vivdunstan

A Murder of Quality by John le Carré (1962). The second Smiley novel is a murder mystery rather than a spy story—the spy thing is only directly relevant because Smiley is dragged into the murder mystery by a former spy colleague—and I like murder mysteries better than spy novels on the whole, so I liked this. It's set at a public school and is very interesting as a portrayal of that setting in the post-war period, though it's not at all a school story, the major characters being mostly teachers and their wives. It's also very much About Class: the murder victim is the wife of a teacher from an unusually lowly background, and much of the dramatic backstory revealed as the murder is investigated involves the tension around the husband having done his best to forget his origins and integrate into the public-schoolmaster class while the wife did not (religion is part of this: they were both originally Nonconformists, but he converted to the CoE while she continued to attend the local chapel until her death). I was annoyed by how everyone, including characters from the Midlands, kept referring to the Midlands as the North, and disappointed by the lack of Mendel (does he reappear in any later books?), and also what's with saying at the start that the action takes place 'as the Lent Half (as the Easter term was called) drew to its close' and then it later becomes clear from various seasonal references that it's actually not only (the equivalent of) Lent term but fairly early on in Lent term, what term/half system is this place using?, but otherwise enjoyed this one very much as a well-constructed twisty mystery with interesting setting and themes.

The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless by Eliza Haywood (1751). A solid eighteenth-century brick following the adventures in London society and courtship of the young protagonist, who is kind, generous, good-hearted and not at all vicious but who is nevertheless rather—you'll never guess what Betsy's central character flaw is. (There is a lot of extremely unsubtle character naming in this book.) It's one of those books that I found interesting rather than liking exactly. Much of it is an illustration of a contemporary sexual morality which can accurately be described as victim-blaming and double standards and not much else; the early part of the book seems to shy away from portraying controversial subjects (one character attempts abortion but fails; another sets in motion legal proceedings to divorce his wife, but dies before the divorce can be completed), and later on there's a sequence which is kind of a shockingly bold repudiation of conventional morality and also kind of really isn't, which was a bit frustrating. Betsy is really a very likeable character, though, and there's a lot of enjoyable overwrought drama and fun eighteenth-century language. (Haywood consistently spells the possessive 'its' with an apostrophe, among other things.)

The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys by Forrest Reid (1906). A strange, dreamy, virtually-textually queer book that isn't a school story at all despite being about the relationship between two boys at school and very little else. (We see almost nothing of other boys, teachers, lessons, painstakingly-detailed cricket matches or school affairs in general; the one time the book acknowledges the wider world it's to comment 'democracy, how ghastly' and then move straight on.) The writing style is strikingly modern. I enjoyed it, although neither the style nor the relationship development is the sort of thing I really get attached to. Also, a gay relationship beginning with one character confessing to the other that they've already met them in a dream as a child is a weird thing for a book like this to have in common with Carmilla.

Amateur City by Katherine V. Forrest (1984). I had to know what this lesbian detective genre was all about, but this book—in which lesbian police detective Kate Delafield solves the mystery of who murdered the world's worst boss in a big corporate office building, and also isn't the main witness in the case cute?—was a bit of a disappointment. I don't get on with Forrest's writing, I think; then police procedurals are not the kind of detective story I like, and the characters and relationships in this one were not appealing to me. (I can't say I was contrary enough to like Ellen's horrible girlfriend, who does treat her pretty badly, but I was annoyed on her behalf because Forrest was so clearly writing her as a cardboard villain and Ellen just blithely cheats on her and still hasn't come clean and/or broken up with her by the end of the book. That's not a happy ending!)