An Awful Lot of Books by Elizabeth Jane Howard Read Free Book Online Page A

do. Her heroine, Jenny Brown, is a new and young teacher at Gudge Street School in London. Jenny has been given Form O - made up of toughs and near delinquents, and run by a backward but forceful twelve-year-old called Sam, ‘who moved with the mad co-ordination of a crippled tank’, and whose language, I must say, is a delight - at least, to read. The only member of the staff who is friendly to her is Jack Star, a Communist, married and about twenty years older than she, who cannot resist seducing any personable young woman and at the same time trying to recruit her to the Party. As Jenny’s home is a country town and she is living in a furnished room with no friends in sight the first part of Jack’s programme is not difficult, and as it would be hard to someone with Jenny’s earnest simple nature not to equate having an affair with being in love - she is in love. To compensate for her imagination about her lover (in no time there seem to be two of him - one present, one absent) she starts trying to make her relationship with her family, a step-father and a neurotic mother a more honest and interesting business.
    Apart from her tremendously good school atmosphere (the children are brilliantly drawn, as are the staff-room scenes with their jersey-knit bonhomie and bitchery, and there is a headmaster whose conversation is a mixture of a scrambled sports commentary and the dregs of any distant political speech), Miss O’Donovan has that unusual gift for writing scenes which tremble between pathos and near farce - they are very funny, and they are sad, and it is this kind of double-barrelled accuracy that makes the people she writes about both touching and surprising.

 
The Light in the Piazza
by
Elizabeth Spencer
    April 1961
    The writing of a successful novella requires an idea so simple that most novelists - when blessed with such a thing - dismiss it as a mere short story notion. Publishers have claimed for years that they cannot sell a novella (unless by Turgenev, etc.), and so it is not surprising that we see very few of them. The facts are, however, that this is a particular form with demands and possibilities which do not occur either in the short story or the novel, and it is extremely pleasant to settle down in a hundred pages at one sitting, which is, incidentally, from the writer’s point of view, the best way of being read.
    Miss Spencer’s idea has the right simplicity, and this story has the charm of a good watercolour - there is no room in a novella to overpaint.
    Mrs. Johnson is American, and has brought her daughter, Clara, on a trip to Italy. Clara, pretty, innocent, and radiantly charming, has the mental age of a child of ten, due to an accident when she was very young. Mrs. Johnson knows that in America Clara will never to able to lead a normal life - she had been through all the heartbreaking experiments and experiences that prove this. When, therefore, a young Italian, Fabrizio, who meets Clara outside his shop in Florence, falls instantly in love with her, her mother, who loves her with the kind of intelligent devotion which enables her to see more than one side of the situation, is faced with the choice of stopping him, or of letting it run its curiously childlike course. It is through Mrs. Johnson that we follow the affair - the meetings with Fabrizio’s family when it is clear that Clara’s simplicity matches something in Fabrizio’s Neapolitan mother: Mrs. Johnson’s attempt to explain Clara to the family, and the family to Clara’s father in America - the escape from the situation and the return to it. The whole idea has been perfectly explored and resolved: I should have liked more of Clara, but since the book is more or less an exercise in accident and fate, and it is Mrs. Johnson who is given the power to discriminate between the two, this is probably an idle wish.

 
Thunderball
by
Ian Fleming
    April 1961
    James Bond may either delight or disgust his countless acquaintances, but