BLOG POST: A year in the life of a customer, book by book
Some books what I have read in 2024
This year, I saw the phrase “nourishing seepage” in an online book preview – on the first page, in fact. I ordered it (The Girls, by John Bowen) immediately.
First published in 1986, you can only get it second hand in the UK, but this “wry, macabre tale of simple country living, brutal murder, and a reasonably happy couple” has just been republished by McNally Editions in America, so hopefully some enterprising indie publisher here will follow suit. It’s gloriously mad, and one of those rare books where a man has written convincing female characters, who drive the plot, and are entirely themselves. Even the minor characters are beautifully drawn: Mrs Marshall had been in service in a good house. She had never taken kindly to being ordered about, nor had her employers been altogether comfortable in the presence of a housemaid of six foot two. She had left in 1953 by mutual agreement a week after her twenty-first birthday, which she celebrated by blacking the eye of a baronet.
If you think “nourishing seepage” is a combination of words that should never be seen in public or spoken of in polite society, how about “hyena butter”, from Ashley Ward’s The Social Lives of Animals? “A fabulous waxy secretion” which they paste onto vegetation to mark territory…It’s not the kind of butter you’d want to smear on crumpets, though, not least because the hyenas produce it from their anal glands. The lesson, I think, is that you may think a phrase is nasty, but you never know what you might read next. Ward’s book, for example, also includes a description of whale poo. Apparently, they don’t produce a great whale-sized log … more of a massive, explosive nuggety cloud of Brown Windsor soup. This is something I learned as I watched from a boat, with an exquisite mixture of delight and horror, as a snorkelling colleague of mine was engulfed in one such gargantuan cetacean bum detonation.
OK, perhaps a change of tone. Stanley Tucci’s Taste is exactly as charming and easy to read as you’d expect, but there are also wonderful, opinionated asides such as the one about how people taste things on cooking shows: It seems that before whatever is being eaten has touched the tongue of the chef/host/cook, they are rolling their eyes in ecstasy, moaning and shaking their heads … before they have even finished swallowing, the word ‘perfect’ is sanctimoniously whispered. He goes on to describe the process, the pauses and mannerisms, of really tasting something, and saying to yourself “needs more salt…” Occasionally, he swears like a trooper, too. It’s great fun.
Anita Brookner does not swear, but she is delightfully acidic. Edith in Hotel du Lac is a writer who overhears two women discussing her, saying she’s “In a dream, half the time … making up those stories of hers”, and “I’m the one with all the stories … I wonder she doesn’t put me in a book.” There’s a paragraph break to indicate an exquisitely timed pause, and: I have, thought Edith. You did not recognize yourself.
For real-life female strength, Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own is extraordinary. If some of the people who go about saying millennials are all woke snowflakes had had half the life Tomalin has, they’d go running to their nanny (whom they still employ). There are hilariously filthy asides about George Melly, too, which I won’t spoil (although I will tell you his party piece involved removing all his clothes in the back garden.)
But if you want truly salacious memoir, I can recommend Roderic Fenwick Owen’s Oh What a Lovely Century, in which he announces before the end of page one, that his grandmother was a notable harlot in Edwardian society
…which sets the tone for what follows. It was edited down from a million words (he agreed on condition “that nothing be cut on the grounds of decency”), and is still – at almost 600 pages – slightly too long, but to say it has its moments is putting it mildly. One night in 1952, he finds himself at a London ball eyeing up a pirate, dancing clumsily. What did that matter? He was very good looking in a swarthy, piratical way, with broad shoulders owing nothing to padding … he’d come to the big city hoping to find a job in the theatre.
He takes the chap home, and is disappointed to find that he doesn’t mind sharing a bed, but isn’t up for any shenanigans. Looking back, Roderic heavily hints that this was a young Sean Connery – no longer alive by the time the book came out, and therefore unlikely to engage lawyers.
This blog could be twice as long, easily, but I think I’d be overstaying my welcome. So… other recommended reads of mine from 2024 are Dennis Duncan’s Index, A History of the (which lives up to its excellent title); Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite (about John Donne: “it is an astonishment to be alive, and it behoves you to be astonished”); Penelope Lively’s The Road to Lichfield (her beautifully observed debut from 1977, now reissued with a cover by Angie Lewin, so it looks great on your shelf, too); Brian Klaas’ Fluke (a brilliant look at how random chance can create huge change); and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower (just one aside – “jollity is just as relentless as piety” – is enough for you to picture one character completely).
As far as I know, almost all of these are available at all good bookshops. And some of the less good ones, too. Be on the safe side: order from Red Lion Books
2024, Chris Coates
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