The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies

This rather slight novel draws together Rotherham, an Anglicised German refugee with a Jewish father, working for British intelligence and cross-examining Rudolf Hess; Karsten, a German POW struggling with the shame of surrender; and the eponymous Esther, encountering foreigners (including the English) for the first time. The parts of the novel dealing with Hess, while interesting, seem a little bolted-on and disconnected from the main narrative which focuses around Esther. Esther is an interesting character, drawn to transgressive acts but ultimately returned to something like convention, although this is built on half-truths and deceits. It's all beautifully written, but a bit too much like three linked short stories to make a satisfying novel.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters remains in the late 1940s for her latest work, which revolves around a country house, Hundreds Hall in Warwickshire, the Ayres family who live there, and their doctor, first-name-less Dr Faraday, whose mother was once a housemaid at the Hall and who has traversed, but not forgotten, several social boundaries. Initially called to the Hall to treat the current housemaid Betty, the doctor gradually develops an intimacy with Mrs Ayres and her adult children Caroline and Roderick. Through this friendship, and his uneasy romance with Caroline, he becomes party to various strange events at the Hall; a fire, rappings and knockings, writing appearing on walls. The Hundreds Hall he remembers from his boyhood is decaying before his eyes, the estate mostly sold off, rooms closed up and paper peeling away. Dr Faraday is the voice of rationality in the book as the Hall's inhabitants become increasingly convinced that the odd events are supernatural in origin, but he cannot prevent tragic consequences through rational argument. I'll try not to spoil the ending for those who have yet to read the book.

Although Sarah Waters has returned to a chronological narrative order for this novel, there is still much that is interesting in her narrative choices. Dr Faraday, as first-person narrator, is often absent from the strange and unsettling events at the Hall. Sometimes he hears about them directly from witnesses, so the reader encounters them in Caroline's voice, for example; at other times he recounts them himself, using reportage that increases the reader's distance from the events themselves and ratchets up the sense of ambiguity. His narration of the uncanny is flat and scientific, highly reminiscent of the dry academics who so often narrate the ghost stories of M R James, but - the uncanny aside - the lives he depicts are generally flat and limited, with few options in a period of deep austerity and financial constraint. The first-person narrative and the focus of the novel on a house are something of an homage to Rebecca, but there are other similarities too; the influence of a long-dead character, the awkwardness of Faraday as his friendship with the family grows, and his increasing power and agency as the mysterious events pile up. I wondered if the choice of a doctor as narrator was a hint, given the famously unreliable narrator of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; when I went to hear Sarah Waters speak about this book, however, she suggested that a doctor was chosen because he would have access to the house and permission to ask impertinent questions. His position as the voice of material rationality - during the course of the novel he conducts a research project and writes it up for presentation at a conference - is also an effective contrast to the variety of levels of belief in the supernatural he encounters at the Hall.

Every book I read at the moment seems to be partly about class, and this is no exception. Of working-class stock, Faraday has moved through several social classes to get a grammar-school education and then qualify as a doctor. The seriousness of his mother's final illness was kept from him to ensure his studies were undisturbed, and his move into middle-class professionalism damaged his relationship with his father irreparably. His later transition into friend of the Ayres, and would-be lover of Caroline, proves equally disruptive and damaging. For the Ayres, Faraday personifies the rapid social change of post-war England, but he is also affected by it; the nascent NHS is both a threat and an opportunity for him. The Ayres are trapped and tormented by their social role as they attempt to preserve it in impossible circumstances. The barriers of class infect the narrative, limiting the freedom of conversation and preventing Faraday from asking questions, and the Ayres from giving away family secrets.

It's probably not giving anything away to say that the end of this novel is ambiguous; readers can draw their own conclusions. Is the Little Stranger a genuine manifestation of the uncanny, of shared hysteria, or of individual neurosis? Is Faraday's interest and influence on Hundreds Hall benign, or does he somehow contribute to the sinister happenings there? What of Betty the housemaid, convinced that the house itself is somehow bad? I have my own theory, and you'll probably have yours too.

A Party in San Niccolò by Christobel Kent

A murder mystery set in Florence links the expatriate community with the local underworld, subverting the beauty of a dolce vita in sunlit Renaissance gardens by reminding us that criminality and corruption lurk even in the loveliest of places. Gina, taking a much-needed break from the demands of suburban family life, is our guide to this new world, introducing us to an oddly assorted group of characters. There is Gina's old friend Jane, married to Niccolò, a successful English-Italian architect; Jane runs a cookery school and is strongly controlled and perfectionist, her life superficially without flaw. There is generous and kindly Frances, in her seventies and planning her annual birthday party; and Frank, a journalist who has long since abandoned the search for a major scoop. In the first two pages of the book, however, two young women are found dead: Evelina, a Nigerian girl trafficked into prostitution, and Natasha, a beautiful English girl thrown through the plate-glass window of a local antique dealer. Natasha is the best friend of Beatrice, Niccolò's daughter and subject of Jane's unwilling stepmothering, and it is this younger generation that links the rest of the expats to to the local criminals centered around grey-haired Stefano, dealer and pimp.

