The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

 

The Enchanted April, published in 1922, was written by the Australian-born British novelist, Elizabeth von Arnim (1866-1941). She left Sydney as a young child, moved to London and then to Europe, and never returned to Australia.

The delicate and delicious fragrance of the freesias came in through the door and floated round Mrs. Wilkins's enraptured nostrils. Freesias in London were quite beyond her. Occasionally she went into a shop and asked what they cost, so as just to have an excuse for lifting up a bunch and smelling them, well knowing that it was something awful like a shilling for about three flowers. Here they were everywhere— bursting out of every corner and carpeting the rose beds. Imagine it— having freesias to pick in armfuls if you wanted to, and with glorious sunshine flooding the room, and in your summer frock, and its being only the first of April!

The Enchanted April begins in London where Lottie Wilkins, a young married woman neglected and belittled by her husband, begins a conversation with Rose Arbuthnot, a woman she only knew by sight in their women's club. Rose was also in an unhappy marriage, not that she ever complained. Both women see a small Italian castle advertised in The Times and Lottie screws up her courage to approach Rose to suggest they take it for a month.

Neither of them being big spenders, they decide to find two other ladies to come as well, but when all four of them arrive at their destination, personalities clash and the holiday has all the makings of a great disappointment.

However, the magic of the place works itself into the lives and hearts of all four and by the end of the four weeks of April major changes have taken place. 'Beauty made you love, and love made you beautiful...'

I'd describe this story as a sort of modern fairytale. At first I thought the story was going to involve marriage break-ups and everyone would go off and give up on their marriage partners, but von Arnim crafted a lovely turn around in each woman's life. The author's descriptive writing is beautiful, especially when describing flowers and she made Italy very enticing, especially for an April holiday! This is the first book I've read by this author but it doesn't surprise me that her first book was titled, Elizabeth and Her German Garden and that in real life she created a wonderful garden at her home in France.

How passionately she longed to be important to somebody again...not important as an asset in an organization, but privately important - just to one other person, quite privately, nobody else to know or notice. It didn't seem much to ask in a world so crowded with people, just to have one of them, only one out of all the millions, to oneself. Somebody who needed one, who thought of one, who was eager to come to one - oh, oh how dreadfully one wanted to be precious!

A Son at the Front (1923) by Edith Wharton

 

A Son at the Front was one of four novels written by Edith Wharton in the 1920’s after she had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for her book Age of Innocence. These novels focussed on the growing sense that World War I had brought about irreparable damage and had left an indelible mark on society.
A Son at the Front, as its title implies was set during WWI, and opens in Paris in 1914 just before war was announced. Edith Wharton was involved in relief work in France and this novel was inspired by a young man she met during that time.

American artist, John Campton, resided in Paris and was looking forward to his holiday with his son George who had finished his studies in America and was returning to France to visit before taking up work in a bank in New York.
By a twist of fate, George had been born in Paris and not in America. His parents divorced early in his life and his mother, Julia, had remarried.

It was almost impossible to Campton to picture what it would be like to have the boy with him. For so long he had seen his son only in snatches, hurriedly, incompletely, uncomprehendingly: it was only in the last three years that their intimacy had had a chance to develop. And they had never travelled together, except for hasty dashes, two or three times, to seashore or mountains; had never gone off on a long solitary journey such as this. Campton, tired, disenchanted, and nearing sixty, found himself looking forward to the adventure with an eagerness as great as the different sort of ardour with which, in his youth, he had imagined flights of another kind with the woman who was to fulfill every dream.

Life had perpetually knocked him down just as he had his hand on her gifts; nothing had ever succeeded with him but his work. But he was as sure as ever that peace of mind and contentment of heart were waiting for him round the next corner; and this time, it was clear, they were to come to him through his wonderful son.

Before father and son could begin their holiday together, George was called up to join the French army and the trip could not take place.
All three parents were desperate for George not to go to the front and used every means they could to prevent it happening.
As the war progressed it touched the lives of everyone around them. More and more families they knew received the news that their sons had died, gone missing or had been severely wounded in action and Campton struggled with the morality of pulling strings to have his son relegated to an office job.
George had seemed ambivalent about war service and this gave a false sense of security to his father, although subconsciously he wished his son to do the honourable thing.

