March was a good reading month, with fifteen books finished. Seven of those came from the library; I wrote about two by AS Byatt here and rounded up most of the rest here. The fringes and edges of passion always seem too neatly tucked under, in her novels. Harriet and Vesey are both a bit too opaque for me to care much about them. It deals with the rehabilitation of injured Boer War veteran Jocelyn Irvin, who retreats to the cathedral city of Torminster to live with his grandfather a kindly canon , his grandmother rather stricter , and his two young cousins-ish.
It also deals with the cousins themselves, specifically the girl, Henrietta, who is adopted, and whose appreciation for beauty and meaning is slightly preternatural—Goudge never makes her affected, though, and her rumbunctious adopted brother Hugh Anthony is a nice counterweight to her ethereality. Goudge writes children well, with that particular mix of innocence, curiosity, willfulness and perspicacity displayed by many bright kids growing up in adult-heavy environments.
Think The Secret Garden for grownups. Kindly sent in a parcel of proof copies by Rebecca! A short memoir of a few months Howland spent in a psychiatric ward after attempting suicide at the age of thirty-one, this is much less a personal excavation—as the introduction by Yiyun Li notes, Howland is barely present in her own retelling—and much more a kind of encyclopaedic guide or handbook to the denizens of the ward.
Both men and women live there, which surprised me slightly, and the treatment strategy of heavily medicating the inmates while also failing to even mildly chastise them for doing things like standing on the dinner table and revealing their bare buttocks to other patients feels extremely of its time.
Found on the free bookshelves of our local train station. This is a very, very short little novel which speculates on the identity of the man whose corpse was used in the real-life British counterintelligence op, Operation Mincemeat. The identity of the body has never been disclosed. Cooper suggests that he was a military man, lacking blood relations and dead of pneumonia, whose ambition far outstripped his competence, and whose love of old British imperial culture was both naively touching and under threat from the rise of modern warfare—indeed, the modern world in general.