Kent constructs a complex plot, with blind alleys and several plausible suspects for the murder, and into this weaves a good many observations on the nature of love and marriage, and the proximity of apparently perfect lives to seedy degradation. The plot resolution is reached after deftly built suspense, and in Frank, Gina and Frances Kent creates genuinely appealing and rounded characters, who stop the novel becoming formulaic.

New Grub Street by George Gissing

New Grub Street details the lives of those attempting to earn a living from writing during the 1880s. A group of writers, journalists and scholars, linked together by professional and family connections, are at work in London: we have Jasper Milvain, who looks on the production of literature entirely as a trade, and at the other extreme is Mr Biffen, quietly starving in his garret as he works at his realist novel Mr Bailey, Grocer. If the novel has a main protagonist it is probably Edwin Reardon, whose view of culture is placed somewhere between these two points. A published author, he is struggling to produce another novel; with a wife and child to support, he is finally persuaded, in part by his wife Amy, to compromise his aesthetic principles to produce something sensational that will sell. However, the money he is able to earn from his work continues to dwindle, and he returns to his former work as a clerk, causing a major rift in his marriage. Unacknowledged in print, but working daily as a researcher for her father is Marian Yule, Amy’s cousin, who contributes to the support of her small family through her efforts at the British Library.

The novel’s main interests are the effects of the business of writing. Is it possible to make a decent living from writing culturally valuable work? Or is it only possible if artistic integrity is compromised? Based on the fates of the various characters, the latter is true – only Jasper Milvain achieves any sort of financial success. The novel also criticises the constraints of the publishing industry and the tyranny imposed on the writer required to produce a three-volume novel by the circulating libraries. Reardon in particular is tormented by the need to stretch a story out to three volumes, and there’s a certain amount of evidence of Gissing’s own torment in this respect. The novel is definitely padded in places, and makes use of cliched plot devices, although this gives insight into the validity of Reardon’s complaint. The book is also interesting on matters of class. Marian Yule’s parents have married across the class boundary, to the everlasting regret of her father; Amy and Edwin separate when his move to clerkdom threatens to declass Amy. Lack or loss of social status results in social isolation and degradation, and limits opportunities for advancement and connection. The Reardons are increasingly isolated when their increasing poverty makes it impossible for them to accept the hospitality of others, since they cannot return it; the threat of compounding this isolation through crossing a class boundary is too much for Amy. Unmarried men may attempt to challenge that social status: Mr Biffen lives like a pauper in a garret, in a poor (and, it turns out, dangerous) area; but women and married men cannot transgress class boundaries without serious consequences. Those serious consequences are played out in the tensions of Marian Yule's home and the lack of opportunity in her life. While the book celebrates, to an extent, the joys of bachelor life in a dingy garret, it also reinforces rigid social stratification.

Like the other Gissing novel I've read (In the Year of Jubilee), the book deals ambiguously with its female characters and with attitudes to women. Some misogyny might be detected in the way wives are presented as a curb to literary and creative ambition, millstones around the neck of writers who might otherwise create works of genius. Although Amy is not entirely sympathetic to her husband's desire to create better-quality work, focusing more on what will sell and support her and her child, she is portrayed as strong and enduring, helpful to her husband and struggling to manage on the little money they have until they separate. This view of Amy is, however, undercut by her (probably unwitting) contribution to Mr Biffen's final decline, and her marriage to Jasper Milvain at the end of the novel. Hard-working Marian Yule might be a proto-feminist character: at first undertaking scholarship to support her father's work, she progresses to writing published under her own name. But her self-sacrifice in order to support her family, and her passivity in the face of Jasper Milvain's reluctant and reduntant courtship, undermine her agency. She is whisked off to run a library in the provinces, solving her family's financial hardship and Gissing's problem of how to end her story at one stroke.

This fascinating book foregrounds the labour of literature and locates writers, socially, as workers - but workers continually attempting to balance society's demands and their own aesthetic principles. This reminds me of the continual tightrope walk performed by members of the lower middle/upper working classes, attempting both to preserve their gentility and make enough money to live on. Throw artistic aspirations into that mix and you have a triangle that is impossible to reconcile.