This novel is more about the families left behind than the sons at the front. When Julia had remarried, George’s rich stepfather and millionaire banker, Anderson Brand, provided for George and brought him up and loved him dearly. There is much tension between the three parents and Campton had a huge chip on his shoulder because of his lack of success in life, generally.
I thought Wharton had good insight into the relationships involved and her treatment of the effects of the war on the different characters throughout the novel were brilliant.
I’ve been reading the author’s lesser-known novels and short stories and I’m surprised that they aren’t as popular as her longer works. She had a profound insight into human nature, her writing is just beautiful and her vocabulary is rich. I occasionally come across words I’ve never seen before and often can’t find them in my Oxford dictionary. I think they must be peculiar to America, although not necessarily words in regular use.
That she wrote from personal experience is obvious and her work is realistic, portraying some of the senseless crimes the war had perpetrated- describing it as a monster whose daily meal was made up of ‘an incalculable sum of gifts and virtues.’

I loved this reflection by Campton when he discovered his son’s ardour for literature:

Campton perceived that the millionaire’s taste for owning books had awakened in his stepson a taste for reading them. “I couldn’t have done that for him,” the father had reflected with secret bitterness. It was not that a bibliophile’s library was necessary to develop a taste for letters; but that Campton himself, being a small reader, had few books about him, and usually borrowed those few. If George had lived with him he might never have guessed the boy’s latent hunger, for the need of books as part of one’s daily food would scarcely have presented itself to him.

Initiation had come to them in different ways, but their ardour for beauty had the same root…
Campton, with a passionate interest, watched his son absorbing through books what had mysteriously reached him through his paintbrush.

The Library of America has published the four novels of the 1920’s in a hardback edition that is very nicely done. ISBN: 9781598534535

The Power of Geography by Tim Marshall (2021)

 I wrote this post in 2021 when this book was first published:

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World was published this year (2021) and is a sequel to Prisoners of Geography which I wrote about here.
In that book Tim Marshall focused on the fact that geography has played a major role in history. In this new book he explores ten different regions and the power they hold in the shaping of our future.
These regions are: Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, The United Kingdom, Greece, Turkey, The Sahel (a region I was totally ignorant of), Ethiopia, Spain and Space.

The Power of Geography covers some very diverse countries with complicated histories – a whole book could be written about just Iran alone when you consider the upheaval and changes there even in recent times. There’s a lot of ground to cover and I think that’s the reason I found this book generally wasn’t as tightly written as the previous one. There are some chapters where this wasn’t the case – Turkey and Ethiopia, for instance, which were more compact. In spite of the sense of overwhelm at times (I’m thinking of you, Saudia Arabia), The Power of Geography is an interesting and informative book.

Some highlights:

Australia

We tend to think of China and Australia being relatively close to each other, but Tim Marshall points out that the map most of us use, the Mercator, distorts our view of the world. He suggests the different perspective to be had from the use of a Waterman map, noting the fact that Beijing is as close to Warsaw as it is to Canberra, but it is China that is regarded as our close neighbour.
I learned that Australia, along with New Zealand, the USA, the UK and Canada is a member of what is probably the world’s most efficient intelligence-gathering network: ‘Five Eyes.’ I asked my husband if he knew about this and he did. He also knows where the Sahel is, which shouldn’t have surprised me – he has a mind like a steel trap on more modern history.

Iran

I know a little bit about Iran from teaching ESL to a couple who left that country and resettled here. Apparently it was not until 1935 that the land of Persia became known as Iran but everyone I’ve met from Iran (and all of them were born decades after the name change) describe themselves as Persian.

Saudi Arabia

What a complicated and confusing history! Saudi Arabia was created in the twentieth century. Its population then was about two million, and most of them were nomads. Now there are 34 million people living there.
Marshall describes the rise of Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden and the various members of the royal family, notably, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who is reigning now.

United Kingdom

The chapter starts with a quick overview of the UK’s history, beginning with the Greek explorer Pytheas, through the Roman occupation, Viking invasions, the Battle of Hastings, the rise of the British Empire, the two World Wars, up to the present and Brexit.
He considers the question of Scottish independence and the complications that would result – for example, if Scotland insisted that the Royal Navy remove its nuclear-armed submarines from their base at Faslane on the west coast.

