The Town in Bloom, Dodie Smith’s third adult novel, was a gift from the kind and good Jessica of The Bluestocking Society. It’s the story of an aspiring actress called Mouse in 1920s London, her friends Lilian and Molly and Zelle, her attempt at an acting career, and her love affairs along the way.

The wonderful Leaves and Pages read The Town in Bloom recently, engendering in me a desire to revisit it. I read it years ago in a post–I Capture the Castle frenzy, and I thought I might perhaps have done it an injustice by reading it in that context. You could hardly expect Dodie Smith to be as great as I Capture the Castle every single time. Besides which, the copy Jessica sent me matches to my copy of The New Moon with the Old, so I knew I’d feel happy about that when I looked at the book, even if I didn’t end up loving it.

I didn’t end up loving it. Alas! Dodie Smith sighs balefully in heaven about the vast choruses of people who complain that she never did anything as good as I Capture the Castle, but I am indifferent to her complaints.

The problem with The Town in Bloom for me was the utter rigidity of the characters, and the fact that I didn’t find any of them nearly as charming as Dodie Smith seemed to. Molly’s affectations maddened me; Lilian felt awfully entitled to affection for how much of a bitchy, conniving prude she was; and I got tired of Mouse’s ingenuousness, which quickly began to feel disingenuous.

If I may be permitted a quick spoiler, I had slightly more positive feelings about the book for the first three-quarters of it. But I was furious that a book with this degree of casual sexual permissiveness ended up suggesting that it was totally fine, even admirable, for Lilian to have tattled about Zelle’s sexual history to Zelle’s (potential) paramour. You know, to save him. From maybe marrying a girl who had had an affair with a married man. Keep in mind this action is taken by a girl who is currently engaged in an affair with a married man. Gag.

Good news is, I do feel happy every time I look at my matching copies of The New Moon with the Old and The Town in Bloom, and I do tend to like books better when I reread them, so I haven’t lost all hope. The Town in Bloom has lots of interesting bits about a life in the theatre in the 1920s, which I quite enjoyed, and maybe time will help me to find Mouse less annoying. (She’s a ghastly mix of Cassandra and Rose, if you’ve read I Capture the Castle, which produces very poor results.)

Anyway, on to the art pairing! I’ve picked one of Roy Ritchie’s photographs (his website here), as I absolutely love the costumes and the atmospheric lighting in this series. This one reminds me of Zelle, the one character in the book I didn’t semi-loathe. Zelle upon her arrival in the girls’ lives is unspeakably elegant and unspeakably bored. She keeps wanting her life to be different and doesn’t (initially) know what to do about changing it.

Make sure to look at the other photographs in this series when you’re over at the website! You naturally must want to see more of them, right? Since they’re so pretty?

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It Ends with Revelations has my love in a small way because the title and epigraph are in reference to a play of Oscar Wilde’s. A Woman of No Importance, I believe, though I wouldn’t swear to it. Moreover, Oscar Wilde is mentioned in the book:

She’s known about homosexuality since she was ten years old when she asked what crime Oscar Wilde committed. My grandmother, who had met and liked Wilde, obliged with a straightforward answer couched in such a way that Kit accepted homosexuality as being neither right nor wrong, despicable nor pitiable, but simply existent.”

…It now seemed perfectly natural to be sitting here eating cucumber sandwiches (so suitable, in view of the mention of Wilde) in this matter-of-fact way.

Of course the guy’s grandmother met and liked Oscar Wilde. Everyone who met Oscar Wilde liked him. Even the Marquess of Queensberry liked Oscar Wilde when he met him. He forgot about it almost straight away, because his head was full of craziness, but when he met him, he liked him. People did. Oscar Wilde was extremely lovable. Good point, Dodie Smith!

The plot of the book is this. Jill (I love that name) is the wife of a well-known stage actor called Miles, who is working on a play version of something that succeeded on TV, and experiencing some problems with the child actor, who was trained for TV and not for the stage. As Jill is helping smooth down ruffled feathers (producer’s, director’s, actors’), she meets MP Geoffrey Thornton and his daughters, Kit and Robin. At once she is charmed by the girls, and so am I. They are the best thing about the book, and this, I regret to say, is down to their being the most I-Capture-the-Castle-ish aspect of the book. On the up side, Kit’s adorability reassured me about the name Kit, which I had been mad at from that dreadful Mary Renault book. Here’s Kit being charming at length regarding Ivy Compton-Burnett:

She did fairly well on clothes and life but was out of her depth as regards literature–though she was thankful to be able to say that she had read one book by Kit’s favourite modern novelist, Ivy Compton-Burnett.

