Tag: 1960s

The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas – #NovNov25

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Translated by Elizabeth Rokkan

After reading my first Tarjei Vesaas book, The Birds, in September, I couldn’t wait to read more of his work. Like The Birds, The Ice Palace has recently been reissued by Pushkin Press and as it’s a very short book I decided it would be perfect for this year’s Novellas in November (hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck).

First published in 1963, The Ice Palace is the story of two young Norwegian girls, Siss and Unn. Siss is popular, outgoing and the leader of her group of friends at school, yet when the shy, quiet Unn arrives in the village to live with her aunt, Siss is immediately drawn to this girl who seems to be her complete opposite. Soon, Unn invites her back to her house after school and Siss accepts – but when she arrives, the evening doesn’t go quite as she expected. The two girls look at each other in a mirror, then Unn persuades Siss, without explanation, that they should both undress. Unn then confesses that she has a secret, something she’s not able to tell her aunt, but she doesn’t say what it is. Uneasy and uncomfortable, Siss quickly leaves and goes home, feeling disturbed by the experience.

The next day, Unn feels embarrassed and decides not to go to school. Instead, she visits the huge frozen waterfall known as ‘the ice palace’. The last we see of her is when she enters the icy caverns behind the frozen water – she doesn’t return to school or to her aunt’s house and no one has any idea what has happened to her. As Unn’s only friend, Siss is put under pressure to tell the adults anything she knows, but Siss is still confused by her own emotions and struggling to come to terms with the whole situation.

This is a beautifully written novel and the cold, icy imagery is hauntingly atmospheric. The chapter in which Unn discovers the ice palace – ‘an enchanted world of small pinnacles, gables, frosted domes, soft curves and confused tracery’ – is particularly vivid and eerie. The book also has a lot to say about grief, loss and loneliness, exploring the impact of Unn’s disappearance on her aunt, on the community and particularly on Siss.

I did find the book very ambiguous, with a lot left open to interpretation. For example, we are never told what the secret was that Unn was trying to share with Siss and it’s not quite clear what exactly happened between the two girls the evening before Unn disappears. It’s strongly implied, of course, that their interactions have sexual connotations, although I found that a bit unsettling as the girls are only supposed to be eleven years old. I felt it would have worked better if they had been a few years older – but on the other hand, Vesaas obviously intended this to be an uncomfortable book to read, so he achieved his aim there.

Of the two Vesaas books I’ve read, I preferred The Birds as I felt a stronger connection with the main character and found his story more moving, but both are excellent. This one is also a novella, which means I’m counting it as my first read for this year’s Novellas in November!

Thanks to Pushkin Classics for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Predicament by William Boyd

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After finishing last year’s Gabriel’s Moon, I was pleased to learn that William Boyd was writing a second book about Gabriel Dax. I’ve now read it and enjoyed it even more than the first.

The Predicament begins in March 1963 with travel writer Gabriel trying to lead a peaceful life in a small East Sussex village. However, his parallel life in the world of espionage just won’t leave him alone. His Russian contact, Natalia Arkadina of the KGB, still believes he is a double agent working on behalf of Russia and has requested a meeting with him to give him his latest assignment. Meanwhile, Faith Green of MI6 has also approached him with a new mission: to go to Guatemala and interview Padre Tiago, the man expected to win the upcoming presidential election there.

Gabriel is not thrilled about getting involved in spying again, but agrees to the Guatemala plan as he’ll be able to combine the trip with some research for his new book on the world’s rivers. Unfortunately, things go badly wrong and he leaves the country in a hurry, having made himself the target of some unscrupulous people. It’s not long before he is given a new task, though – this time he must go to Germany and try to prevent an assassination attempt on President Kennedy, who is visiting West Berlin.

I don’t often choose to read spy thrillers, but one of the things I find compelling about this series is that Gabriel is such a reluctant and accidental spy. He never intended to get mixed up in international espionage and is really not very good at it! We do see him adding to his skill set in this book, though, being trained on how to lose someone who is trying to follow him and how to use everyday items as weapons. And although his Guatemala mission is disastrous, he does play a part in foiling the conspiracy to kill JFK in Berlin (I’m sure it’s not a spoiler to say that it was foiled as everyone knows that he wasn’t assassinated in Germany). Boyd does a good job of creating tension in the Berlin sections, despite it already being obvious what the outcome is going to be!

