The Sack of Bath was written in 1973 in response to the decisions made by Bath City Council to demolish large swathes of Georgian cottages in order to provide the city with newer houses, better access and improved facilities.  Fergusson acknowledges that the aim itself was admirable but the ways in which they sought to accomplish it were misguided.  With words and pictures he illustrates the ongoing destruction of Bath and issues a heartfelt plea for it to be stopped and more reasonable measures, such as renovation and preservation, be considered instead.

Although The Sack of Bath is just as well written today as it was when it was first published, it lacks the immediacy which it would have had in the 1970′s when the demolition and construction was being carried out.  It is interesting, yes, but in a vague and distant way rather than in an inciting-architectural-rage-and-writing-to-your-local-MP-to-stop-this-sort-of-thing way that I suspect it was intended.  The closest thing that I can liken it to is reading a newspaper article covering some terrible natural disaster and trying to encourage readers to give aid, but doing so nearly forty years after the event when everyone appears to have recovered quite nicely, thank you very much.  It just isn’t the same as reading it when it was relevant.

The problem is that the book is written in such hyperbolic language and strident tones that it implies nothing less than the wholesale destruction of historic Bath, which couldn’t be more different to what any visitor to Bath today will see as they walk around the city.  In fact, the most recent new development is incredibly sympathetic to the aesthetics of the city and blends in beautifully (or as beautifully as modern high street shops ever could) with the historical setting.  Admittedly this is probably at least in part due to the pressure of action such as the publication of The Sack of Bath but there is such a huge gap between this and the city overrun with hideous concrete boxes that you might expect from reading the book that it lost a lot of impact for me.  Clearly this book was influential in its time and I have no doubt that it did a lot of good, but I didn’t find that it quite worked reading it now.

The Sack of Bath by Adam Fergusson.  Published by Persephone, 2010, pp. 81.  Originally published in 1973.

 Wild Swans chronicles the lives of three generations of the women of the author’s family, from 1909 to 1991.  The book begins with her grandmother, who became a concubine to a local warlord at her father’s insistence.  After the warlord’s death, she flees from his house where she has been forced to live with his other wives and concubines, taking with her her baby daughter, Jung Chang’s mother.  In spite of family disapproval, she gets married to a Manchu doctor who gives everything up to live in poverty with her. Jung Chang’s mother grows up in an area of China which is under Japanese rule and the Chinese people are considered second class citizens.  An intelligent girl, she is recruited by the Communist resistence and begins working towards a free, egalitarian China.  She falls in love with a young Communist party member and they have several children, including Jung Chang herself, but each regime change, relocation or shift of opinion brings renewed suspicions, even for those as devoted to the cause as Chang’s parents and so she grows up amid the violence, intimidation and uncertainty of the Cultural Revolution.

 This book blew me away with its scope, its attention to detail and the way that it made everything make sense.  I had a vague notion of life in Communist China before reading Wild Swans but this book made me able to see how and why everything happened, the subtle shifts and insidious changes as well as the grand sweeping ones which lead to the situation in China being what it was. 

As an outsider, I’ve only ever seen the end product, but Wild Swans makes it perfectly clear that Communism in China was a very positive thing when it set out.  Its aims were clear, its systems logical and its demands for gender and social equality admirable.  Given that Jung Chang has provided the reader with a context in which to set this by describing the story of her grandmother, sold by her father as a concubine for political and financial gain, the changes seem all the more attractive.  This is where the book excels: although Chang talks about the political changes that take place, these are inextricably linked with the very personal, relateable stories of the lives of herself and her family.  It transforms the political ideas and dictates from abstract notions into concrete things which have a real and immediate impact on the family.  It’s all well and good to read about family members being split up as the party sends them to different locations, but it makes it real and heartbreaking to read about Chang’s elderly grandmother journeying across China, largely on foot, to be with her daughter only to be sent back to her home town almost immediately, or Chang’s mother miscarrying from the harsh journeying conditions because her husband refuses to favour her by letting her ride with him in his car as she is of a lower rank than he is.

Chang manages to describe a time that is very confusing politically and to convey that turmoil and uncertainty without once confusing me as a reader.  Her prose is lucid and quite spare but very effective.  Wild Swans is the perfect blend of the personal and the political and is an amazing testament to the powers of endurance and the integrity of all of Chang’s family, not just the women. It is at once a compelling story and a fascinating, insightful account of life in a time and place so different it’s like reading about another world.

