Six degrees of Separation - October 2020

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

This month our starter title was The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.  I don't much like ghost stories, and I haven't read this one, but four ghosts I am familiar with appear in my first link, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I must admit that although I have read this one once, I've also seen the brilliant Muppets' version several times over. In the latter Michael Caine plays Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly moneylender who counts every last penny and almost refuses to give his poor employee Bob Cratchit (played by Kermit himself) even 25 December off. Charity collectors also get short shrift from Scrooge - but then he is visited by the ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley. Marley warns Scrooge that if he doesn't listen to the three Christmas ghosts, Past, Present and Future, who will appear to him that night, he will end up in eternal damnation just as Marley has. The Ghost of Christmas Future also shows Scrooge how miserable his fate will be, and he is shocked into changing his ways and becoming a decent human being.

One of Dickens' inspirations for this novella was a visit to a Ragged School; these had been set up in very poor districts for the education of destitute children. He was appalled by the conditions there and originally thought of writing a pamphlet on the subject, but realised that a story would have more impact. A Christmas Carol (full title: A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas) was published on 19 December 1843; the first run had sold out by Christmas Eve, and it has been in print ever since. 

My next book is another that's still languishing on my sagging TBR shelves, but I have seen the film, and my goodness what a masterpiece it is. Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt is set in 1952: the film, named after the lead character, is Carol. (And coincidentally, the action begins at Christmas!) An elegant, beautiful woman is being divorced by her wealthy husband, who is seeking custody of their little daughter Rindy. The woman's name is Carol Aird, and she is a lesbian at a time when this itself could be grounds for divorce. Carol meets aspiring young photographer Therese in the toy department at Frankenberg's in Manhattan, and after a tentative courtship they begin an electrifying affair.  As her husband's influential family unites against her, Carol is desperate not to lose custody of Rindy. Eventually both women are forced to make a choice.

Both Cate Blanchett (Carol) and Rooney Mara (Therese) are absolutely outstanding in this subtle, moving, intense film - and the costumes are stars in their own right, with Blanchett in particular stunningly dressed in every scene. For Highsmith the novel was semi-autobiographical, the plot inspired by a blond woman in a mink coat who ordered a doll from her when she was working at Bloomingdales;

I felt odd and swimmy in the head, near to fainting, yet at the same time uplifted, as if I had seen a vision.

(although it later transpired that she was coming down with chicken pox; as she said 'fever is stimulating to the imagination.')

Highsmith took a real chance in publishing the book only seven years after the end of the war. Her usual publishers, Harper & Bros, rejected it, and her agent told her she would be 'committing career suicide' to follow her huge hit Strangers on a Train with a blatantly lesbian novel. In the end Coward-McCann published The Price of Salt under a pseudonym; it did not appear under her own name until 1990, when Bloomsbury changed the title to Carol.  

Many years ago my husband bought me a copy of Compton McKenzie's novel Extraordinary Women. I'm not sure that he knew what it was about at the time, and to be honest neither did I at first. It's an entertaining satire featuring (mainly) rich European, American and Russian women staying on the Isle of 'Sirene' (Capri) during the First World War. Most of the women are lesbians, many being caricatures of people McKenzie knew, such as Radclyffe Hall. The author lived on Capri with his wife Faith from 1913 to 1920. The island was known to be exceptionally welcoming to artists and homosexuals, and Faith herself had a relationship with the Italian pianist Regatta Borgatti. In the book, numerous affairs and liaisons take place; for me it's a light, fun read, although various academic studies have delved further into its themes and possible failings. 

I recently read and very much enjoyed McKenzie's Monarch of the Glen, but perhaps his most famous novel is Whisky Galore, featuring the inhabitants of the Hebridean islands of Great Todday and Little Todday. The second world war is in full swing, and by 1943, deprived by rationing of their usual supplies of whisky, the locals are deeply depressed - until a ship, the SS Cabinet Minister, is wrecked off the coast and its cargo is found to be crates and crates of usquebaugh. Unfortunately, though, the wreck occurs just as Sunday begins; the island is Presbyterian and the Sabbath strictly observed. How are the islanders to protect their loot without committing mortal sin? The ensuing shenanigans to avoid discovery by the Home Guard and the English Customs and Excise officials form the main plot of the book, although there are plenty of others, and lots of detail about life on remote islands over 70 years ago. The 1949 Ealing Studios' film of the book is a classic, opening with the immortal lines;

To the West there is nothing. Except America.

On the surface, the Toddays have little in common with Sirene/Capri, but both are subversive in their own ways. Sirene tolerates behaviour which, at that time, would have attracted legal action in the UK; the Toddays have their own moral code and refuse to admit any interference from the mainland.

My last book, featuring some more Scottish islands, is a much more recent one, but its setting predates even The Turn of the Screw. Sue Lawrence's The Unreliable Death of Lady Grange is a fictionalised version of a true, and shocking, story. It opens in 1732, with Rachel, Lady Grange's, funeral in Edinburgh. But Rachel's oldest child, Mary, questions her death - how can her healthy mother have become ill and died overnight? And what has become of her mother's servant? Unwilling to submit to her husband's increasingly cruel demands and behaviour, Rachel's fate has been sealed when she finds out just what he has been up to with the thuggish, unprincipled Jacobite Lord Lovat. She is indeed not dead, but has been abducted by Lovat's henchmen and taken first to the Monach Isles and later, when Mary eventually discovers her whereabouts, to the remote archipelago of St Kilda. This is the 18th century. The islanders eke out a basic existence on a diet of seabirds and their eggs, they speak only Gaelic and live in squalid conditions. 

The Unreliable Death of Lady Grange is a real page-turner, but also a very well written book, one that  examines mysogyny and the ways in which male power is used to silence women who dare to fight back. As such, it resonates not only with Highsmith's Carol but also with very many women's lives today.

So, not many ghostly tales in my 'degrees' this month, but plenty of subversion, from independent women to irrepressible islanders. And what are ghosts if they too are not subversive?

(My full review of The Unreliable Death of Lady Grange is here.)