family's thwarting of a gang with a dastardly plot to rob a famous chocolate shop in Paris. The book ends with the family flying off in their beloved car, heading for more adventures.

Ian Fleming wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang while he was recovering from a heart attack (partly brought on by the strain of a court case alleging that he had taken sole credit for his last Bond book when it had in fact been co-authored with someone else.) He intended Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to be a present for his son Caspar, but unfortunately he did not live to see it published, dying of another heart attack on the very morning of Caspar's 12th birthday. The story has since been adapted not only for the cinema, but also as a stage musical and a radio play; the author Frank Cottrell Boyce has also written three sequels.

Finally, another very proud, but rather less responsible, car owner. In Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, Mr Toad - who is very rich and an irrepressible show-off - becomes obsessed with cars after one runs his horse-drawn caravan (with which he is already bored) off the road. Despite the best efforts of his long suffering friends and inhabitants of the Wild Wood, Mole, Rat and Mr Badger, Toad eventually steals a car from a pub car park, drives it far too fast, is stopped by the police and sent to prison for twenty years. He manages to escape dressed as a washer woman, but is given a lift in a car that turns out to be the one he stole in the first place; of course he can't stop himself from repeating his reckless behaviour, and ends up fleeing for his life with the owners and the police in pursuit. Reunited, by pure chance, with Badger, Mole and Rat, Toad comes to appreciate his faithful friends, changes his ways, and (after the insurgent and rather frightening weasels and stoats have been dispatched in a bloody battle) invites them all to live with him at Toad Hall.  

The Wind in the Willows is one of my very favourite books; the characters are so well drawn, the settings so idyllic, and the stories entertaining, touching and sometimes quite scary. Although all of the main players are animals, their thoughts and actions are instantly recognisable, whether in ourselves or in people we have met. The interlude entitled The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in which Mole and Rat help the otter to find his missing son Portly, is magical. A book entirely worthy of its classic status.

From a family living in a castle to a group of friends living in a wood, this month's Six Degrees took me in a direction I had never anticipated - and that, of course, is one of the great pleasures of this exercise. 

Next month's starter book (for 5 December) is Judy Blume's Are you there God?  It's Me Margaret. Anyone can join in (and you don't have to have read the books); full details of how to do so are here: https://booksaremyfavouriteandbest.com/6-degrees-of-separation-meme/