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang.  Published by Flamingo, 1993, pp. 696.  Originally published in 1991.

The first three years of my childhood were spent in a vast Victorian country house in Wiltshire called Clouds.  Built entirely of green sandstone, it boasted forty bedrooms, and a kitchen so far from the dining room that a miniature railway track had to be built to carry food from one place to the other.  Luckily, tepid meals were the norm in those days.

How could I possibly resist such an opening?

In Dawn Chorus Joan Wyndham tells the story of her family, beginning with her great-grandfather, Percy, who built Clouds to be his family home and continuing on through the generations down to her own memories of her childhood and teenage years.  Her life begins in 1921 at the second incarnation of Clouds, the first having burned down before she was born, then is transported to London after her parents separate, where her mother’s friends, a group known as ‘the Souls’ simultaneously entertain and embarrass her with their eccentric antics.  Joan attends a convent school and has a somewhat tempestuous relationship both with religion and the nuns responsible for her education, until she goes to the theatre and sees John Gielgud as Hamlet, whereupon she decides to audition for RADA.

This is a wonderful memoir, not only because the subject matter than it chronicles is so interesting, but also because the evidence on which Joan Wyndham draws is so miraculously complete.  Her relatives seem to have been meticulous record keepers, and so her accounts of their history is littered with diary entries and excerpts from letters which lend a great immediacy to the writing.  Her own letters and diaries are written with remarkable candour and shared with an openness and lack of embarrassment which makes Dawn Chorus a delight to read.  Even though I do not doubt that the selections used have been carefully chosen, Wyndham seems quite happy to display her younger self both at her best and at her worst.  I cannot think of many writers who would share their awkward teenage diaries, rife with overblown emotions and incidents rather forgotten, so willingly with the reading public.

Whatever subject she is talking about, Joan’s diary entries are warm and filled with emotion so that she really leaps off the page and comes to life.  They are often highly amusing, although sometimes not intentionally so, imbued as they are with the seriousness of youth.  At one point, she goes to stay with a family in Paris:

Friday For three days now there has been no paper in the Tante Fannee.  I’ve had to use all the tissue paper from my trunk.  Luckily, I have been asked to dinner by my Romanian relatives in Paris.  They are very grand and rich so I will probably be able to pinch a few rolls of paper to take home with me.

On another occasion, Joan goes on holiday to Wales:

I have become the complete ‘hearty’ down here, striding out in the dew before breakfast in corduroy trousers with a stick, a whistle and two dogs, and then down to the farm to feed the cows and see the newborn calf.  Then back for a breakfast of kidneys, bacon and pickled herring, followed by a few rounds of clock golf, finally taking the rowing-boat out for a cruise around the outlying islands, with binoculars slung round my neck, and no makeup.  Horrible metamorphosis!

On a more genteel note, we also sold produce at the Vicar’s bazaar, raffled teasets at the Conservative fete and made conversation over tomato sandwiches at various county tea parties.  I’ve also been climbing the mountains around Snowdon.  So bleak that nothing grows on them but the sparsest grass, with thin streams running down into the hidden lakes, and sheep lying curled in the rock crevices.  One of the lakes is supposed to be bottomless but I fell into it, so I can positively state that it isn’t; it’s shadowed by red-berried mountain ash.  Mountains almost reconcile one to Wordsworth.

There is a similar brutal and entertaining honesty in the extracts from her family’s writing that she includes.  Take, for example, her mother’s record of Joan’s early development in her Baby’s Progress Book:

Joan is never still for one moment and exhausts all who look after her.  When finally tired out, she sits and twiddles her hair without ceasing.

Hearing Hears more than is good for her.

Smell Good, but has a habit of snorting.

Sight Slight squint.

Taste Greedy

Later on there is no doubt at all of the genuine affection between Joan and her mother, as evidenced by their numerous letters to one another, but her mother’s evident frustration with her young baby and the ruthless way in which she records it is highly entertaining.

