Recently, two books came into the shop (new) that caught my eye. Two little novellas. One a paperback titled “The Man in the Picture”, and the other a gorgeous little hardcover called “The Small Hand”. Both by Susan Hill, and both ghost stories, in the traditional genre. Rubbed my hands in glee. Here is a new author, I thought, that I might come to love. The first was a good yarn, the second I have put on hold while I read ANOTHER of her books … “Howards End is on the Landing. A year of reading from home”. A non-fiction that was published last year, it is a book about her rediscovering her own library and reading nothing that doesn’t come from it for a year.

I am only half way through. At first, I was absolutely enchanted. I thought to myself “here is a woman you would want as a good friend”. A woman with a delightful sense of humour, a woman who loves children’s pop-up books! A kindred-spirit of the bookish variety. Except that she can’t stand Jane Austen. She doesn’t get the point.

On page 50 she makes a statement that, on it’s own, meant little. She is writing about a travel writer she met who was giving a talk about his book on Australian Aborigines, in whom, she feels impelled to tell us, “I had then, as now, little interest”. That’s cool, Ms Hill, I don’t expect you to be. But sidle that up against another paragraph further on in, and her comment takes on a different connotation. Twenty pages later:

Eucayptus. Murray Bail.
Someone told me that this was a great novel, so I bought it, but then discovered that it was a great Australian novel so I put it away. I find it difficult to get to grips with Australian novels. Difficult, but not impossible.

Really? It is an Australian novel so you don’t even bother to give it a go? Way to generalise, Ms Hill. I would be so very interested to find out exactly WHAT is about all ‘Australian novels’ that is so difficult for you to get to grips with. I challenge you to read Alex Miller’s ‘Lovesong’ (it is set mainly in Paris, maybe that should satisfy) and not fall in love with it. I also, national bias put aside, say emphatically that he is a better writer than yourself. And Thea Astley, oh now there is an Australian of literary merit.

Yes. After reading that, a nasty taste is left in my mouth and BOOM! Infatuation with Susan Hill well and truly over. Then I remember that she states in her introduction “[n]ame-dropping is a tiresome, if harmless, trait”. Yes, INDEED, Ms Hill. It is VERY tiresome. In this book, names are dropped like leaves in autumn. How she ‘bumped into’ TS Eliot, EM Forster, C Day Lewis. How Stephen Fry told her this, and how she knows friends of Virginia Woolf, and this diarist, and that travel writer, and on and on and on. Tedious.

But I continue to read, to see if perhaps I am wrong in my suspicions of snobbery. Until I read this a few minutes ago and my upper lip curled.

I have a problem with Canadian writers as I do with Australian writers. (I know, I know.) But that is emphatically not true of America…

WHAT do you know, Ms Hill? What is it you are ‘owning up to’ here? A bit of British Colonialist Bigotry perhaps? Do you have a ‘problem’ with Indian writers as well? Perhaps it is because I come from the ‘colonies’ but I absolutely adore Indian writers. You can’t go past ‘God of Small Things’ and ‘Inheritance of Loss’ for the absolute beauty that the English language can produce. I charge you with middle/upper class snotiness. That I do.

My my, Ms Susan Hill, what a long nose you look down from. I would love to be proved wrong, but from where I’m sitting, three times is the ‘charm’. Or lack thereof.

Postcript. Here’s another… “I have no difficulty with Katherine Mansfield, surpisingly enough“. ‘Surprisingly’ because she’s from New Zealand?

A scrap I want to keep from p.304 of  “Mr Shakespeare’s Bastard” by Richard B. Wright:

“But what must have scored my imagination that December afternoon so long ago–for over the years the Scarfes, both father and son, have returned to me in dreams–was the depth of that old man’s misery: a life of toil at a trade he despised, an unfaithful wife and a wayward son, blindness and a palsied hand and penury towards the end. Job himself had scarcely endured more. And looking at Martin Scarfe in our silence together, I remember wondering how I could avoid such unhappiness. Such thoughts are apt to trouble us most in the hours of a sleepness night, and then with daybreak vanish like the mist across a meadow. But I have carried such thoughts from that room in Whitechapel over all these years and with them attendant questions. How may we find some measure of contentment in this life? Or should we look instead to whatever lies beyond the grave? And if we fail the test, as preachers are so fond of prophesying? What then? Damnation?

I really love the simile of thoughts vanishing like mist across a meadow at daybreak. Beautiful.

This is a good book. A book about words. A book about fictional characters. Do they not exist, or do they exist in the pages? Which then leads the reader to wonder ‘do characters live beyond the book, in the minds of all the people that have ‘read’ them?’ (This reader, at least.) And then I got to thinking about Stephen King’s ‘Dark Half’.