Review of "Time of Hope: Strangers and Brothers #1" by C.P. Snow

 

I first read C.P. Snow's 'Strangers and Brothers' series some time ago, and it became a favorite. The novels focus on an English barrister/civil servant, Lewis Elliot, who rises from poverty to a position of influence in the early-to-mid 1900s. Elliot is present in the entire eleven-book series, but he's not always the central character.

I think Anglophiles and fans of historical fiction would enjoy the series.

*****

As 'Time of Hope' opens in June 1914, nine-year-old Lewis Eliot - ambling home after an afternoon with friends - is seized with a feeling of dread.



Lewis soon learns his father Bertie's leather merchant business has gone bankrupt. This is especially difficult for Lewis's mother Lena, a proud woman whose hopes had been lofty. "She had a romantic, surging, passionate imagination....as a girl she had expected a husband who would give her love and luxury and state." Deprived of personal success, Lena infuses Lewis with her dreams.



After Bertie's bankruptcy is made public, Lena can hardly show her face in public. Bertie, however, was born with a cheerful disposition, and carries on as a low-paid traveling salesman.



Lena makes budgets and pinches shillings, but the war makes everything more difficult.



Then, when Lewis is eleven, Lena swallows her pride to ask Aunt Milly (Bertie's sister) for the fees she promised for Lewis's secondary school. Aunt Milly agrees, but she's a 'kindly curmudgeon' who tells Lewis, "You've got too good an opinion of yourself....It's your mother's fault for letting you think you're something out of the ordinary."



Lewis observes, "Aunt Milly would consider that her money had been well invested if I contrived to scrape through my years at school without drawing unfavorable attention to myself. And once more I was to listen to her message. My first duty, if ever my education provided me with a livelihood, was to save enough money to pay twenty shillings on the pound on my father's liabilities, and so get him discharged from bankruptcy."

When Lewis finishes secondary school he's almost sixteen, and there's no money for university. Having done well in his studies, Lewis lands a job as a junior clerk in the local Council Education Office, which has possibilities for advancement.



With this in mind, Lewis enrolls in law classes at the local College of Art and Technology (aka the School). There Lewis meets George Passant, a solicitor/managing clerk who teaches a night class in Fundamentals of Criminal Law. George is destined to play an important part in Lewis's life.



Lewis's hopes for a brighter future are bolstered when he inherits 300 pounds from his mother's uncle. Aunt Milly wants Lewis to pay down his father's debts, but his mother, who's terminally ill, insists Lewis is to spend the money to 'get a start.'

After his mother dies, Lewis asserts his independence by taking a room in a boardinghouse. He observes, "I had brought all my possessions in two old suitcases - another suit, two pairs of flannels, some underclothes, a few books and school photographs. I felt despondent in the strange, cheerless room, and yet hopeful with the hope that I saw so often in my mother."



Lewis continues working at the Council Education Office, and starts fraternizing with young people (called 'the group') that George Passant - now in his mid-twenties - is collecting around him. All the group, both men and women, are students at the School. Lewis recalls, "We sat hour after hour at night or on Sunday afternoons in dingy cafés up and down the town, the cafés of cinemas or, late at night, the lorry drivers' caff beside the railway station....soon we developed the practice of all going to spend weekends in a farmhouse ten miles away, where we would cook our own food, pay a shilling a night for a bed, and talk until daybreak."



It's now that Lewis has his next life-altering experience. He observes, "It was in those happy days that, attuned so that my imagination stirred to the sound of a girl's name, I first heard the name of Sheila Knight....attuned because of the amorous climate which lapped around our whole group on those summer evenings....One warm and cloudy midsummer evening, I had met [my friend] Jack out of the newspaper office, and we were walking slowly up the London Road. A car drove by close to the pavement, and I had a moment's sight, blurred and confused, of a young woman's face, a wave. The car passed us, and I turned my head, but could see no more. Jack was smiling. He said 'Sheila Knight'."



For Lewis, it's love at first sight. He and Sheila occasionally go out together, but on Sheila's part it's much more platonic than romantic. Sheila exhibits erratic behavior, suffers from some kind of antisocial personality disorder, and torments Lewis with other men. Still, Lewis is obsessed with Sheila, and their relationship forms a large and important part of this novel (and Lewis's story going forward).