This book can become a bit confusing at times, as Joan tends to refer to people by their first names rather than their relationship to her, so it can become easy to lose track of who is who and in which generation.  Nevertheless, this is a fine memoir of life in England for the upper classes between the Wars, and definitely one that should be more widely known (according to LibraryThing only two other people own a copy of this book, so the vast majority are missing out).  Joan Wyndham continued to chronicle her life in several other books, and I enjoyed her style so much that I’m sure it won’t be long before they find their way onto my shelves.

Dawn Chorus by Joan Wyndham.  Published by Virago, 2004, pp. 233.  Originally published in 2004.

In this book, Lady Winifred writes about her experiences of moving to a tiny mountain village in Provence with her husband, referred to throughout as Monsieur, and the trials and tribulations of dealing with a new country.  Not only does she come up against the barrier of language, both French and Italian, but also the completely different culture and way of life there.  Her collection of amusing anecdotes about managing the builders, servants and gardeners, dealing with local officials, encountering the dubious honour of being invited to a wedding, and learning to drive on the treacherous mountain roads are all told with a smile, and ability to laugh at herself and a genuine love for the place that is utterly infectious.  The illustrations by E. H. Shepherd which accompany the text throughout just make this book even more enjoyable to read.  If I hadn’t wanted to visit Provence before, I certainly would after reading Perfume from Provence; as it is, I’m only more keen to go there someday.

The section on driving was particularly entertaining, not least because of the way in which Lady Winifred anthropomorphises her cars.  There is the gallant English Sir William whom she has had to leave behind and her new little Fiat named Desiree because there is a long period of waiting for the car to arrive from the manufacturers during which she is ‘desiree mais pas trouve‘.  But it is the section on driving lessons which is most endearing.  My woes at the hands of the DVLA pale into comparison beside a friendly local teaching Winifred to brave the mountain roads by directing her up a precarious, winding track, completely unprotected from a long drop into the valley below on one side, which turns out to be a one way street running in the opposite direction to that in which she is driving.  Of course, she only learns this on meeting a rather surprised car coming straight towards her.  I also loved the account of how one of Winifred’s friends accidentally runs over her garden while Winifred is giving her a lesson and all the servants are enlisted to try to disguise the damage before the gardener notices, after which they gleefully conspire to deny all knowledge of noticing anything happening.

Perfume from Provence is such a happy book, full of laughter and fond nostalgia, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this relaxing, amusing tale of French rural life as seen through the eyes of the bemused but affectionate English to anyone at all.

Perfume from Provence by Lady Winifred Fortescue.  Published by William Blackwood and Sons, 1947, pp. 274.  Originally published in 1935.

Rubenhold’s edition starts out with an informative and interesting introduction which puts the List into its historical context.  Harris’s List was not written by a man named Harris at all, but by an Irish poet named Samuel Derrick who had fallen on hard times and needed to find a way to keep himself out of debtor’s prison.  Jack Harris was a notorious London pimp who allowed Derrick the use of his influential name and his extensive list of contacts in return for a one time fee, and so he only became bitter while Derrick became increasingly wealthy.

The entries on each girl provide a surprising amount of detail, and they are often miniature character studies rather than just bawdy adverts promising pleasures.  Obviously there is physical description and a summary of which particular tastes a girl caters to along with her prices (as a rule, the more specialised the tastes, the higher the price) but there are also details such as how she came into ‘the public life‘ as the List euphemistically terms it.  In some cases, the writer expresses sympathy for a girl who has been led astray by a man and is forced to turn to this particular line of work, as in the case of Miss Char-ton:

This is an old observation, but certainly a true one, that some of the finest women in England are those, who go under the denomination of ladies of easy virtue.  Miss C- is a particular instance of the assertion; she came of reputable parents, bred delicately, and her education far superior to the vulgar; yet the address of a designing villain, too soon found means to ruin her; forsaken by friends, pursued by shame and necessity; she had no other alternative, than to turn -, let the reader guess what.  – She was long a favourite among the great, but some misconduct of hers, not to be accounted for, reduced to the servile and detestable state of turning common.  She is a fine figure, tall and genteel, has a fair round face, with a faint tinge of that bloom she once possessed, is rather melancholy, ’till inspired with a glass, and then is very entertaining company.  (pp. 56-57)

In others, girls appear to bring about their own falls through their lusty natures and to thoroughly enjoy doing so, like Miss Jo-es:

