"A Dog's Life," by Michael Holroyd

     Michael Holroyd--now aged 82--is best known for his biographies, which include ones of Augustus John, the painter, Lytton Strachey, and Bernard Shaw. This short novel was his first, and it may be his only novel (not sure). I picked it up in the local library, attracted by a cover drawing that suggested it was a classic funny read. 
     At the end of the paperback edition of "A Dog's Life " he includes an interesting article about its genesis and why it was first published in the United States but not in the U.K. until forty years later.
     The novel clearly uses Holroyd's own family as characters. He is Kenneth, on leave from doing his National Service in the army. The family are gathered together in a house named "This'll Do," and the plot, such as it is, revolves around the illness and death of the dog named Smith. In addition to Kenneth, we have his grandfather Eustace and his grandmother Anne, both of whom are portrayed as distressingly senile to the extent that one begins to feel that the descriptions of their actions are somewhat unkind. Kenneth's father, Henry, divorced from Kenneth's mother, lives in the same house, and he is unsympathetically portrayed.  We also have Eustace's eccentric spinster sister Mathilda, who lost her lover many years ago. She is devoted to Smith, and his death produces a sort of coda to the book as she reviews her life. Unexpectedly, Henry's first wife appears on the doorstep and consumes much alcohol. There are two further caricature characters, Mrs. Gaff the cook, and an aging Miss Tooth, who was originally brought into the household as a nanny for Henry some 50 years ago and has stayed ever since. 

     Holroyd's father hated the novel and threatened legal action if it was published, contending that it defamed him and was unkind and inaccurate about his aging parents. It was this that led to the publication of the novel in the States after careful review to see if a successful legal action could be made against it. Holroyd waited forty years before publishing it in the UK, by which time all the characters were dead.

     By a strange coincidence, we went to a talk at the Kensington Library, where Holroyd and a member of August John's family talked about a recently published book of the letters of Ida John, Augustus' first wife, who died at around thirty. In answer to some questions, Holroyd talked about some of the things he wrote as the postscript to "A Dog's Life"---the problems that arise with biographies when family members are at odds with the way they, or their families, are portrayed. And in that postscript he also mentions the ancient Augustus John climbing into bed with one of his many illegitimate daughters (then aged in her late thirties) and telling her "he couldn't do it anymore." It left open the question whether he would have done it if he could.

     I wouldn't suggest anyone go off to a library to track down the book. I just felt that I should keep my nose to the grindstone with the blog, if only to keep the record of what I have been reading.

Jeanette Winterson: "Gap of Time."

     This was the first in the series of novels I have mentioned before in which modern authors re-write and modernize Shakespeare's plays. This one, by Jeanette Winterson, who is a terrific writer, was the first in the series, and she rewrites "The Winter's Tale" in a modern setting, with a wealthy hedge-fund manager believing his best friend is the father of his wife's child, his abduction of the child to a far-away place, and his rediscovery of her many many years later.

     From a Guardian review:
"The richness of her language, the swing and swoop of her sentences, smooths out the transitions and eases us over the joins. What’s more, despite her faithfulness to Shakespeare’s storyline, Winterson manages against the odds to keep us gripped. By providing her characters with rich backstories, she wins our sympathy and so injects a real sense of jeopardy into a familiar tale. It’s no mean feat."

I had my reservations: although generally enjoying the story and admiring the language, I found it a little tedious as I moved towards the end, and--yes--I did tend to skip in the last thirty pages or so...

But don't let me deter you giving it a shot--chacun a son gout...

Angela Carter: "Wise Children"

Recently Joan and I went to hear a lecture about Angela Carter, an English novelist I admit I had never heard of, probably because she was writing at a time when I was in the United States. The following brief bio. quoted below is from Wikipedia. We both went straight to the library after the lecture, and Joan got 'Nights at the Circus' but did not hang in there until the end. The magical realism of the novel was that the heroine, a trapeze artist, actually had a pair of wings.

"Angela Olive Carter-Pearce (née Stalker; 7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992) who published as Angela Carter, was an English novelist, short story writer and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".^[1] In 2012, Nights at the Circus was selected as the best ever winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize."

I read a different novel by Carter--"Wise Children"--and I found it endlessly entertaining, tracking the lives of Nora and Dora, two illegitimate twins of a great Shakespearean actor who would not acknowledge that he was their father. The tale is narrated by Dora, or was it Nora?, when the two sister are in their 'seventies and looking back at their lives. The novel follows their careers as dancers and film actresses, woven in with their relationship with the family of the Shakespearean actor and his wives and their film-making in Hollywood. There is much that I suppose one would describe (like Wikipedia) as picaresque: the brother of the great Shakespearean actor, who is always affectionate with the twins, is something of a conjuror, but the tricks he performs go well beyond the possible. And his sexual performance at age 100 seems unlikely...

This is from a glowing review, with which I agree:

"Angela Carter's last novel, Wise Children, is arguably her finest. It's certainly her most ebullient, cheerfully orgiastic and comic. It's quite simply a blast - of energy, laughter, art, love, entertainment, history, voice and hope."

I agree.