Meanwhile, from age nineteen, Lewis takes steps to further his professional ambitions. George Passant is a solicitor/managing clerk at the firm 'Eden & Martineau', and he urges Lewis to apply for an apprenticeship there. This would cost Lewis a considerable sum, and George insists, "If there's any snag, I should expect you to look on me as your banker. I don't see how you could possibly need more than a hundred pounds on top of your [300 pounds]. Somehow or other, that will have to be found. I insist that you don't let a trivial sum affect your decision."



Lewis meets Mr. Eden and Mr. Martineau and makes a good impression, but ultimately decides to go in another direction. Lewis decides that, instead of becoming a solicitor, he wants to read for the bar (become a barrister). Lewis gets admitted to the Chambers of Herbert Getliffe, where he'll have to pay 208 pounds down, and then pupil's fees - which is more than his entire inheritance. Lewis must borrow money to help with his education and living expenses, and Aunt Milly is cajoled into providing a loan.



Lewis's education/experiences at Herbert Getliffe's Inn occupies a large part of the novel, and provides most of the lighter moments. Getliffe is a memorable character: he's good-natured, but also arrogant; stingy (he never pays for drinks); takes credit for other people's work; is wary about juniors moving up the ladder....and he usually manages to slide out of his promises.



Lewis has to deal with all this during his years at the Inn, and then must 'study study study' to take his bar exams. George Passant, who has extensive knowledge about the law, coaches and encourages Lewis, and is instrumental in Lewis's success.



Towards the end of the novel, Lewis is a London barrister representing a client, and this is the subject of the next book in the series, titled 'George Passant.'

Though the book encompasses the WWI years, there's not much about the conflict aside from the deprivation this causes in Britain. This seems like a hole in the story, since some characters would surely lose loved ones and talk about it. On the upside, the novel has a good bit of British slang, archaic words, and fancy language, which is always fun.

For instance:

➤ George tells Lewis, "You'd become an incomparably better solicitor than most of the bellwethers and sunkets who disfigure what I still consider a decent profession." (In this context, sunket means an idiot.)



➤ When Lewis applies to apprentice in Getliffe's chambers, Getliffe tells him, "It's not easy for me to take you, but I shall. I make it a matter of principle to take people like you, who've started with nothing but their brains....Also, it keeps the others up to it." Lewis observes, "He grinned at me: his mood had changed, his face was transformed, he was guying all serious persons." (Guying means teasing, making fun of.)



➤ Lewis is suffering in his relationship with Sheila, but can't break it off. He observes: "I had seen something of myself, and something of my fate. In detail, I did not burke the certain truths." (Burke originally meant 'to murder by suffocation without leaving marks' but now means suppress the truth/ kid yourself.)



➤ When Lewis is an apprentice barrister and looking for business at police courts, he notes, "I used to attend several....Those courts were only a few miles apart, but in society the distance was vast - from the smart businessmen showing off their cars on the way home from the tennis court, to the baffled, stupid, foreign prostitutes, the ponces and bullies, the street bookmakers, the blowsy ladies of the Pimlico backstreets." (Ponces refers to pimps.)



➤ Mrs. Eden admires Sheila, and Lewis observes, "She was quite unembarrassed by her admiration; it was easy to think of her as a girl, concentrated and intent, unrestrained in a schwärmerei, bringing some mistress flowers and gifts. (In this context, schwärmerei means a crush.)



This debut novel in the series establishes Lewis Eliot's background; conflicted feelings about his mother; confidence in himself; ability to read people; willingness to suffer for Sheila; and deep loyalty to his friends.

This book is set in a time when climate change; pollution; oil reserves; nuclear bombs; etc. weren't issues. People had different worries then, but many concerns - like family; education; professional success; relationships; corruption; poverty; and so on - remain significant.

I like the book and recommend it. 

Rating: 4 stars 

Review of "No Way Home: A Novel" by T.C. Boyle

  

Terence Tully (Terry), a third-year medical resident in Los Angeles, is capable and empathetic with patients. In a typical day, Terry must get through the usual crush, such as transients found down on the pavement; third-degree burns; a teenage girl who'd been bitten by her boyfriend's pet fer-de-lance; toddlers poisoned by d-Con; teens crushed in their cars; drug addicts overdosed on pills; a psychiatric patient whose skin lesions are exacerbated by the feces he smears on himself; a homeless woman who's leaking cerebrospinal fluid from her nose; and so on.



Terry is at the hospital when he learns his mother died suddenly, and he takes an emergency leave to drive to Boulder City, Nevada, where his mother lived.



Terry must make decisions about the funeral, and his mother's house, and her dog Daisy, and it's overwhelming.



