moosifer jones's lair & grouch – online home & blog of Mags L Halliday

A quick note on this for any new blog readers: Haruhi Suzimiya is a Japanese schoolgirl unaware of her ability to alter reality. She runs a school club, the SOS Brigade, whose members are secretly dedicated to preventing her unconscious desires rewriting the world.

The Rampage of Haruhi Suzimiya
Nagaru Tanigawa
(Little Brown, 2011)

The next volume of Haruhi Suzimiya short stories is a mixed bag.

The first story, Endless Eight, made me groan. Anyone who has watched season 2 of the anime will understand the fear at “Summer’s almost over…”. Thankfully, the short story doesn’t have the same structure and was a lot more enjoyable than I expected. The big problem was with my own over-awareness of the plot. Suzimiya wants to have a fun-filled summer holiday, and the rest of the SOS brigade have to make it happen.

The next story, Day of Sagittarius 3, was my least favourite. I struggle to engage with stories that involve descriptions of battles – either actual ones or cyberfights – and this was no different. There’s too little emotional content, and too much dry description.

The final story, Snowy Mountain Syndrome, is exactly what I want in Haruhi. Mirroring their summer expedition to a Remote Island, the Brigade go to a ski lodge and get caught in a blizzard. This story delighted for several reasons, one of which is that it was the only one not yet adapted into anime. It was the most playful, and saucy, and made me remember why I started reading Haruhi to start with.

When I was tidying up last week I found this overlooked book that should have been in the review roundup.

Notes on a Scandal
Zoe Heller
(Penguin, 2004)

A teacher, Barbara Covett, gets drawn in when a colleague, Sheba Hart, is accused of having sex with a pupil.

This novella is in the first person singular, and is delightfully creepy. The waspish comments of the narrator, a frustrated history teacher approaching retirement, are entertainingly prim. The range of teachers at an inner city comprehensive are recognizable stereotypes that she precisely lampoons.

As the plot unfurls, Barbara’s obsession with ‘protecting’ Sheba becomes more unhealthy than Sheba’s madness in having an affair with a pupil. Her desperate desire for a special friend mirrors that of the teenage girls she teaches, although she would never demean herself with such a comparison. The hints of a backstory, involving a private school in Scotland and a previous scandal that meant Barbara had to move to a North London comprehensive, evoke The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In another echo, Sheba doesn’t realise who betrays her.

The prose is crisp, sharply capturing a neat, waspish and thoroughly nasty mind. It makes you collude with Barbara by drawing you in with wit and humour at the start. So when the cracks start, the disgust you feel is all the stronger for having liked her.

Thoroughly recommended.

I have realised I will not get time to write reviews on the backlog of books I’ve read in the last six months. The 200 word review idea should have helped, but it still needed time I rarely have. So here are extra short reviews of everything I’ve got stacked in the ‘to be reviewed’ pile…

• In London’s By-Ways by Walter Jerrold, illustrated by E W Haslehust
  Found in a charity shop, this is a pre-WW2 book that rambles around inner London. The text is OK, if prone to overlong sentences, but I bought it for the delightful colour illustrations by Haslehust.
  
  
• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
  It’s great to read a contemporary American novel that has a proper ending, although the penultimate chapter seems out of kilter with the world created in the rest of the book.
  
  
• The Pride of the Peacock/Mistress of Mellyn by Victoria Holt
  Two enjoyable romantic romps, of which Mistress of Mellyn was the better. It benefitted from the Cornish setting with its hints of Daphne Du Maurier and Winston Graham.
  
  
• Rivers of London/Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch
  I really want to do these two books justice with a proper review. Magical police procedurals with a heavy dose of London pyschogeography, jokes and no nice reset switches. The end of Rivers of London is proper nasty. Really, just go and buy them now.
  