Sea power underpinned an empire based on the usual power-building common to all countries, but also the racist assumptions of colonialism. There was, however, one bright point of moral light in the navy's role. In 1807, having played prominent role in the slave trade, Britain outlawed it. For the next few decades the Royal Navy actively pursued slave traders, liberating about 150,000 people, while the government paid subsidies to African chiefs to persuade them to end the practice.

Life in these Royal Navy ships is depicted as almost equally harsh and dangerous for the British sailors;
‘Between 1830 – 1865, approximately 1587 men died on the West Africa Squadron, from a variety of causes: disease, killed in action and accidental deaths…’

One of the most fascinating countries represented in this book is Turkey. General Kemal Atatürk was the first president of the Republic of Turkey which was established in 1923. Known as ‘Father of the Turks, he ruled for fifteen years and implemented radical reforms which transformed and modernised the country.

Atatürk understood that language is culture. He was in the business of forming a new culture based not on the multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic Ottoman Empire, but on Turkishness.

In recent times Turkey has turned to the past in order to shape the future. The author describes Erdoğan, Turkey’s Prime Minister, as a ‘neo-Ottoman’ who believes that Turkey is destined to be a global superpower as the West declines.

Ethiopia and Spain are two other very interesting places to delve into – in fact, all of countries covered in this book are, but there is so much detail and changes in their history, not to mention their geographical complexities, to enable a reader without too much background information to take it all in. It’s a book I’d be more than happy to read again in order to digest all the details, or to dip into as a reference when any of the countries are mentioned in the news or current affairs.

 

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1949)

 

I Capture the Castle was one of the books on my shelf that I'd been reluctant to begin. I’m not sure why because I enjoyed Dodie Smith’s other well-known novel, 101 Dalmatians. Once I'd started this book my hesitancy quickly disappeared as I discovered that it is such a quirky, fun with patches of seriousness, fairytale-ish story, that captures all the angst of a young woman in love with someone who loves someone else.
The young woman is 17-year-old Cassandra, the narrator of the story, and she describes her unusual poverty-stricken family beautifully. Her father, James Mortmain, a one hit wonder of an author; his second wife, the artistic, ethereal Topaz; her resilient younger brother and her pretty older sister, Rose, who is determined to marry money. (“I could marry the Devil himself if he had some money.")
Then there is Stephen, their 18-year-old boarder/servant who dotes on Cassandra so much that her father calls him her ‘swain.'

Cassandra keeps a diary and has a literary bent, which is partly why I liked this novel as much as I did.

I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring - I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house.

I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic - two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud. I must admit that our home is an unreasonable place to live in. Yet I love it.

The Mortmains had a forty-year lease on their run-down castle. Their landlord, who lived five miles away, always sent them a ham at Christmas whether they paid the rent or not. When he died the previous year they sadly missed the ham…

One day the heir to their landlord's fortune arrived, along with his brother and the girls' fortunes are beginning to look up.

Did you think of anything when Miss Marcy said Scoatney Hall was being re-opened? I thought of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice – where Mrs. Bennet says 'Netherfield Park is let at last.' And then Mr. Bennet goes over to call on the rich new owner.

Rose believed that having money would solve everything and be the antidote to misery, but her experience belied this. Cassandra thought that there must be a catch about having plenty of money; that perhaps it would eventually take the pleasure out of things.
She had this perceptive comment to make on the ‘climate of richness.’

But most of the time, I just thought. And what I thought about most was luxury. I had never realized before that it is more than just having things; it makes the very air feel different. And I felt different, breathing that air: relaxed, lazy, still sad but with the edge taken off the sadness. Perhaps the effect wears off in time, or perhaps you don’t notice it if you are born to it, but it does seem to me that the climate of richness must always be a little dulling to the senses. Perhaps it takes the edge off joy as well as off sorrow.

Oddly, I have never thought of us as poor people — I mean, I have never been terribly sorry for us, as for the unemployed or beggars; though really we have been rather worse off, being unemployable and with no one to beg from.

Cassandra wrote in her diary:

Sometimes I try to imagine what happens to characters in books - after the books finish, I mean.

I finished the book with this thought because the ending left much up in the air. It’s a ‘coming-of-age’ sort of story so that adds to the unresolved feeling. How many of us know what we really want when we are just on the threshold of adulthood?