This lady was born in the country, but the circumstances of her parents, when she was sufficiently grown up, obliged them to send her into London to get a livelihood, she was not long before she got a place in St. James’s Market, where, whither, by being accustomed to see the poor lambs bleed, or rather a desire of becoming a sacrifice to the goddess of love, is left for the reader to judge, but she was shortly found stabbed to the heart in the most tender and susceptible part of her body, in short she was unable to withstand the powerful impulse of nature any longer, so was ravished with her own consent, at the age of sixteen; her mistress on the discovery, thought proper to send her going, for fear her good man should take it in his head to kill the lamb over again.  She began now to show the bent of her inclinations, she listed under the banners of Cupid, and marched at the head, being of a courageous disposition, and always ready to obey standing orders, she had great success, and often made the enemy to yield, by which means she gained no inconsiderable share of spoil, but her charitable disposition, (being always ready to relieve the naked and needy) soon reduced her. (pp. 69-70)

As you can see, this book contains euphemisms a-plenty.  At times it felt like reading one of Shakespeare’s dirtier plays, the amount of veiled references to sex, body parts, prostitutes and plenty of less orthodox sex acts there were.  As a social and cultural historian this must be a fascinating book to examine.

However, it might not come as a shock to learn that I am not a jolly Georgian gentleman out looking for a good time, and so consequently a lot of these descriptions started to blur into one after a while.  They were interesting, and the book itself is fascinating because of what it is, but there were just too many of them without anything to break them up for it to be a riveting read.  In the final section of the book which looks at excerpts from outside 1793 the girls are grouped together by type (red heads, foreign beauties, buxom etc.) and I think I might have enjoyed it more had the whole book been arranged like this with some sort of commentary from the author accompanying each section.  I know Rubenhold has written two other books on the subject: The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the Extraordinary Story of Harris’s List and The Harlot’s Handbook, both of which sound as though they are more along those lines, using the List as a means of illustrating a point rather than as the raison d’etre of the book.  I’ll definitely be on the lookout for these as this has proven to be an unexpectedly fascinating topic.

Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies: Sex in the City in Georgian Britain by Hallie Rubenhold.  Published by Tempus, 2005, pp. 158.  First edition.

Celia Fiennes was an intriguing, unmarried woman who journeyed around the country on horseback between 1685 and 1703 noting down what she saw.  The exerpts from her diary contained in this volume display a country comprising towns teeming with industry, linked by dirty, muddy and treacherous roads.

I’m sure this book would be fascinating to someone researching their local area or looking at the history of England at this time, but as a mere reader I found it hard going.  Fiennes does not describe the places she visits so much as she provides an itemised list of exactly what is there: the book is a succession of distances, acreages, numbers of churches and building materials of houses.  She is very matter of fact in what she reports and tends to focus on the physical features of the towns and landscapes, rather than talking about the people and their customs.  Very occasionally she will deviate from this course to report on a local food or habit, such as her disgust at the smokers in Cornwall where ‘both men, women and children have all their pipesof tobacco in their mouths and soe sit round the fire smoaking’ (p. 79) but this is an unfortunate rarity.

I might have been tempted to read a longer version of Celia Fiennes’ travels to see if this focus on industry and buildings is universal or just showing the bias of the editor who selected the exerpts for this volume, and also to read Celia’s thoughts on the places I have lived and know well, none of which are included in this book.  However, the prose, quite simply, is not enjoyable to read.  Bearing in mind when Celia was writing I wasn’t expecting modern punctuation and grammar, but equally I hadn’t anticipated her being the queen of the run-on sentence.  Some of them go on for several pages and while I could posibly bring myself to forgive her if it was beautiful, elegant, descriptive prose, I cannot when it’s a great big list with some verbs and conjunctions added.  To let Celia speak for herself and show you what I mean:

The situation of Lancaster town is very good, the Church neately built of stone, the Castle which is just by, both on a very great ascent from the rest of the town and so is in open view, the town and river lying round it beneath; on the Castle tower walking quite round by the battlements I saw the whole town and river at a view, which runs almost quite round and returns againe by the town, and saw thesea beyond and the great high hills beyond that part of the sea which are in Wales, and also into Westmorelandto the great hills there call’d Furness Fells or Hills being a string of vast high hills together; also into Cumberland to the great hill called Black Comb Hil whence they dig their black lead and no where else, but they open the mine but once in severall yeares; I also saw into Yorkshire; there is lead copper gold and silver in some of those hills and marble and christall also. (pp. 16-17)

And that’s one of the short sentences!