  
• Call the Midwife/Shadows of the Workhouse/Farewell to the East End by Jennifer Worth
  Sticking with London, I read these over Easter. There’s an occasional reactionary tone that can be a jolt if you’ve seen the jolly Sunday night TV adaptation. But Shadows of the Workhouse left me in floods of tears at some of what happened to toddlers before the Welfare State existed.
  
  

Five authors doesn’t look like much, but it was nine books, plus things like Midnight’s Children and Death Comes to Pemberley. Phew.

Also, now they are reviewed I can sort them into the donate/shelve piles and move them off my dresser.

As always, click through on the main image to see the notes on the plants.

GJ helped me plant the pansy and viola in the long narrow bed earlier this week, and is responsible for watering them each evening. And watering everything else in sight, including her own shoes. Her other garden skills include: brushing dirt off the beds onto the path; shouting “BEE!”; shouting “BIRDS!” and thus frightening them away; and standing on the bench shouting “hiya!” to the neighbours.

Not all of the lavender plants put in last year survived but as they were a cheap buy from a DIY store I’m neither surprised nor upset. I’m currently transplanting grass seedlings from the flower beds into the cracks in the paving, in an attempt to soften the edges.

Here’s a slideshow of the last 13 months in the garden. The two at the start are older photos still, showing it in its cat-friendly state.

welcome to the future!

I’m using the silly function on my iPhone to dictate this. Look no typing whatsoever!

silly. S I RI.

which clearly needs to learn how to hear its own name.

dodgy voice recognition aside, this will mean I can do the notes on posts whilst travelling. And annoying people in the quiet coach on the train.

siri! Bring me gin and tonic!

I’m going to break my word limit here. Just warning you. I actually got my rant down in January but wordpress ate it. So now I’m trying again. With frequent ‘save draft’ clicks.

Death Comes to Pemberley
PD James
(faber & faber, 2011)

You can totally see the logic that meant someone gave this to me at Christmas. It’s three of my favorite things in one bundle: Pride and Prejudice, crime and “non-canonical fiction”. I really need a better term for it than that but “professionally published material making use of another’s fictional universe” is a mouthful. And Mark Lawson’s “literary continuation” deliberately seeks to exclude the wilder, less legal, edges of the field. Whatever you call it, I’ve shelves of it.

‘Death Comes to Pemberley’ is a sequel to ‘Pride & Prejudice’. Elizabeth Darcy (formerly Bennet) is preparing to host the annual Pemberley ball when a body is discovered in the grounds. Darcy, one of the local magistrates, has to investigate and suspicion quickly falls on his childhood friend – and adult rival – George Wickham.

As in Emma Tennant’s Pemberley, characters are made to undergo radicial personality changes in order to enable the author’s desired plot. You can accept Lady Catherine de Bourgh softening her attitude towards Elizabeth once there are (male) heirs at Pemberley. But one of the other characters from the original is so distorted to enable him to play a role that I was thrown out of the narrative.

Not that I’d got particularly into it. An entire chapter at the start is given over to recapping the plot of ‘Pride and Prejudice’. It was the only section of the book that raised a smile, in fact, by being the only bit to capture some of Austen’s sly spirit and tone. But P&P is hardly an obscure text, and the whole book is sold on being a P&P novel. It seems either gratuitous to do an unrequired recap, or egotistical to assume a reader has bought the book on the author’s name alone.

There’s 137 books riffing on ‘Pride & Prejudice’. Yes, really. It’s an industry that rivals that of non-canonical Holmes. There is, in other words, a massive audience for P&P fiction.

So how does it read as a crime novel, if you set aside the P&P elements? It’s an alright, but rather dry, procedural. Mention of the police early on confused me, as I wasn’t sure there was a police force – at least in rural England – in 1803. And so we progress through the arrest, the trial etc., and the resolution. The crime is solved not through Darcy having unusual perceptions and being a proto-detective, but through confessions. That’s not the sort of crime novel I find satisfying, and there wasn’t enough puzzle to play with as a reader.

By trying to sit on two stools, this novel falls down instead.