Gabriel’s Moon probably had slightly more depth, as it also featured a storyline about a childhood trauma that affected Gabriel’s mental health, but I preferred this book overall – possibly because when I read the first one I was comparing it unfavourably with Boyd’s previous and very different novel, The Romantic, which I loved. And although the mental health storyline is pushed into the background in this book, Gabriel does find himself facing some other personal predicaments: he is being accused of plagiarism by another travel author, who is not pleased that Gabriel has written about the same group of islands; his ex-girlfriend Lorraine is trying to rekindle their relationship; and Gabriel himself is continuing to struggle with his feelings for his MI6 handler, Faith Green. Faith is an enigmatic character – is she really romantically interested in Gabriel or is she just stringing him along for her own purposes?

The Predicament is an entertaining read with some fascinating settings – Guatemala on the brink of a political revolution and post-war Berlin shortly after the construction of the Berlin Wall. Throughout the book, Gabriel’s Russian contacts, Natalia and Varvara, keep pushing for him to also visit Moscow, so maybe that will finally happen in the next book! This is apparently intended to be a trilogy, so hopefully we’ll get answers to some of the other questions in the final novel too. Something to look forward to.

Thanks to Viking for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie

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This month for the Read Christie 2025 challenge, the theme is ‘amateurs’ and although I’ve read the suggested title, Crooked House, quite recently, there were some alternatives that I haven’t already read – including this one, A Caribbean Mystery. Published in 1964, it’s one of the later entries in the Miss Marple series and not one that had really appealed to me; Miss Marple belongs in St Mary Mead and it seemed incongruous to put her in a Caribbean setting! Now that I’ve read it, though, I can say that although it’s maybe not one of my absolute favourite Christie novels, I did really enjoy it.

You may be wondering why Miss Marple is in the Caribbean. Well, it seems she has been ill and her nephew Raymond has paid for her to spend some time recuperating in the sun on the island of St Honoré. Miss Marple is grateful, of course, and is enjoying the warmth and the scenery, but she’s also beginning to feel bored – every day is the same as the one before and nothing ever really seems to happen! This all changes when she falls into conversation with Major Palgrave, an elderly man staying at her hotel, who tells her a story about a man who got away with murder several times. He asks her if she wants to see a picture of a murderer but as he begins to dig out the snapshot, he suddenly stops abruptly and changes the subject as other people approach.

The next day, Major Palgrave is found dead in his room. High blood pressure is blamed, but Miss Marple is convinced he’s been murdered and that there’s some connection with the photo he was about to show her. To add to her suspicions, the photo now seems to have disappeared from the Major’s belongings. It seems likely that the murderer is one of the other guests, but which one? The most likely suspects seem to be the Dysons, Greg and Lucky, and their friends Edward and Evelyn Hillingdon, two nature loving couples who often travel together and who had been walking up the beach towards Major Palgrave as he told Miss Marple his story. But there are others who can’t be ruled out, including the Kendals, who own the hotel; Canon Prescott and his sister; and Mr Rafiel, an old man confined to a wheelchair, visiting the island with his masseur and his secretary.

I found this a very enjoyable mystery; it’s not one of Christie’s more complex plots but there’s some clever misdirection to send the reader along the wrong track. The first murder takes place early in the novel and the story continues to unfold at a steady pace after that, so it held my interest from beginning to end. Miss Marple also plays a big role, in contrast to some of the other books where we see very little of her. This time, she’s present for the entire novel, interacting with the suspects and victims and sharing her thoughts and deductions with the people she believes she can trust. As usual, people underestimate Miss Marple, dismissing her as a ‘fluffy old lady’, but in time some of them come to see that there’s far more to her than meets the eye!

Some of the characters in this book reappear or are referred to again in the later novel Nemesis, published in 1971. I read that one a few years ago, so it was nice to see how those characters were originally introduced and how Miss Marple gained her nickname ‘Nemesis’. I should probably have read the two books in the correct order as it also meant that I could quickly discount those two recurring characters as serious suspects, but it didn’t really matter. Now I’m looking forward to reading Christie’s memoir Come, Tell Me How You Live for Read Christie in July!

Book 4/20 for 20 Books of Summer 2025.

Ice by Anna Kavan

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This is a strange book and I’m not sure I’ll be able to describe it adequately! It’s probably not something I would normally have chosen to read, but this new edition from Pushkin Press caught my eye and as I’ve enjoyed other books from their Classics range, I decided to try it.

Ice was first published in 1967, the last of Anna Kavan’s books to be published before her death a year later. It follows an unnamed narrator who has developed an obsession with a pale young woman with silver-white hair. The girl is also unnamed and described as delicate, glass-like and under the control of her sinister husband, who later becomes known as ‘the Warden’. Our narrator pursues her from place to place, hoping to rescue her from the Warden, occasionally catching up with her and then losing her again. There’s not much more to the plot than that – Christopher Priest in his foreword to this edition calls the novel ‘virtually plotless’ – but the book still has multiple layers that make it an interesting and worthwhile read.

First, there’s the setting. The narrator’s pursuit of the white-haired girl takes place against a backdrop of apocalyptic scenes as the planet rapidly becomes engulfed by ice. I’ve seen this referred to as an allegory of Anna Kavan’s own addiction to heroin, although I don’t know enough about her to comment on that. It could also be seen as a warning of climate change, more relevant than ever today, of course. Either way, there are some beautiful descriptive passages as Kavan writes about the coldness, the glittering snow and the giant walls of ice closing in on the girl, the narrator and the world.

Another notable thing about the novel is the way the reader (and the narrator himself) can never be quite sure of the boundaries between reality and a dreamlike or hallucinatory state. Sometimes the girl will appear seemingly from nowhere, just out of reach or about to be enclosed by the ice – only to disappear again just as suddenly, leaving us wondering whether she was ever really there at all. These shifts in reality occur repeatedly throughout the book, which is very unsettling! The Warden also never feels entirely real, but is always there as a threatening, oppressive presence; the narrator sees himself as trying to free the girl from the other man’s control, but his own infatuation with her gradually begins to feel just as disturbing.

In the foreword, Priest describes the book as ‘slipstream’, which Wikipedia defines as ‘speculative fiction that blends together science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction, or otherwise does not remain within conventional boundaries of genre and narrative’. It’s certainly not a conventional novel and I have to be honest and say that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d hoped to – after the first few appearances and disappearances of the girl, I began to find it repetitive – but it’s also a unique and powerful one. The cold, icy imagery will stay with me for a long time.

Thanks to Pushkin Press Classics for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This Sweet Sickness by Patricia Highsmith

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Virago have just reissued ten of the books from their Modern Classics range with new green cover designs, including Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston – and this one, Patricia Highsmith’s This Sweet Sickness. I’ve been meaning to try another Highsmith novel since reading Strangers on a Train a few years ago, so when I spotted this book on NetGalley it seemed the perfect opportunity.

This Sweet Sickness was first published in 1960 and takes us inside the mind of David Kelsey, a young man who lives in a boarding house in the town of Froudsburg, New York, and works as a scientist at a fabrics factory. At least, this is his life from Monday to Friday. When the weekend comes around, David leaves for his own house in nearby Ballard, where he becomes William Newmeister, a freelance journalist. For two whole days he locks himself away and imagines he is happily married to Annabelle, the love of his life. He has decorated the house the way he thinks Annabelle would have wanted it, prepares the meals he’s sure she would like and has even bought her a piano. The only problem is, Annabelle ended their relationship two years earlier and married another man. She and her husband, Gerald Delaney, live in Connecticut with their baby son and Annabelle has never even visited the house in Ballard, let alone lived in it.

David thinks he has successfully covered up his dual identities, having convinced everyone at work and at the boarding house that he visits his elderly mother at her nursing home every weekend. His mother has actually been dead for many years, but he’s sure no one will ever find out! However, two of his friends – a work colleague, Wes Carmichael, and a fellow boarder, Effie Brennan – begin to grow suspicious and decide to investigate. They are right to be concerned, because David is becoming increasingly unstable. He can’t and won’t accept that his relationship with Annabelle is over and bombards her with letters and phone calls, urging her to leave Gerald and marry him. Eventually, things take a more sinister turn and David finds himself in trouble. Is his double life about to be exposed at last?

I loved this book and although the first half is quite slow, I was completely gripped by it all the way through. It’s definitely a disturbing read, though, particularly as the whole book is written from David’s perspective (in third person). I was so impressed by the way Highsmith changed my perception of him several times throughout the book. At first I saw him as a basically decent person who’d had his heart broken and was struggling to move on, then I quickly lost sympathy for him when it became clear how dangerous his obsession was and how relentlessly he was stalking Annabelle, and finally, despite his actions, I began to pity him again because by then he had completely lost his grip on reality and desperately needed help.

Annabelle, although we do meet her occasionally, exists mainly as a fantasy woman in David’s mind and it seems obvious that if he got his wish and married her he would find that the real Annabelle didn’t quite live up to the imaginary one. Annabelle frustrated me because she could have been much more firm with David; instead, at least at first, she seems to be encouraging him, speaking to him on the phone, agreeing to meet him and letting him think there’s still hope. It would have been interesting to have seen things from Annabelle’s perspective, I think. Did part of her still care about David and not want to hurt him? How did she really feel about Gerald?

Effie is another character who interested me. She’s clearly in love with David, but he’s too preoccupied with his delusions and obsessions to pay her much attention. He becomes more and more irritated by her persistence and her ‘spying’, without acknowledging that he is behaving the same way towards Annabelle. Effie and the other characters in the book are seen only through David’s eyes which almost certainly doesn’t give us a true or fair picture of what they are really like.

This Sweet Sickness is an unsettling novel and not very comfortable to read, but it’s also fascinating from a psychological point of view and I found it very immersive. I liked it better than Strangers on a Train and look forward to reading more of Patricia Highsmith’s books.

Thanks to Little, Brown Book Group UK/Virago for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain

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I’ve had mixed experiences with Rose Tremain’s books, enjoying some and struggling with others. Absolutely and Forever was shortlisted for last year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and as it’s a personal project of mine to try to read all of the shortlisted titles, I decided to read this one despite it not sounding particularly appealing to me. It’s a short book (under 200 pages), so at least it wouldn’t be too big a commitment if I didn’t like it.

Here’s how the book begins:

When I was fifteen, I told my mother that I was in love with a boy called Simon Hurst and she said to me, ‘Nobody falls in love at your age, Marianne. What they get are “crushes” on people. You’ve just manufactured a little crush on Simon’.

What Marianne Clifford has manufactured, however, is more than just a little crush. It’s an obsession. She knows she’s going to love Simon Hurst ‘absolutely and forever’ and at first it seems that he feels the same way about her – but when he leaves for Paris to study at the Sorbonne and never returns, Marianne’s heart is broken. As the years go by, Marianne tries to move on and build her own life, but she can never quite let go of her love for Simon and the dreams she once had.

The book is set in the 1950s and 1960s and Marianne narrates the story of her life during and after her relationship with Simon. A lot happens to her over the years – she attends secretarial college in London, has several jobs, gets married and makes new friends – but all the time she’s pining for Simon, which holds her back from finding happiness and contentment. It’s understandable that she would be upset for a while, but when she continues to grieve for years and years afterwards, it quickly becomes frustrating, particularly as it’s so one-sided and Simon clearly doesn’t care as much as she does. But Marianne herself is naïve, innocent and childlike, never really seeing the world as other people see it, so it’s maybe not surprising that she reacts the way she does. Although she grows from a teenager into an adult over the course of the book, she doesn’t develop very much as a person and the Marianne at the end is not a lot different from the Marianne at the beginning.

Although I didn’t dislike Marianne and found her story quite sad, it was Hugo, the man she marries, who had my sympathy. Hugo is completely devoted to Marianne and she does like him very much, but her feelings for Simon prevent her from loving anybody else. At least Marianne is lucky enough to have a close female friend in Petronella, a sensible, practical Scottish woman she’s known since their school days, and Petronella does her best to help her move on with her life, but ultimately she can’t control whether Marianne chooses to take her advice.

The time period the story covers is the period when Rose Tremain herself was a teenager and young adult and I’m sure she’ll have drawn on some of her own personal memories and experiences of that era. Having read her memoir, Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life, however, this novel seems to be only partly autobiographical – Marianne’s life follows a different course from Rose’s own, but there are also some similarities, such as Marianne’s desire to be an author (for much of the book she’s working on a novel narrated by an Argentinian horse).

As I’ve mentioned, Absolutely and Forever appeared on the Walter Scott Prize shortlist in 2024, but it didn’t win and I think I can see why. Although I found it quite an easy, enjoyable read (despite Marianne being a bit irritating), sometimes the more readable books aren’t the ones that win prizes and this one doesn’t really tackle important or topical issues like the others on the list. I have the final shortlisted title, The New Life by Tom Crewe, to read soon.

Third Girl by Agatha Christie

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This is the final book I’ve read for this year’s Read Christie challenge. I had intended to read it in November, but didn’t have time. I’m glad I’ve still managed to fit it in before the end of the year because, although I don’t think it’s one of Christie’s absolute best, I did enjoy reading it.

Norma Restarick is the ‘third girl’ of the title. The term refers to the practice of two girls who are living together in rented housing advertising for a third girl to take the spare room and share the rent with them. Norma crosses paths with Hercule Poirot when she approaches him for help because she thinks she may have committed murder – but after meeting Poirot in person, she flees, saying she’s made a mistake and he is too old to be of assistance.

Concerned – and insulted – Poirot tries to find out the reason for Norma’s visit to him and learns that the girl is acquainted with his friend, the mystery writer Ariadne Oliver. This makes it possible for Poirot, with Mrs Oliver’s help, to track down Norma’s family at their home in the country and the two girls she lives with in London. But Poirot is still confused. Norma says she thinks she has tried to poison her stepmother because a bottle of weed killer has been found in her room, yet she has no memory of actually doing it. It’s also not the only time Norma has experienced gaps in her memory. Convinced he doesn’t have all the facts and that the murder Norma originally referred to was not the attempted one she’s now confessing to, Poirot begins to investigate.

A common theme in Christie’s later books seems to be that society is changing and the world is moving on and she doesn’t like or understand it. Published in 1966, this book is firmly set in the 1960s and the older characters take every opportunity to complain about the fashions (particularly men with long hair), the music, the culture and what they see as rampant drug use amongst young people. I found this interesting as it gives the book a very different feel from the earlier Poirot novels. I think Poirot, like Christie herself, probably felt much more at home in the 1930s!

Third Girl is also unusual because for most of the book we don’t know if a murder has actually been committed and if so, who the victim is. This makes it less of a conventional detective novel and more of a psychological study of Norma Restarick. As we learn more about Norma’s past, there’s a real sense of her vulnerability and how she could be being manipulated by other people. Even when the true nature of the crime that needed to be investigated became clearer, I still didn’t correctly guess who the culprit was – and to be honest, I thought it was quite an unconvincing solution, which relied on several of the characters being very unobservant.

What I did love about this book is that Ariadne Oliver plays such a big part in it from beginning to end. She is often said to represent Christie herself and gives her a chance to comment on the writing of detective novels! It’s always nice to see her pop up in a Poirot mystery and I wish she was in more of them. In Third Girl, Mrs Oliver adds some humour to the book, as well as inadvertently providing Poirot with some of the key clues. Poirot is also present from the beginning of the book, rather than appearing halfway through as he often does.

I’m pleased to have completed eight of the twelve monthly reads for the 2024 Read Christie challenge. I’m looking forward to joining in again in 2025!