I was also rather disappointed at how absent Miss Celia Fiennes herself was from this book, although admittedly this could be a problem of editing for this particular edition.  Even though they were confined to Britain, her journeys seem quite remarkable for a single woman during this period, and I was looking forward to reading about what that was like.  I wanted to find out about her own experiences of travelling, any difficulties arising from her unusual circumstances as an unmarried lady on such a journey (albeit with an escort of servants who are occasionally aluded to) and her interactions with the people that she meets.  However, with the exception of a few disparaging comments about her landladies and complaints about rye in the bread upsetting her stomach she barely features at all.  The account of travelling through England could have been written by anyone, male or female, and that seems a great shame to me.

Please don’t let my review put you off picking up Celia Fienne’s writings, however, if this sort of thing is of interest to you.  Nonetheless, I would suggest getting hold of the full volume of her travels rather than this collection of extracts to avoid the disappointment of your local area not being one of those featured in this book, and also not approaching it looking for an entertaining, casual read.

Through England on a Side-Saddle by Celia Fiennes.  Published by Penguin, 2009, pp. 87.  Originally published in 1947, written in 1698.

Dark Star Safari is an account of Paul Theroux’s travels through Africa, shunning easy and convenient travel methods in favour of treacherous trains, dodgy taxis and tiny vans stuffed full of people and their belongings.  Along the way he meets a whole variety of people from different walks of life, some old friends from his previous stay in Africa working for the Peace Corps and some new acquaintances.  There are waiters, prostitutes, diplomats, Indian shopkeepers, white farmers, Rastafarians, ex-convicts and many more, all with a story to tell which become part of Theroux’s own overarching story of his travels.

This book is interesting because of what it is: Theroux’s journey is undeniably ambitious in scope and Dark Star Safari stands as a testament to that.  It was a huge undertaking, accessing such a wide cross section of people from so many places, and the fact that he was able to write the book at all is impressive.  It’s also an area that is entirely new to me and I learnt a great deal from the book.  I had no idea, for example, that there were so many Indians who migrated to various African countries to set up businesses and new lives, and Dark Star Safari is a gold mine of information such as this for the ignorant reader such as myself.  He also presents a perspective on foreign aid (that it is often doing more harm than good) which I hadn’t really considered before,  probably because Africa isn’t something that I read about terrible often, and certainly gave me pause for thought.  My experiences of people travelling through Africa tend to come courtesy of Comic Relief and feature television personalities presenting pitiful sights while asking for my financial aid, so regardless of whether you agree with Theroux’s controversial point of view, it’s definitely interesting to read from the perspective of someone seeing the same sights and instead saying that perhaps aid isn’t helping anyone.

My issues with this book don’t stem from it’s subject matter but from Theroux himself, who I found to be an utterly insufferable narrator.  He is so scathing and dismissive of so many of the people he meets that he frequently comes across as boorish and unpleasant.  He scorns the tourists on the Nile cruise on which he embarks partly because they are on a Nile cruise (the hypocrisy of this seems lost on him) and partly because they have the temerity to ask questions!  How dare people travelling in a foreign country to see historical sights want to learn about things?  What a ridiculous notion!  He is equally derogatory about many of the diplomats he meets (although he does love name dropping), the Christian missionaries towards whom he is deliberately antagonistic, and the foreign aid workers who won’t give him a lift, which seems rather unnecessary.  By all means criticise the aid system, but being provocative towards the individuals who are trying to help and work within a flawed system primarily because they won’t give you a lift (which is hardly part of their job) comes across as whining.  He also seems to have an over-inflated sense of his own importance, being shocked upon his arrival in Malawi to discover that no one at the American embassy has responded to his generous offer to hold a few lectures during his stay there out of the goodness of his own heart (and so he can celebrate his birthday, of course).

I found his sexual references to be totally unnecessary and added nothing to the book.  I appreciate that a lot of the women he meets are prostitutes and that they have some interesting stories to tell, but his self-congratulatory attitude at not taking advantage of them himself I found rather distasteful.  In a similar vein, his sexualising of many of the women he comes across is unpleasant and makes Theroux seem like a bit of a dirty old man (which, at sixty, he kind of is).  His completely irrelevant references to the erotic novel that he is inspired to write as he travels are equally unnecessary and I would have preferred it if this whole aspect of the book had been left out.