Needing a break, Terry goes to a popular nightspot for dinner and happens to meet a beautiful young woman named Bethany, who works as a receptionist in a Boulder City hospital.



Bethany quickly inveigles herself into Terry's bed, and when Terry goes back to Los Angeles for work, Bethany moves into his mother's house. When Terry returns to Boulder City, he's shocked to find Bethany there, and most of him wants her out. Nonetheless, Terry is mesmerized by Bethany's sensuality and sexuality, and he accepts her excuse: Just before she met Terry, Bethany broke up with her boyfriend Jesse - who stole her savings and paycheck - and she's currently homeless and penniless.



Unfortunately, Bethany's former boyfriend Jesse still considers Bethany his property, and he's not about to let it go. Jesse is something of a dichotomy: he teaches English Language Arts to eighth-graders; he minored in creative writing; and he plans to write a novel.



Jesse also rides a Honda 450RL motorcycle, and revels in the tough guy image.



After Terry and Bethany accidentally encounter Jesse in a restaurant, Jesse tells Terry, "You want some advice? She's poison. You don't know that yet, but you're going to find out soon enough." Jesse still wants Bethany though, and he starts a war against Terry by flattening all four tires on Terry's car in the middle of the night.



Nevertheless, Terry's observation about Bethany's 'toxicity' seems prognostic. When Terry drives from Los Angeles to Boulder City for a surprise visit, his mother's house is a mess. There are smeared dishes on the coffee table, pizza crusts, the remains of a salad, beer cans, a diminished fifth of Jack Daniels, a cluster of used glasses...and a strange girl on the couch wearing a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. It turns out Bethany invited her friend Lutie to stay in the house.



Moreover, it's Lutie's birthday, and Jesse and his best friend Thomas show up for the festivities.



Terry thinks he's been made a fool of, Bethany is a liar, yada yada yada, and he insists Bethany get out of his mother's house. Soon enough, though, Bethany has talked and seduced her way back into the domicile, part of her argument being that she's taking care of the dog Daisy (who's been evicted from Terry's Los Angeles apartment).



It's hard to know if Bethany is deliberately using Terry, or if she's just a free spirit who doesn't understand boundaries. With Bethany giving mixed signals, the antagonism between Jesse and Terry escalates, partly by happenstance, and partly on purpose.



To say any more would be a spoiler.

The story maintained my attention, but it's not among my favorite books by T.C. Boyle. A toxic love triangle is less interesting to me than themes like climate change and mental illness that the author addresses in other books.

Still, this is a page-turner that many readers would enjoy.

Thanks to Netgalley, T.C. Boyle, and Liveright for an ARC of the book.

Rating: 3.5 stars

Review of "Angle of Repose: A Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel" by Wallace Stegner

  

In essence, this novel is about the marriage of Susan Burling Ward and Oliver Ward, which lasted for 60 years, from 1876 to 1936. As material for the fictional story, author Wallace Stegner used the REAL letters of Mary Hallock Foote, born to a Quaker family in 1847.

In his acknowledgments, Stegner writes, "My thanks to J.M. and her sister for the loan of their ancestors. Though I have used many details of their lives and characters, I have not hesitated to warp both personalities and events to fictional needs. This is a novel which utilizes selected facts from their real lives. It is in no sense a family history."

Still, after Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, controversy broke out, and Stegner was accused of being a plagiarist and misusing the letters.

*****

As the novel opens in 1970, Lyman Ward - a retired history professor who taught at Berkeley - is living in Zodiac Cottage in Grass Valley, California. The professor is in a wheelchair, having lost one leg to bone disease. Long-time family employees Ed and Ada Hawkes live in a cottage down the hill, and Ada comes over every day to cook and take care of Lyman's physical needs.



Zodiac Cottage was the last home of Lyman's grandparents, Susan Burling Ward and Oliver Ward. Now that Lyman has time, he's using his grandmother's letters, papers and life as the basis of a sort of roman à clef novel. The narrative toggles back and forth between Susan's story in the past and Lyman's life in the present.

The book is long, so I'll just provide a brief sketch of the tale.

Susan Burling comes from a line of Quaker farmers in Milton, New York. She's attractive, smart and talented, and in the mid-1860s, Susan is sent to 'The School of Design for Women' in New York City, to study art.



