This week a double feature, a two novel series by one of my old standbys. Do they hold up to expectations?
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
Bel Lamington by D E Stevenson C
This book relates the life of the title character during a six month period. Bel is a twenty-something (four?) year old woman. Her parents were killed in a car crash, so she was raised by an aunt in the country. When her aunt died, she inherited just enough money to learn how to be a secretary to make an independent living. For two years she has been working for an importer in London as a typist, and eventually as the personal secretary of one of the partners in the firm. Lonely in the city, she still yearns for the country, and, like the cover art shows, had made a rooftop garden out one of her windows. There she meets a painter, who found his way there because he likes to climb mountains, and when in cities, climbs buildings and roofs. He talks her into posing for a painting. She briefly falls in love with him... and from there, has a variety of other experiences and trials at work and in her life, of which I won't spoil. It is a nice snapshot of the life of a single woman in London in the late 1950's.
My problem with this book, and indeed with the writing of D E Stevenson in general, is that she "reports," rather than spins her stories. By this I mean that she writes her stories in a rather cold, clinical, and unemotional way. Oh, her characters have lots of emotions, but her stories are often related with as much heart as a newspaper news article. Or at least that how it seems to me. Sometimes this unemotional storytelling is more evident in some stories than in others. It was evident in this story.
I find that many of her characters are not particularly likable. In this case, Bel is a strange mix of competence, and overwhelming timidness, such that I found it hard to reconcile who and what she was. She strikes everyone as levelheaded, but then acts in ways that are not at all level headed. For example she panics at the prospect of staying at a country inn when her boyfriend's car breaks down, because she doesn't like the look of the owner. While all this is quite possible, people are strange, after all, I find it hard to get into the mind of such a character and makes sense of the character. Plus, given Stevenson's very remote way of telling her story, I found it hard to care for her. But that's just me.
The happy ending came as no surprise. But at least there is one.
Bel goes on to be featured in another D E Stevenson novel, the book below.
Fletchers End D E Stevenson C
This second of the Bel Lamington novels features her friend, pictured on the cover. Bel gets married in this novel, and they buy an old house in the country known as Fletchers End. Over the course of the novel, we get to know the history of the house and the people who lived there. The romance of her friend with a rather irresponsible navy lieutenant commander adds what drama there is in the story.
My same remarks about the coolness of D E Stevenson's treatment of her characters and story in general apply here. What might have been a cozy story, is lost in the fairly heartlessness of its telling. The truth is that after these two books, I don't think I'll be all that eager to read more Stevenson books any time soon.
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