Six degrees of Separation: March 2022

Six Degrees of Separation is hosted by Kate of  http://booksaremyfavouriteandbest.com/

This month our starter book is The End of the Affair by Graham Greene.

For once I actually borrowed this from the library and read it - it's only 160 pages long after all. I'd read some of Greene's other books in the past - The Power and the Glory, Brighton Rock, Our Man in Havana and The Quiet American - but none of those is exclusively about one relationship.

In The End of the Affair Maurice Bendrix, a hard up novelist living in a boarding house, comes across Sarah Miles at a party. She is the wife of Henry, a senior civil servant, but the marriage has never been consummated. 

Predictably Maurice and Sarah soon become lovers, and the book charts the development of their wartime affair, its sudden end, and what Maurice discovers when, a few years later, he runs into Henry and ends up having Sarah followed by a private detective to see if, as Henry fears, she is having another extra marital liaison. 

I have to say I was not impressed with this novel. Greene's writing is as good as ever, and most of the characters in the book are well drawn, but I found both Maurice and Sarah very selfish, self-indulgent, and quite frankly boring. As the story draws to a close, it becomes almost all about Catholicism, God, belief, redemption... all Greene's usual obsessions - but whereas in, for example, Brighton Rock, these seem to fit with what is still an exciting and engaging plot, in The End of the Affair the plot is minimal and unconvincing and the endless pontificating about religion seems quickly to overwhelm what little of it there is. 

What I did enjoy were some of the other characters, notably Henry himself, Sarah's dreadful mother Mrs Bertram, Mr Parkis, the private investigator, and his son. In her introduction to the 2004 Vintage edition. Ali Smith says;

'In Parkis, the attempt at humour falls rather flat.'

but to me Parkis is not funny but sad, and much more worthy of my sympathy than the tedious lovers. 

Greene can sum up a person in a few well chosen words - the waiter at Maurice's club who, meeting Henry for the first time, still glides into making the right remarks about his ministry work;

'with the quickness of a hairdresser'

Maurice's landlady, who informs him that the private detective has come to call;

'"A Mr Parkis to see you" thus indicating by a grammatical article the social status of my caller.'

and Greene's descriptions of the weather on the Common that separates the Miles' smart house from Maurice's rather grim lodgings are also excellent - I could really feel the sleet sliding down the back of Maurice's neck and the rain soaking Sarah's shoes.

So, not all bad but certainly not a five star read for me. 

My next book also features a woman who is bored with her rather stuffy civil servant husband and thinks she might enjoy an affair. In Barbara Pym's A Glass of Blessings Wilmet and Rodney live in affluent comfort with Rodney's widowed mother Sibyl. Wilmet has plenty of money and very little to do; she decides to get involved in her local (High Anglican) church - allowing Pym to go to town in her depictions of pompous clergymen, the fussy (male) housekeeper who looks after them, and all the usual types to be found at 1950s jumble sales, coffee mornings and evening lectures. But Wilmet also runs into Piers, the attractive though somewhat dissolute brother of her best friend Rowena. As she sees more and more of Piers, her ideas about him take flight, and when she receives a very special anonymous present, she is convinced that her feelings are reciprocated.

This is one of Pym's earlier novels, and in my opinion one of her best. It's very funny, and piercingly accurate in its portrayal of a certain part of English society in mid 20th century London.

Wilmet eventually realises that she has got the very wrong end of the stick in almost all of her assumptions, and that while some of them were harmless, and more embarrassing for her than anyone else, one in particular was cruel, and leads her to reflect on her entitled behaviour. This being early Pym though, everything works out in the end.

Barbara Pym has sometimes been compared to Jane Austen. I'm not sure that this is necessarily fair, but in Emma, Austen also creates a heroine who has a similar inflated view of her own understanding and matchmaking skills, and is only brought down to earth when Mr Knightly is appalled by what she thought her wit, but was in fact rather smug, unfeeling, cruelty. Like Wilmet:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition... had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

And like Pym, Austen teaches her heroine a lesson, but makes sure everyone is happy in the end. There's even a further parallel between the two books in that, just as Wilmet and Rodney live with Sybil, when Emma finally marries Mr Knightly, her father moves in with them - though Sibyl does actually boot Rodney and Wilmet out when she herself decides to remarry.

