Source of book: Borrowed from the library
I don’t even remember how I ended up with this book on my list. I am guessing it was a recommendation somewhere from one of the literature-related websites I read. Otherwise, I doubt I would have just put a book by a Scottish author from 1981 on there.
That said, I really enjoyed the book, so there must have been a good reason.
How to describe it? That is more difficult. It is a very interior book, with the broader world events merely being the context of the story. It is set in post-World War Two England, when rationing was still a thing, and the economy hadn’t really recovered.
Fleur Talbot is a young aspiring author, working on her first novel, and in need of work. She also has a, well, complicated personal life as well - and it gets a lot more complicated as the book goes on.
She is offered a job by the somewhat mysterious and very pompous and self-important Sir Quentin Oliver, who leads the Autobiographical Association. This group consists of a number of equally self-important borderline somebodys who plan to write their autobiographies - telling the whole truth, lock them up for 70 years, and have them published after anyone who might sue them is dead.
With the exception of one of them, they are all terrible writers, and their stories mostly deadly boring. Hence the need for Fleur to type them up in a form that is at least marginally readable.
Meanwhile, Fleur is having sex with Leslie, a critic, who is married to Dottie, another critic. Not only do Fleur and Dottie know about each other, they are friends, or at least frenemies. So when Leslie runs off with a poet for a homosexual affair, Dottie comes to Fleur to commiserate - she preferred it when Leslie was with Fleur.
As all this goes on, Fleur works on finishing her novel, Warrender Chase, and starts to notice that the plot and characters, which she conceived years before meeting Oliver, resemble real life all too much. Oliver is Chase, and the other members of the Association strongly resemble other characters.
And that includes Oliver’s mother, the gloriously eccentric old woman Lady Edwina, who is a lot smarter than she pretends, and who practices “strategic incontinence.”
Things get a lot more serious, however, when Fleur finds that her now-completed manuscript has been stolen, her publisher breaks the contract (under pressure from Oliver), and that Oliver has flagrantly plagiarized the novel and written it into the autobiographies.
And then the deaths start.
I will leave it there as far as plot goes.
The fun of the book is in its cheeky irreverence, its sharp wit, and its hilarious and memorable characters. It doesn’t take itself seriously at all, and the author leans into the absurdity of the happenings.
There are so many hilarious lines, and so many great witticisms. I will share a few of them, starting with the delightful first line.
One day in the middle of the twentieth century I sat in an old graveyard which had not yet been demolished, in the Kensington area of London, when a young policeman stepped off the path and came over to me. He was shy and smiling, he might have been coming over the grass to ask me for a game of tennis. He only wanted to know what I was doing but plainly he didn’t like to ask. I told him I was writing a poem, and offered him a sandwich…
Later, at the end of the book, we finally get the rest of this scene, which is interrupted by all of the events of the book, which took place shortly before the opening in the graveyard.
I love the line about the autobiographies themselves.
The memoirs written by the members of the Autobiographical Association, although none had got beyond the first chapter, already had a number of factors in common. One of them was nostalgia, another was paranoia, a third was a transparent craving on the part of the authors to appear likeable. I think they probably lived out their lives on the principle that what they were, and did, and wanted, should above all look pretty. Typing out and making sense out of these compositions was an agony to my spirit until I hit on the method of making them expertly worse; and everyone concerned was delighted with the result.
The subplot of the love life of Leslie and his lovers does lead to plenty of great lines. Like this one.
Neither of us had seen him for over three weeks. I had decided to finish with him as a lover, which was easy for me although I missed his face and his talk. Dottie was infuriated by my indifference, she desired so much that I should be in love with Leslie and not have him, and she felt I was cheapening her goods.
Lady Edwina is a great character. Throughout the book, Sir Quentin and his housekeeper, Mrs. Tims, are paranoid that Fleur is trying to get Lady Edwina’s money from her. Which is pure projection, of course. And also, Lady Edwina isn’t actually rich, but they don’t know that.
On the whole, the old lady bore very well the fact that she had spawned a rotter; it wouldn’t have done to rub it in.
“Her fortune’s all a myth.” I had known this for a long time, for one Sunday when I was wheeling Edwina out with Solly she told me, “I married for money.”
“I consider that very immoral of you, Edwina,” said Solly.
“I don’t see why. My husband married me for money. We were a devoted couple. We had several things in common. One was expensive tastes and the other was no money.”
Another great passage is one where Fleur reflects on the sayings she was raised with: “All is not Gold that Glisters,” “Honesty is the Best Policy,” “Discretion is the Better Part of Valour,” and most of all, “Necessity is the Mother of Invention.”
And I have to testify that these precepts, which I was too flighty-minded to actually ponder at the time, but around which I dutifully curled my cursive Ps and my Vs, have turned out to my astonishment to be absolutely true. They may lack the grandeur of the Ten Commandments but they are more to the point.
There is a mention of Wedgwood pottery in the book - I am a descendant of the Wedgwood family on my mother’s side, which means that Charles Darwin was a relative by marriage. Anyway, this line about Sir Quentin is fun.
I suspect he really believed that the Wedgwood cup from which he daintily sipped his tea derived its value from the fact that the social system had recognized the Wedgwood family, not from the china that they had exerted themselves to make.
At the end of the book, before the author wraps up what happened to the characters afterward, she returns to the graveyard, and we learn how the book got its title.
I asked him: suppose I had been committing a crime sitting there on the gravestone, what crime would it be? “Well, it could be desecrating and violating,” he said, “it could be obstructing and hindering without due regard, it could be loitering with intent.”
I’ll end with my favorite line in the book, which is about one of the colorful members of the Association, and also one of my life goals.
Sir Eric Findlay died on good terms with his family, having lived long enough to earn the reputation of an eccentric rather than a nut.
Overall, a fun and delightful book, not like anything I have read before, and an unexpected discovery.
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