Nothing is Safe by E M Delafield

Nothing is Safe, published in 1937, recounts the effects of divorce and remarriage on a family from the perspective of a ten-year-old girl. The third-person narrative is always from precocious Julia’s point of view, always clear that, even if the reader has grasped what is going on, Julia has not. Julia’s parents separate at the start of the novel, and she and her brother Terry, older, vague and clumsy, return to their boarding schools not knowing where or how they will spend the next holidays. Julia is fiercely protective of Terry, who comes in for a good deal of adult criticism, and attempts to manipulate situations so that he is not exposed to difficulty or fear. Unfortunately her ability to do this is entirely compromised when both parents make new marriages: her father Alick to the much younger, bohemian Petah, and her mother Daphne to Captain Prettyman. The vigorously masculine Captain is unimpressed with Terry, and the novel follows the children about as they are shuffled between parents, grandparents and impromptu babysitters. Terry experiences a series of nervous crises which culminate in his treatment by a child psychologist, and the end of the novel sees Julia finally realising that she is to be separated from her brother.

The narrative voice of the novel is well-sustained, making effective use of internal monologue – thankfully for the reader, Julia is a bright child with a good vocabulary – and cleverly managing to convey meaning that Julia cannot grasp from her perspective. Delafield deploys a very careful, delicate tone here, ensuring that Julia does not tell us things that she could not possibly know or understand, and making effective use of dialogue that the reader can interpret without Julia’s intervention. The tone also allows the use of light irony which relieves some of the emotional tension of the book. I’m not sure if the paragraph which implies that the Captain is making excessive sexual demands on Daphne is intentional, but there are similar, if less controversial, effects elsewhere in the novel. Julia’s concern about the regularity and quality of her meals, the simplicity of her interpretations of events, and her ability to live in the moment, help to reinforce her childishness and prevent her being unbelievably precocious. Her narrative role also makes the novel rather timeless, since she is not much interested in current affairs.

This is the only Delafield novel I’ve read so far that is much interested in masculinity. Terry’s vagueness and sensitivity, his perceived childishness, his clumsiness and lack of interest in machines or sport, as well as his dependence on Julia, all contribute to a view among the novel’s adults that he is insufficiently masculine and that this must be corrected. The difference in the generational view of girls and boys is also brought out through Daphne’s relationship with her parents, who have stricter ideas of gender roles and appropriate behaviour. However, it is Captain Prettyman who causes most of the crises in this respect, criticising Terry’s lack of dexterity and his unwillingness to take physical risks. All the adults fear that Terry will not be tolerated by men when he grows up, and will be unable to endure public school, an inevitable rite of passage for him; Julia’s influence is seen as feminising him, making him unacceptable to other men. This is ironic, given her position in the family as a bossy, articulate tomboy, more comfortable in shorts than the dresses her grandmother prefers. The siblings represent a challenge to established gender norms. While the challenge is played out mainly in intergenerational terms, affronting the senior family members but not their parents, this is acceptable. But Terry’s problems, and his expression of them (high-pitched screaming, vomiting and fainting) are eventually portrayed as illness rather than rebellion. Once his parents are convinced of his problems, an imposition of greater gender norms is made: Terry will be treated at a small school for sensitive boys; Julia will go to a much stricter boarding school which will inculcate feminine behaviour.

This analysis of the development of masculinity, expressed through the thoughts and words of a small girl, could be read as an ironic critique. The novel is certainly critical of a model of masculinity that cannot accommodate Terry’s talents and demerits; Captain Prettyman, its adult manifestation, is a fairly ridiculous character, with a surname that carries overtones of effeminacy and a head that is too small for his body. Feminist voices in the novel, which might challenge models of masculinity, are limited to Peggy, a friend of Daphne’s who is willing to challenge the Captain’s view of Terry and theories of childrearing, and possibly to the capable Julia herself; she can be read as challenge incarnate to gendered behaviour, combining tomboyish robustness with a strong urge to nurture. But the end of the novel leaves the reader uncertain whether the critique of conservative gender roles is sustained. Julia’s “management” of Terry is sometimes over-bearing. Terry’s voice is heard little in the novel, because he seldom speaks; however, in the final pages, it becomes clear that he has been told earlier of the plan to separate them, and has not confided in her. This hints at a desire for independence from Julia, which is achieved, but the plot cannot reasonably conclude with a sustained challenge by the children to the roles they are required to take up – they do not have the power or agency to undertake this.

