An Awful Lot of Books

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About Elizabeth Jane Howard

Elizabeth Jane Howard, CBE, is an English novelist having previously been an actress and a model. She wrote seven novels (starting with
The Beautiful Visit
which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1951) before publishing the first of her best known work - a four-part family drama set in wartime England. The books (
The Light Years
,
Marking Time
,
Confusion
and
Casting Off
) have been dramatized for the BBC as The Cazalets.

Between 1959 and 1961, Elizabeth Jane Howard was the book reviewer for
Queen
magazine. This collection of her reviews from the magazine provides a fascinating snapshot of the literary scene during those years.

The final book in the Cazelet Chronicles is
All Change
, published in 2013. Howard has also written a book of short stories, and her acclaimed autobiography
Slipstream
was published in 2002.

Elizabeth Jane Howard lives in Bungay, Suffolk and was awarded a CBE in 2000.

Introduction
by
Elizabeth Jane Howard

I’d better begin by saying what this collection of reviews is not. It is not literary criticism. It is simply a collection of book reviews written some fifty years ago, designed to tell its audience what they might enjoy reading - and as few people wish to spend much time being told how not to get to the Post Office, these reviews tend to be positive, though not, I hope, over-glazed with adulation.

The second point I would like to make is that I did read all of every book I reviewed - a detail, you might think, but one that should be mentioned since - in those days at least - many wretched authors had to endure ill-written pieces full of factual error and often undeserved spite. As Antony Powell remarked, ‘They go for you for not writing the book that you had no intention of writing in the first place.’

Reviewing has never been a well-paid job. People review largely for two reasons…they need the money, and they love the chance to explore and publish their opinion. Taken seriously, it is hard work. A good novel often has a serious effect upon the society from which it emerges. Take Darkness at Noon that is said to have stopped France embracing Communism after the Second World War - an extreme example of influence: but there are many more. Dickens - for example - wrote many novels expressing ignorance, incompetence, corruption, and hypocrisy. The industrial revolution bred a new class of rich and powerful people who had yet to learn humanity and respect. All empires have won on slavery, of one kind or another: the paradox of this nation striving to end the export of Africans to America while continuing to allow children (often sold by destitute parents) to be sold to go down mines or up chimneys. Novels, albeit obliquely, played a large part in informing and therefore civilizing society. Jane Austen was absolutely right with her sardonic reply “Only a novel, etc.”. When you look at my book, you will agree with this.

The novels reviewed here were written in the late fifties and early sixties and if they have a value it is that they provide a taste of how things were then. Social history is always accompanied by a streak of nostalgia and we all enjoy that.

Elizabeth Jane Howard

Suffolk, 2013

FICTION REVIEWS

Momento Mori
by
Muriel Spark

April 1959

Here is a novel about a miscellany of old - some formidably ancient - people, all more or less known to one another, whose lives are freakishly interrupted by a voice on the telephone reminding them that they must die. Despite all efforts of police and private detection this voice remains anonymous and also personal to each one of them who hears it - they can none of them agree upon its description. They foregather, unite, argue, observe one another with the ruthless attention of a bunch of old children, but this chief event of death effortlessly overtakes them, and of those who do not die in the course of the story, we are given an austere account at the end.

Further description will not give you the flavour of this book, which is very unusual - like some aromatic herb that you have never encountered and cannot easily define. It sounds macabre, sombre, possibly dull and probably depressing, but the first only is true: it is also entertaining, brilliant and merciless.

I have admiration and respect for Mrs. Spark’s capacities; she has an original mind, writes beautiful English, and has an ear for dialogue sharper than almost anyone I can think of excepting Henry Green - like the difference between remembering a tune and having perfect pitch: she has a sense of humour and she sees some things with an almost unbearable clarity; one feels that certain aspects of old age amuse or appal her, but that other aspects might have done rather more than that. If, in fact, she adds more heart to the rest of her enviable equipment, what a novel she will give us.

Other books

Roxanne Desired by Gena D. Lutz

This Too Shall Pass by Jettie Woodruff

Reina Lucía by E. F. Benson

Alien Chronicles 1 - The Golden One by Deborah Chester

Covenant's End by Ari Marmell

Louisa and the Crystal Gazer by Anna Maclean

Big Wheat by Richard A. Thompson

Hoi Polloi by Craig Sherborne

Los falsos peregrinos by Nicholas Wilcox