ODB: Staying in Step

Gilbert White by Richard Mabey (1986). A biography of the deservedly famous eighteenth-century naturalist and writer, written by a respected modern nature writer several of whose books I've enjoyed in the past, so I had to pick this up. Unfortunately it's a bit wanting as history; Mabey has a lot of interesting things to say about nature but he's not a historian and perhaps it shows. Certainly the evidence is lacking in places, but that's no excuse for so many groundless declarations of what White 'must have' thought or felt about something. Anyway, I did find the information interesting. The book gives a nice sense of White's social and family surroundings and the everyday setting of his existence, life and writing, and complicates some of the 'obvious' facts about him and The Natural History of Selborne (his aversion to travel was real but has been exaggerated; his clerical career was just a bit more involved than 'curate of Selborne'; the structure of the book as a series of letters, while based on real letters he did write to Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington, is fairly substantially fake). I also enjoyed the little bit of eighteenth-century Oxford college drama. Anyway, I can't really recommend this book, but I will take the opportunity to say if you haven't read The Natural History of Selborne then you really should.

A Room above a Shop by Anthony Shapland (2025). I struggle to get on with literary prose. I do like prose for its own sake; I read fiction first for the story, but language certainly isn't just a vehicle for telling the story and beautiful, elegant prose can add a lot to a book and indeed to a story; but I don't want to feel like the author is putting prose ahead of telling the story or—especially—that I'm having to work to get to the story through the prose. So I'm not sure how to feel about this book. The story is that of a relationship between two men, known only by their initials M and B, in the Welsh Valleys in the 1980s; M owns the local ironmonger's shop, he gives B a job there, they live together in the single room above the shop—hence the title—which becomes a sort of symbolic image of the private relationship they have to keep secret from the world to which they're simply colleagues. It is very much a literary book, and I got annoyed with the prose, which I found difficult to interpret at points (a flexible approach to sentence construction in which 'sentences' don't necessarily have a verb, a habit of using nouns and adjectives as verbs and an aversion to the definite and indefinite articles (by which one might otherwise identify which words are nouns) are not a good combination for making it easy to interpret sentence structure). But the style—in how spare it is and how carefully-constructed, if not in how ungrammatical—creates an impression, and it's memorable, and I can nevertheless see that at least some things about it are good, thoughtful choices that serve the story rather than pointlessly obscuring it, and the book wouldn't be as effective a book as it is if it was written in the more straightforward way I prefer. The spareness and fluidity of the prose suit the simplicity and significance of the events and emotions. Even that rather silly gimmick where the characters don't have proper names kind of emphasises the sense of hiddenness, the indirectness and intimacy at the same time with which we readers much approach the characters, the precariousness, uncertainty and specificity together. I also enjoyed the way Shapland sprinkles information about dates and time throughout the story rather than just giving us simple numbers, which was pleasing to my fandom timeline-constructing brain. I am not sure about the ending, but again, the way it's presented works.

The Story of a Governess by Margaret Oliphant (1891). I had a look through Oliphant's long bibliography for interesting titles and chose this—what'll she do with that favourite nineteenth-century theme, I thought? Well, the novel starts out sounding as though it's going to be a comic subversion of the 'poor oppressed governess' story, and I suppose the whole thing kind of is a parody of Jane Eyre in a sense, but what it eventually turns out to be is half romantic drama and half attempt at a sensation novel, and unfortunately the overall effect of both sides is that it doesn't work and it's really annoying. And the ending not only involves the heroine getting married again; not only does so in a way that's uncomfortably reminiscent of the worst aspect of Miss Marjoribanks; but comparing the two, one begins to get the impression that what Oliphant turns to when she's not writing the very good endings she's sometimes capable of is not only not good but really quite ugly indeed.

So this leaves me with the question, what next? I've read five of Oliphant's novels now; two of them are among the best Victorian novels I've ever read; one is very good; one is about two-thirds of a brilliant book that badly lets itself down towards the end; and one is kind of terrible. And she has, as I say, a long bibliography: how many more books like this am I willing to risk in the hope of finding another Kirsteen??