His writing is very journalistic in style, which some might enjoy as it feels very factual and efficient.  However, when I read a travelogue, I want it to make me feel as though I’m actually there, not that I’m listening to someone a bit dull but very accurate tell me what it’s like being there.  Every time there is a market it is described as ‘medieval’, and it quickly gets rather old and tired.  There are other times though, when the descriptions are absolutely perfect and evoke wonderful images of these strange countries, such as when he describes Cairo:

The smoke from the fires lit in braziers, the stink of the pissed-on walls, the graffiti, the dust piles, the brick shards, the baked mud, the neighbourhood so decrepit and worn, so pulverized, it looked as though it had been made out of wholewheat flour and baked five thousand years ago and was now turning back into little crumbs.  (pp. 9-10)

Sadly, these flashes of lovely writing come all too infrequently for my liking, and are overshadowed by the way that Theroux himself comes across.  Not a writer I’ll be reading again, I think.

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux.  Published by Penguin, 2003, pp. 495.  Originally published in 2002.

Try Anything Twice is a collection of essays about the trials and tribulations of life as an ‘upper-middle-class, lower-middle-aged Englishwoman‘, as Struther herself puts it.  They cover such diverse topics as the pleasures of making lists, the perils of foreign travel and the horrors of arranging for family photographs to be taken.  They read very much like the articles in the Style section of the Sunday Times: they focus on aspects of life which may be a bit frivolous but they do so in a way that is intelligent and witty.  Unsurprising then, they they were first published in journals such as The Spectator, The New Statesman and Punch in the 1920s and 1930s.

What I enjoyed most about this collection of essays was how well they have aged: clearly the life of the upper-middle-class, lower-middle-aged woman from whose perspective Struther writes with such humour hasn’t changed very much in the intervening eighty years.  A lot of the situations are instantly familiar for a modern reader, and Struther is easy to identify with even if the specifics are completely alien because she writes in such a way as to make the concerns that she expresses seem universal.  Her essay ‘Cut Out the Stars’ about economising in the face of hard times as only the privileged can, is one that I found particularly apt given the current financial situation in this country.

Although Struther is usually entertaining, in these essays she never shies away from using her humour to impart tough truths and convey harsh opinions.  I found ‘The Toys of War’ to be a particularly skillful critique of modern violence and inhumanity through imagining a child playing with toys that accurately emulate warfare.  As with all essay collections, I found some better than others, but all the essays (including those which were left out of the Virago edition but can be read here) are definitely worth reading.

Try Anything Twice by Jan Struther.  Published by Virago, 1990, pp. 212.  Originally published in 1938.

84, Charing Cross Road comprises a series of letters representing twenty years’ worth of correspondence starting in 1949 between Helene Hanff, an America writer, and the staff of the antiquarian booksellers Marks & Co.  Initially, these letters are purely book orders, but soon the become less and less formal as an unlikely friendship springs up between Helene and Frank Doel, the chief buyer.  My copy of the book also includes The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, Helene Hanff’s diary of her trip to England following the publication of these letters in the form of the first book.

Helene Hanff’s writing style in the letters that make up 84, Charing Cross Road is wonderful to read.  It is frank, forthright, highly opinionated and overflowing with humorous warmth and it doesn’t take long for book purchasing to seem merely incidental rather than the purpose of her writing.  It is also extremely enjoyable to see the friendship emerge between Hanff and Frank Doel as his reserve and formality (partly from being professional, partly from being British) are inexorably worn down by the sheer force of her personality.  Soon they are discussing rationing in post-war Britain (although never with any complaining, of course), gifts are exchanged, and other members of the bookshop staff and of Doel’s family are joining in with the correspondence.  It didn’t take long for me to feel involved in all of their lives and I was surprised at how emotionally attached to the characters I became.  I only wish that more of these letters had been saved, as it is evident from references in some of the letters in the collection that there were others which must have been sadly lost.

