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Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard

Tags: #Book reviews and essays from The Queen 1959-61

An Awful Lot of Books

BOOK: An Awful Lot of Books
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Table of Contents

Cover

Copyright

About Elizabeth Jane Howard

Introduction by Elizabeth Jane Howard

FICTION REVIEWS

Momento Mori by Muriel Spark

The Other Side of the Coin by Pierre Boulle

Means to an End by John Rowan Wilson

The Bright Young Things by Amanda Vail

The Dark Dancer by Balachandra Rajan

A Little More Time and Other Stories by Jean Boley

Love Affair by Robert Carson

The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life by Gavin Lambert

The Nine Guardians by Rosario Castellanos

The Hiding Place by Robert Shaw

Passage to Arms by Eric Ambler

Take Only as Directed by James Byrom

Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie

Add a Dash of Pity by Peter Ustinov

The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant by Anthony Powell

The Tangled Web: a novel about the notorious Dilke-Crawford Affair by Betty Askwith

Twice Lost by Phyllis Paul

The Sleep Walkers by David Karp

Saturday Lunch with the Brownings by Penelope Mortimer

Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis

Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham

The Letter in a Taxi by Louise de Vilmorin

A Number of Things by Tracy Honor

Road Through the Woods by Pamela Frankau

The Bachelors by Muriel Spark

Flight into Camden by David Storey

A Burnt Out Case by Graham Green & Destiny of Fire by Zoe Oldenbourg

Mistress of Mellyn by Victoria Holt

In the Cool of the Day by Susan Ertz

The Enclosure by Susan Hill

The House of Five Talents by Louis Auchincloss

Night's Black Agent by John Bingham

Four Voices by Isobel English

The Middle Tree by Joan O'Donovan

The Light in the Piazza by Elizabeth Spencer

Thunderball by Ian Fleming

His Brother, the Bear by Jack Ansell

The Shores of Night by Robert Muller

Sammy Going South by W.H. Canway

The Sun Doctor by Robert Shaw

China Court by Rumer Godden

Voices at Play by Muriel Spark

Through the Fields of Clover by Peter de Vries

Latitudes of Love by Thomas Doremus

Fear Is the Key by Alistair Maclean

The Old Men at the Zoo by Angus Wilson

When My Girl Comes Home by V.S. Pritchett

Consider Her Ways by John Wyndham

NON-FICTION REVIEWS

The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood by Elspeth Huxley

So Dark a Stream: a study of the Emperor Paul I of Russia 1754-1801 by E. M. Almedingen b

The Footsteps of Anne Frank by Ernst Schnabel

Bess of Hardwick by E. Carleton Williams

Daughter of France: the Life of Anne Marie Louise d'Orleans, Duchesse of Montpensier by V. Sackville-West

Sarah Bernhardt by Joanna Richardson

The Harmless People by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

The Years with Ross by James Thurber

Nikitina by Nikitina

The Siege at Peking by Peter Fleming

And the Bridge Is Love: Memories of a Lifetime by Alma Mahler Werfel

To Feed the Hungry by Danilo Dolci & The Ten Pains of Death by Gavin Maxwell

Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee

Sarajevo by Joachim Remak

Steps to Immaturity by Stephen Potter

Days with Albert Schweitzer by Frederick Franck

A Hermit Disclosed by Raleigh Trevelyan

That Great Lucifer: a Portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh by Margaret Irwin

The Disastrous Marriage by Joanna Richardson

The Sign of the Fish by Peter Quennell

Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell

A Visit to Don Otavio by Sybille Bedford

The S Man: A Grammar of Success by Mark Caine

Memoires Interieurs by Francois Mauriac

Shadows in the Dark by Isak Dinesen

Dancing in St Petersburg: the Memoirs of Kschessinska by Princess Romanovsky-Krassinsky

The White Nile by Alan Moorehead

The Lost Footsteps by Silvin Craciunas

India and the West by Barbara Ward

The Waste Makers by Vance Packard

Marilyn Monroe: a Biography by Maurice Zolotow

Solitary Confinement by Christopher Burney

A Calabash of Diamonds by Margaret Lane

The Faces of Justice by Sybille Bedford

Lanterns and Lances by James Thurber

Somerset Maugham: a Biographical and Critical Study by Richard Cordell

The Memoire of Chateaubriant: Selected, Translated and with an Introduction by Robert Baldick

Living Free by Joy Adamson

Sir Thomas Beecham: a Memoir by Neville Cardus & Thomas Beecham: an Independent Biography by Charles Reid

ARTICLES ABOUT BOOKS AND REVIEWING

Reading and Reviewing

Books with Magic in Them

Can a Critic Be too Kind?

What's So Different about British Writing?

 
Copyright

 

This ebook first published in 2013 by Hearst Magazines UK (The National Magazine Company Limited)

 

Copyright © Elizabeth Jane Howard, 1959, 1960 & 1961

Introduction Copyright © Elizabeth Jane Howard, 2013

This digital book © The National Magazine Company, 2013

Cover photograph of Elizabeth Jane Howard: Rex Features

Cover design by Tom Shone

ISBN: 978-1-90974-80-26

 

Published by Hearst Magazines UK (The National Magazine Company Limited), 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

 
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.

BOOK: An Awful Lot of Books
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