My next link in the chain is slightly more tenuous. In the 2020 film of Emma (which I enjoyed very much) the role of awful Mr Elton was taken by Josh O'Connor.  Josh is also famous for playing Larry in the TV adaptation of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, a book that I first read at school. At the time I thought it was wonderful, and wanted to know why we couldn't just swan off and live somewhere infintely more exciting than the suburbs of South London - but, much as I liked the TV series, I now have far less patience with the idea that the Durrells were 'so poor' that they just had to go and live on an idyllic island in the Mediterranean. Their 'poverty' was clearly very much of the middle-class kind - all of them slope around doing not very much, Mrs Durrell still has a housekeeper and various other paid help, and although she goes on and on about money, it never seems to be a serious concern. 

That aside though, I did like the book, and the TV version, and Josh O'Connor is a great actor  - who was also brilliant as Prince Charles in The Crown.

The Crown tells the story of the British royal family from 1947 onwards. My next book also features a monarch who ultimately sat on the throne of England, but it opens five centuries earlier in 1593, when James VI of Scotland is ensconced at Holyrood Palace, and Elizabeth I is still Queen of England. Jean Findlay's The Queen's Lender is the fictionalised story of the life of George Heriot, whom Edinburgh residents will know as the founder of one of the city's famous schools.

Heriot is a jeweller, originally living in quite humble circumstances above his workshop in Fishmarket Close, one of the stinking alleyways of 16th century Edinburgh. He becomes a favourite of King James' young wife, Anna of Denmark, and is soon given a life appointment as jeweller to the royal household. His life runs parallel to Anna's; both suffer personal tragedies, both appreciate a good ruby when they see it. James and Anna are both famously extravagent, but without the means to finance all of their excesses, so it's not long before Heriot also becomes Anna's unofficial banker, lending her the money to buy more jewels from him.

A cautious, honest, hard working citizen, Heriot knows how to keep his head down during the many political and social upheavels of the time, and thus avoids the (often fatal) trouble met by so many others associated with the court. When James ascends the throne of England, Heriot moves with him to London. where more personal sadness awaits him. But his coffers continue to fill, and on his death he bequeaths most of his money for the foundation of a school and hospital for 'faitherles bairns.' 

George Heriot's school, although fee-paying, still maintains its tradition of free places and assistance for those in need. I enjoyed this book very much - and learned a lot from it too.

Another of Edinburgh's closes features in one of Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus novels, which explore the dark side of the city rarely seen by tourists, or indeed by most of its residents. In Fleshmarket Close, everything is - as usual - conspiring against the hard boiled, old fashioned detetctive. An illegal immigrant has been found dead in a seedy housing scheme, the sister of a rape victim has disappeared, a Kurdish journalist has been murdered - and the skeletons of a woman and baby have been dug up under the floor of a cellar in Fleshmarket Close. Rebus and his sidekick, Siobhan Clarke, try to find the links between these seemingly unconnected events - but Rebus hasn't even got a desk now that St Leonard's police station has closed down, and his bosses would really quite like him to retire. 

I read this book when it first came out in 2004, and more recently listened to it on BBC Sounds; after 17 years it was just as good, which for me confirms the excellence of Rankin’s writing. 

Staying in Scotland's capital, for my last book I will turn to something altogether lighter. Simon Brett's Charles Paris mysteries are always a joy when they turn up as adaptations on BBC Sounds - especially as Paris is usually played by the great Bill Nighy. Paris is an actor, one more often than not out of work. He is dissolute, lazy, womanising and cynical, and lives (on and off) with his long-suffering semi-ex wife Frances in London. In So Much Blood, however, Brett sends him off to the Edinburgh Fringe, where he of course comes across a murder, and eventually solves it. 

I shouldn't like Paris, and I don't approve of much of his behavour or attitudes, but in Bill Nighy's capable hands his is so much fun. (My favourite by far, though, is the adaptation of An Amateur Corpse, in which the late Geraldine McEwan joined the cast as Joan, Paris's interfering, demanding, and brilliantly comic, mother.)

So for this month's chain I've been to London, Edinburgh, Surrey and Corfu - and for once I am actually able to link my first and last books: Graham Greene's narrator is Maurice Bendrix, and Charles Paris's scheming, sybaritic, agent is also a Maurice - played for BBC Radio by the inimitable Jon Glover.

In April our chain will begin with Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield