Hutchinson, 1959, 336 p.

Clive Marshall, a not very successful author, has been hired to write the history of The Tylers of Tyler County: An Epic of American Enterprise, coming over from his home in Italy, leaving his wife to her nascent acting career, to do so. One night at work on this project in the family’s pile in Arcady, Illinois, he is disturbed by a young woman tapping at the window. When she enters he discovers she is the daughter of the house, Abbie. Abbie is wayward, used to getting her own way, except for when she chose a boyfriend her folks found unsuitable. That affair having been ended she continues to choose wrongly. Marshall’s first impressions of her are not favourable but neither that nor the fact that he is married stops him having sex with her the next night. Thereafter Marshall is inexorably drawn into Abbie’s orbit. Put as baldly as this it might not seem that this is a particularly worthwhile novel but Wellard’s writing is discursive and acute, his character drawing excellent. Outstanding here is Abbie’s stepfather, Earl Borman, in all his venality, his sureness of his world view, his sense of entitlement. When Marshall returns to Italy for a brief spell his wife, Lydia, is also revealed in all her frivolity. Marshall himself is portrayed as weak and easily led.

The situation gives Wellard plenty rein to criticise the society and culture he is describing. “I’ve enough evidence to prove that the Tylers were a clan of greedy, ruthless, unprincipled land and money-grubbers. So, as you asked me before, what do I intend to do about it? Answer: write them up as great Americans.” “The only true thing that was ever said about all of them was that all great men are bad.” “‘Yessir. Nobody wants to cheer a losing team.’ Marshall looked at him, aware that he had just uttered a profound maxim of American philosophy. … He had never even thought of football as a game…. This set of values… made him so … different from other national types, providing an incontrovertible argument against internationalism and the brotherhood of man.”

The words “negress”, “negro”, “darkies” and the other (now highly unacceptable) “n” word appear early and at first I thought their presence was simply a marker of the time the novel was written but they are important since racial prejudice and animus against miscegenation are germane to the plot. Oddly we had what I assume is an expletive deleted in the phrase “you –– bastard” though the last word there is considered by many to be unmentionable.

The title – and the novel – is of course about more than the relationship between Abbie and Marshall. As Marshall’s research into the family’s papers proceeds the dark secrets of the Tylers’ recent past are revealed. In Abbie’s fractured search for meaning in life, and her justified resentment towards her family, lie the seeds of despair.

The Affair in Arcady is an excellent book. I am mystified that it and Wellard himself do not appear on the Fantastic Fiction website. There is an extensive list of his books on LibraryThing though.

Pedant’s corner:- Youasked for it, ciaous (ciaos,) hadn’t of been – but this was in direct speech – if is is (if it is,) damwell (damn well,) ofthe (of the,) should of – again in direct speech, interne.

Penguin, 2007, 306p

Reasonably successful writer Eve Smart, her philandering lecturer husband Michael and their family are renting a house in Norfolk when they are intruded upon by a female stranger called Amber, who proceeds to inveigle her way into their home, befriend Eve’s twelve year old daughter Astrid and seduce her teenage son Magnus.

The novel is split into three sections, The Beginning, The Middle and The End in all of which each family member has a narrative strand. Astrid’s narration is initially irritating as she has a habit of using ie (or even id est) in circumstances which do not warrant it. Thankfully, she – or Smith as the author – grows out of this by The End. Each section is preceded, and hence followed, by a framing narrative in the first person from Amber’s viewpoint. (This does not illumine Amber’s behaviour overmuch.) The unravelling of the Smart family’s life under Amber’s influence is the meat of the book.

There are several infelicities. Not only are a couple of characters unsympathetic but the changes of viewpoint initially jar and for a long time the lack of justification in the text irritated me. The ragged right hand margin was too much of a distraction. By The End, though, the characters (apart from Amber) are more established and these concerns fade.

I noticed that the “cloud” on my Library Thing tags this novel as Scottish Fiction. (According to the book’s blurb Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 but now lives in Cambridge.) Fantastic Fiction also designates her as Scottish. There is nothing identifiably Scottish about The Accidental, though; not its setting, its themes, its dialogue nor its vocabulary. Mind you, the same could be said about Allan Massie’s The Sins of the Father or Andrew Crumey’s Music, In a Foreign Language both of which I read recently. Interestingly enough, Library Thing has those two books tagged as Scottish Literature.

A couple of days ago Dobie Gray, now, on Tuesday, it was Russell Hoban.

Looking on my shelves I find not only his children’s classic The Mouse and his Child nor yet just the remarkable Riddley Walker but also The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Kleinzeit, Turtle Diary and Pilgerman.

Hoban was quite prolific (Fantastic Fiction lists 87 books) so I didn’t manage to keep up with all his output.

His work spanned a multitude of genres from the post-apocalyptic Science Fiction of Riddley Walker through Fantasy to Realism and he seemed equally at home in them all.

In the field of Science Fiction, though, and its close relation Fantasy, it will undoubtedly be for the tour de force that was Riddley Walker – a novel written in an English so far from the standard that it might at first seem totally unreadable (trust me, with a little bit of effort it isn’t, and is well worth that effort) – and The Mouse and his Child that he will be most remembered.

Russell Conwell Hoban: 4/2/1925-13/12/2011. So it goes.