“If you’ve only read one, you couldn’t have liked her,” said Kit. “People who do, read them all–and again and again.”

“I almost like her because she writes about families,” said Robin. “But she doesn’t tell one enough about their backgrounds, what the houses are like, what the women wear. And though everyone’s always eating, we’re never allowed to know what they eat.”

“Well, who wants to know what anyone eats?” said Kit impatiently. “And she does say quite a bit about backgrounds. Sometimes there are cracks in a wall, or an overgrown creeper, or the rich people have cushions. One can do the rest from imagination. And the strange thing is that whenever I re-read one of the books I get a different mental picture of the house in it–and I can remember all the different mental pictures. Very peculiar, that. And the dialogue’s so marvellous, somehow it’s what the characters are thinking as well as what they’re saying, so it ends by being what they are. People say the servants don’t talk like servants and the children don’t talk like children, but the servants just are our great-grandmother’s chauffeur and lady’s maid, and the children are me, almost before I could talk. And the plots are lovely, all the families have terrific secrets and scandals, just like our family–though Miss Compton-Burnett hasn’t done a dipsomaniac nymphomaniac, which seems a pity. She usually deals with quite ordinary adultery, though sometimes it’s murder or bigamy or incest, but the incest seldom comes to anything. I must say she’s fussy about incest. After all, it’s been highly thought of at many periods of the world’s history, and it appears to work well in the animal kingdom.”

“Kit, dear,” said Robin, getting a word in at last. “Jill isn’t interested in Ivy Compton-Burnett.”

“I am, now,” said Jill. “I’ll try her again.”

“Try A Family and a Fortune,” said Kit. “That’s my absolute favourite. Though More Women Than Men is rather a love. There’s a most charming homosexual in it, the nicest character in the book. He marries eventually.”

Christy at A Good Stopping Point was just talking about cultural references in books, and whether they work, and how, and why. I do not know the answer, but this passage about Ivy Compton-Burnett is doing it right. I think that having fictional characters drop cultural references is a gambit, and it can come off affected, or it can come off like the characters love books and cannot resist talking about them. In this case, Dodie Smith has managed the latter. Of course, in this case she does not do a compelling plotline, or resist introducing a potentially explosive plotline in the last quarter and then resolving everything all nice and pat, but hey, she’s name-dropping Ivy Compton-Burnett very successfully. Even if I didn’t know who Ivy Compton-Burnett was, this passage feels perfectly natural.

Kit and Robin on art films, and I do really sympathize:

“And Julian [their brother] should be back soon. He went to one of the arty films he favours.”

“We only like some arty films,” said Kit. “Even some of the slow ones and some of the horrible ones. But we’re not enthusiastic when slowness and horror are combined.”

“Julian thinks those are best of all.”

Basically you can give this book a miss. It is trying to be about compromises, and happiness, and love, but it does not really succeed. I’m only giving it three stars rather than two for the compliment to Oscar Wilde.

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This can be a quick one. Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

So here are my fifteen books that will always stick with me, more or less in the order in which they entered my life:

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Emily Climbs, L.M .Montgomery
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
The Chosen, Chaim Potok
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling
Greensleeves, Eloise Jarvis McGraw
American Gods, Neil Gaiman
The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
Showings, Julian of Norwich
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie

These are all books that left me breathless.  Is that what we were after?

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The book is about the Carrington family, whose father goes on the run for vague and unspecified money-type crimes, just after he has engaged a secretary/housekeeper type, Jane Minton, who plans like Thoroughly Modern Millie to marry her boss.  There are four children and not much money, and one after another they all go off to seek their fortunes.  Precocious fourteen-year-old Merry, intending to go on the London stage, ends up hanging out at the home of some minor nobility and becoming involved in a totally absurd romantic situation; innocent twenty-something (22 maybe?) Drew becomes an old lady’s companion and finds he is after all capable of disliking people; Clare, who dreams of being a king’s mistress, gets a job reading to an old man (seriously, I want that job) who actually was an ex-king; and poor Richard has to stay home and take care of everything at home.

The author’s not attempting realism here, but the book is fun and amusing.  I like Clare’s story the best, probably because – as I say – I would really like to have a job reading to an old man, particularly if, as here, it came with room and board.  I am fantastically good at reading out loud.  The rich old people of the world should be so lucky as to have me to read to them.

Er, anyway.  If a perfect lack of plausibility doesn’t bother you, and you like those sort of previously-privileged-kids-go-off-to-have-adventures books, read this!  It will make you smile.

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