There Susan meets Augusta Drake, a wealthy cosmopolitan girl who belongs to the city's old aristocracy. Susan writes, "We sat together...and scribbled quotations and remarks to each other on the margins of our notebooks...She came up to Milton that following summer and every summer after till there was no Milton for me...Her sharings in books and friends were the stored honey of my girlhood."



Susan is drawn into New York's intellectual circles, where she meets renowned editor and publisher Thomas Hudson. This leads to Susan, Augusta, and Thomas becoming a trio of best friends, and Thomas and Augusta later wed. Susan and Augusta remain close, and as their lives go in different directions, the women occasionally see each other, and correspond for the next half-century.

The story of Lyman's grandparents begins as follows: Susan is a 21-year-old budding artist and writer in 1868, when she meets Oliver Ward at a New Year's party. Oliver explains he was an engineering student at Yale University, but an eye problem took him out of school for two years. By then Oliver's class had graduated and he chose not to return to school. Instead, Oliver is going out West to get practical experience in engineering, mining, and surveying, which he plans to make a career.



Susan and Oliver correspond for the next five or six years while Oliver is working in California, and an understanding develops. Oliver comes East to visit on occasion, and the couple finally wed in February 1876.



Oliver then returns West, where he's Resident Manager of the New Almaden mercury mine, near San José. It takes some time for Oliver to renovate a cottage, and Susan finally sets out to join him in July 1876, bringing a servant girl named Lizzie and Lizzie's baby.

Susan's mental picture of the marriage is that for perhaps two years she and Oliver would live in the West while he established himself. They would then return East, live near her friends Augusta and Thomas Hudson, and the two families would be great friends. Of course, nothing like that happened.

In a nutshell, Lyman thinks of his grandmother's married life as follows: "A Quaker lady of high principles, the wife of a not-very-successful engineer whom you supported through years of delayed hope, you lived in exile, wrote it, drew it - New Almaden, Santa Cruz, Leadville, Michoacán, the Snake River Valley, the deep quartz mines right under this house - and you stayed a cultural snob through it all. Even when you lived in a field camp in a canyon, your children had a governess no less, unquestionably the only one in Idaho. The dream you had for your children was a dream of Eastern civilization."



In the course of the narrative, we follow Susan's arduous journey through her long life.

As an example, here are some snippets of newlywed Susan's trek West with her servant girl: After a week-long journey on a transcontinental train to California, where Oliver meets them, Susan, Lizzie and Lizzie's baby must take further transportation to the mercury mine.

"Nothing on the trip to New Almaden next day modified [Susan's] understanding that her lot at first would be hardship. It was intensely hot, the valley roads seen through the train windows boiled with white dust, Lizzie's usually silent baby cried and would not be comforted. In San José a stage with black leather curtains waited; they were the only passengers. But her anticipation of a romantic Bret Harte [writer/poet] stage ride lasted only minutes. Dust engulfed them. She had Oliver draw the curtains, but then the heat was so great they suffered a slow boil. After three minutes she had Oliver open the curtains again halfway. They were thus insured both heat and dust, and were almost entirely cut off from the view."



Still, Oliver was not above making jokes, and when Susan - referring to their home - asked "Where do we get our water?", Oliver responded, "Why, the housewife carries it from the spring. It's only a half mile up the hill."

When the passengers finally reached the campsite in New Almaden, "The whole place had the air of having been dumped down the hillside-steep streets, houses at every angle white and incongruous or unpainted and shabby. Wash hung everywhere, the vacant lots were littered with cans and trash, dogs prowled and children screamed. At the water tank they slowed to pass through a reluctantly parting densely staring tangle of men, boys, teamsters, cows, donkeys, mules."

Susan makes the best of it by imagining the pictures she can can draw and the stories she can write, but it's a shock for a fastidious lady from the East.



Even more harrowing is a trip to the silver mines of Leadville, Colorado seven or eight years later.


Leadville, Colorado

Susan and Oliver have been apart for long periods because Susan feared the places Oliver worked - like Deadwood, South Dakota - were too rough for their son Ollie. However, Ollie is now back East recovering from malaria, which he contracted visiting Susan's family. So Susan thinks, "No more foolish protectiveness about Ollie, no more timorous holding-back from sharing her husband's life."

Oliver meets Susan at the Denver railroad station, and they head for the silver mines of Leadville in a buggy. The trip is horrible. "At a washout...Susan got out obediently and floundered behind the buggy while [Oliver] led the team through." Oliver commented, "Just as well it's too dark to see. Two wrecked rigs and three dead horses down the cliff."