The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, while still enjoyable, lacks some of the easy charm of 84, Charing Cross Roadand I think this is because the writing in the first book is entirely unselfconscious as it was private correspondence and never intended for publication, whereas the second installment is written without this ease, although with the same wit and vivacity from Hanff.  It is lovely to witness her reactions as she discovers ‘the England of English literature’ and I couldn’t help but smile at her delight in what she found.  In fact, Hanff spends most of this book exploring the streets that I walk every day on my way to and from work, so I found it particularly welcome to receive such an enthusiastic outsider’s perspective on things that I’ve stopped noticing; it make me start taking a look again.  I did miss the variety of tone that Frank Doel’s slightly staid and stuffy but still loveable letters provided in the first book, but nonetheless I found this an excellent read.

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff.  Published by Futura, 1983, pp.220.  Originally published in 1970 and 1973. 

Language is something that I find absolutely fascinating: I love reading about how different languages developed, their particular foibles, the origins of words and the meanings of obscure idioms.  I was therefore ever so pleased to be sent a free copy of False Friends Faux Amis by Ellie Malet Spradbery to review through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme.  I’ve studied a reasonable about of French, both modern and medieval, so I thought that my knowledge was probably sufficient to appreciate such a book and French and English share such a lot of vocabulary that an exploration of faux amis sounded like an interesting concept.  The blurb promised ‘A light-hearted exploration of the French language and culture, and, in particular, words and phrases that could trip up the unwary linguist’.  Having read books on the English language which sounded similar, how could I possibly resist.

Unfortunately, this book turned out to be a huge disappointment.  The description ‘exploration’ implied, as far as I was concerned, that there would be some sort of discussion of the French language and those unusual words and phrases which an English speaker might find confusing, perhaps explaining where the differences arise and what their roots are in an accessible fashion.  However, with the exception of an ‘And Finally’ section so brief you could swallow it whole without needing a glass of water, the aforementioned blurb constitutes the only complete sentences in the entire book.  To my surprise, the book consists entirely of vocabulary lists and, while these can be interesting up to a point, a list can only be so engaging.  The definitions felt brief and lacking in context or information and there isn’t even an introduction stating what the author is trying to do in the book, it just launches straight in with the lists.  ‘A light-hearted exploration of the French language’ it most definitely is not.

The lists are divided into six sections.  The first deals with the faux amis of the title, taking words which are either common to both languages or are aurally or visually similar and providing French-English and English-French translations for them.  The second section was the one that I found the most interesting, dealing with translations of French idioms, but was also the chapter where I felt humorous explanatory prose was the most lacking.  I would have really enjoyed the author’s conjectures as to why the English say ‘whipping boy’ while the French say ‘tete de Turc’ and why the French for ‘to faint’ would literally translate as ‘to fall in apples’.  It’s a shame that this opportunity wasn’t taken.  Section three tackles French words which look very similar but have totally different meanings, such as ‘le loup’ (wolf) and ‘la loupe’ (magnifying glass).  Section four contains thematic vocabulary lists, such as tree and animal names, which is all well and good but seems very odd considering the aim of the book, which is supposedly to clear up linguistic misunderstandings, not teach the reader how to say ‘hedgehog’ (that would be ‘herisson’, by the way) and other woodland creatures in French.  The fifth part is helpfully entitled ‘Miscellaneous’ and is the most bizarre collection of words and phrases, ranging from a few articles of clothing to how to ask for the bill, completely unrelated either to one another or to faux amis.  I’m at a loss as to why they were included at all.  The sixth and final chapter is back on track as the author translates common English phrases into French by sense rather than literally.  The problem with this is that I could never use this as a reference book: if I came across a word of which I thought I knew the meaning but it didn’t seem to fit, I would look it up in the dictionary, not go to this book on the off chance that it’s one of the words and phrases listed in its 87 pages.  If I needed to translate an idiomatic phrase, my first resort would, again, be the dictionary, or another source with a more academic tone and fewer exclamation marks.  When she tries to make vocabulary sound fun and accessible, Spradbery stops sounding reliable, which is an unfortunate flaw.

False Friends Faux Amis has a really good concept, but it is sadly let down by execution.  The lack of an effective system of organisation and the informality of style make it largely unhelpful, but the lists unbroken by any prose make it largely uninteresting.  This book suffers because it can’t decide whether to be an entertaining curiosity or a useful reference tool and in trying to combine the two achieves neither aim.

False Friends Faux Amis by Ellie Malet Spradbery.  Published by Matador, 2010, pp. 87.