It is also interesting that the novel is not particularly critical of divorce itself – the children appear to acclimatise fairly quickly to this – but the effects of remarriage and the lack of a settled home are presented as much more serious, as is the failure of either parent, caught up in new relationships, to prioritise the needs of their children. There are no good mothers in Nothing is Safe: Daphne cannot manage her children and her new husband, and chooses him; her own mother disagrees with her violently about her approach to parenting, and is strict and disapproving; the brief appearance by Petah’s mother, pressed into giving Julia a bed, and quite incapable of dealing with her painful earache, completes the trinity of ineffectual mothers. Petah herself treats the children as tiny adults, feeding them cocktail snacks and ignoring conventions such as bedtime. These are types of mothers typical of their class and generation, controlling (a favourite EMD type), loving but ineffectual, distant or uninterested. There are two caring mother figures: Peggy, who only has to do this from time to time, and Annie, the housemaid who comforts Julia when she is ill. Their openness and warmth with the children can be read as a moderate critique of conventions of motherhood, both good and bad.

This is a rather complex novel, the simplicity of its narrative deceptive, and its judgements and values ambiguous. The development of Delafield’s technique is easily discerned, and the subtleties of her tone are probably only equalled in the Diary of a Provincial Lady. Recommended, if you can track down a copy or if Persephone resurrect it.

Wildwood by Roger Deakin

Wildwood, a sort of sequel to Waterlog, is a similar combination of memoir, history, and travel writing that explores our relationship with trees and wood. Deakin separates the book into four sections. Roots considers the significance of wood in our daily lives, the experience of living with wooden furniture and in wooden structures, and Deakin’s joy in working with wood. Sapwood focuses on British woods and the way they are used and enjoyed by the people who live in and near them. Driftwood explores woods abroad, particularly in Australia, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Heartwood returns to Suffolk, to Deakin’s life with the trees and hedges around his home, the wood that built his house, became his furniture and provided scope for work and recreation.

Like Waterlog, this is full of fascinating information, of botany, folklore and social history, although I found it lacked the lyrical quality of the previous book. However, as Roger Deakin died very shortly after submitting the manuscript, it seems unfair to cavil at minor shortcomings, and my view may be due to a greater personal relationship with water than with wood. It’s a book with a vast breadth of knowledge often focused precisely on details, giving a sense of expansive wisdom and specific expertise, and opening up new worlds to the reader – who else has visited the walnut harvest in Kyrgyzstan, or written about it so enthrallingly? One of the episodes in the book concerns Deakin’s school trips to the New Forest with his biology teacher, during which they would map the animal and plant life of a small area; the scientific habit clearly stayed with him, as his affectionate scrutiny compasses not only the tree, but the insects, animals, plants, people and economies surrounding it and depending on it. To see all this is a rare talent in itself; to write well about it seems exceptional to me.

When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

This is the third of Atkinson's novels to feature detective Jackson Brodie, and we also get another appearance from Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe. Set mainly in Edinburgh, the plot centres on Dr Joanna Hunter, who at six survived the random and brutal killing of her mother, older sister and baby brother. Their killer has now served his thirty-year sentence, and is shortly to be released. Dr Hunter and her one-year-old baby son Gabriel disappear; at first this is not seen as suspicious, given the circumstances and her husband Neil's confirmation that she is staying with an aunt, but her babysitter Reggie (short for Regina) is convinced something more sinister has happened. Jackson is almost literally thrown into Reggie's life; he has, by mistake, boarded a train to Edinburgh, which crashes very close to a house in which Reggie is dog-sitting. Dr Hunter has taught Reggie first aid, and she - in her own estimation - saves Jackson's life at the scene of the crash. Enlisted in the search for Dr Hunter, Jackson encounters Louise again, and each is caused to re-evaluate the wisdom of a recent marriage. Surrounding the main plot are Neil Hunter's dodgy business activities, Reggie's brother Billy's descent into criminality; and lots and lots of literary references, quotations and wordplay.

Like the two previous books, the plot is emotionally rich and satisfying, with appropriate opportunities for redemption and punishment; even the perpetually martyred Jackson is allowed some chinks of light to brighten his personal darkness. However, I wondered whether Atkinson is now working to something of a formula with these books, which might render them a little cynical. One short paragraph stands out in particular. Joanna Hunter's father was a novelist of the angry young man generation. When Joanna goes missing, Louise begins to read his novels, and notes that Howard Mason never wrote about the murder of his wife and children, the survival of Joanna. That, Louise thinks, would have been a bestseller. Kate Atkinson, of course, has written that bestseller; the reader of the paragraph is holding it in her hands. No doubt this is just a little self-referential joke, but it works against the tone of the novel, which is generally redemptive and humane. The novel remains an enjoyable work, however, and taps into issues of deep and enduring interest, such as how to live in the face of atrocities, both for the victims and those who attempt to help them.