Then a clerk has given away the hotel room Oliver reserved for five dollars, and "With the slightest indulgence, the sagging disappointment in Susan's muscles could become panic. Where WOULD one sleep, in this wild place full of rough men? The stable? A hayloft or manger?" The clerk is snippy and "Watching [Oliver], Susan saw the fury come up so suddenly in his face that she was afraid he was going to lean over the desk and slap the clerk."

The couple manage to get a bed in a boardinghouse, separated from other guests' beds by muslin sheets. In the night, Susan hears people coughing, snoring, grinding their teeth, scolding, and yawning. "And that made [Susan] think, with failing nerve, that whatever it was, it was to be her life. It was what she had deliberately chosen."



The last leg of the trip to Leadville is worse yet. While Oliver and Susan's buggy is navigating the edge of a cliff, a runaway stagecoach comes around a bend and is heading straight for them. Oliver viciously whips the horses, and "they jerked wildly in toward the cliff, among the blocks of stone. And there was not room, [Susan] knew it with a certainty that froze her mind. The left wheels reared up, climbed, crashed down, climbed again; the buggy tilted so steeply that she hung on in frantic fear of sliding straight off under the hoofs and wheels....." By the time they're safe, "Susan sat white and trembling, hating [Oliver's] cruelty, hating the pain and exhaustion of the sick beast, hating the heartless mountains, the brutal West."



Of course, the Wards' lives in the West aren't all doom and gloom, and there are times Susan is happy and fulfilled. Susan has three children - Ollie, Betsy and Agnes; she frequently sells drawings and stories to elite Eastern publications; she loves Mexico when Oliver is posted there; she has a literary salon in her Leadville cabin, and hosts resident and visiting intellectuals; and more.



However, Oliver has a character trait that, in time, has unfortunate consequences. The 'flaw' is exemplified by the following: On their trip to the Leadville silver mines, Oliver tells Susan about someone jumping his claim. When Susan asks what he did about it, Oliver says he just went to the office and picked out another lot. Susan observes, 'You're queer, do you know? You let yourself be imposed on and cheated, and you don't seem to care." Oliver responds, "I don't like trouble, not about anything small. I've got too ugly a temper when I do get mad, so I try not to get mad....I hold grudges."

The thing is, Oliver is trusting and naive, is cheated by people again and again, and does nothing about it. Eventually, Oliver's 'negligence' ruins plans Susan has been making for years, to bring her sister Bessie's family to the West. This has sad consequences all around.



The novel contains much more about the Wards and their work, families, friends, and acquaintances. All in all, it's a fascinating picture of the settling of the old West.

Now, I'll say a few words about Lyman Ward's part of the novel.

Lyman was raised by Susan and Oliver Ward in Zodiac Cottage, and is now learning more about their history. He writes, "My mother died when I was two, my father [Ollie] was a silent and difficult man: I grew up my grandparents' child. As those things went in Grass Valley, I also grew up privileged, son of the superintendent of the Zodiac [gold mine] and grandson of the general manager. Every child I played with came from a family that worked for mine....Grandmother deferred to my father [Ollie], seemed almost to fear him. Certainly she assumed the blame for the taciturnity that made him formidable to deal with, and certainly she saw in me a second chance to raise up an ideal gentleman."



Lyman is now in constant pain from his bone disease and amputee stump, and he frequently pops aspirin and drinks bourbon. Lyman's wife Ellen left him for the surgeon who amputated his leg, and Lyman understandably holds a grudge. Lyman's son Rodman, a Berkeley sociology professor and 'modern thinker', wants his father to move to an assisted living facility for his own good.

Lyman is out of tune with the hippie culture that's invaded Berkeley, exemplified by his temporary assistant Shelley (the daughter of Lyman's caretaker Ada). Shelley helps Lyman sort his grandmother's papers and types the recordings he makes for his books. As Shelley gets more comfortable with Lyman, she gives unwanted opinions, asks nosy questions, and converses about things that make Lyman uncomfortable, like an orgy she attended. 🫨



There was some controversy about whether Angle of Repose deserved the Pulitzer Prize, but there's often controversy about Pulitzer selections. For me, the novel is an engrossing, well-written book that adds to the picture of the Old West gleaned from television, streaming, and movies. It's fascinating to see the region from the point of view of an elite Eastern lady rather than lawmen, gunslingers, gold rush immigrants, Chinese workers, saloon women, and so on. I highly recommend the book.

Rating: 4.5 stars