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| Isn't this original dust jacket glorious? I wish I owned it. |
Finding a copy of a Denis Mackail novel was one of the highlights of my big book hunt in Maine this summer. I love the Persephone reissue of his novel Greenery Street and was delighted to find another book by him. The title refers to the social circle of the London residents who live on Tiverton Square. The novel The Square Circle follows a year in the life of the square circle. Get it?
I found the way that Mackail introduces us to residents of Tiverton Square and to the square itself to be quite charming. As the action unfolds and the residents interact in, and with, the square a wonderful little world unfolds. Mackail describes the square, the houses surrounding it, and the residents who live on the square. He even assigns a house number to each resident so you begin to understand who lives where. I was quickly enthralled as I began to build a mental image, and thanks to knowing the house numbers and how they were arrayed around the square, I could easily imagine the route a resident would take as they went to and fro. I became so enamored of the details that I felt I had to write down the details and eventually this turned into the rather crude drawing you see here.
The houses were all built between 1781 and 1831 and are generally cream colored stucco on the first floor with brownish brick above, iron railings and fan lights over the front doors. The houses on the “quietly superior” North Side had an extra storey and seem more remote from the street. The streets fronting the East and West sides are distinctly narrower and closer to the square. The East Side has a cobbled alley in the back with converted mainly converted mews houses. The South Side has the most tenuous relationship to the square with a wide street where traffic “roars and rumbles”.
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| My version of Tiverton Square. I know there are problems with it. Like the London streets would not follow such a rigid grid like they would in most American cities, but my drawing skills are quite limited. Also, the streets fronting the square are probably not called the street names that I have listed. Those streets are the ones in the book that lead into the square, but probably do not front the square or those houses. If they did then the house numbers wouldn't be No. 1 Tiverton Square, etc.) But the streets were the hardest to figure out from the text so, no doubt mistakes were made. |
And just in case there are any fans of The Square Circle who stop by My Porch, I thought I would give little Dramatis personae cheat sheet.
North Side (Nos 1-10)
No. 3 – Sir Herbert Livewright
No. 7 – Mrs Gillingham
No. 4 – Miss Leggatt
No. 6 – Peter Gore Blundell
No. 10 – Mr Justice Melhuish
East Side (Nos 11-24)
No. 13 – Colonel Parkinthorpe
No. 14 – The Norton Family
No. 16 – Lady Poley
No. 17 – Miss McGregor
No. 18 – Wiseman
No. 20 – The Bristow Family and Angus the dog
No. 20 Mews – Peter and Poppy Davidson
No. 22 – The Ashton Family
No. 23 – Cresswell
South Side (Nos 25-30)
No. 26 – Joe Aronson, Esq.
No. 30 – Mrs Mumsey
West Side (Nos 31-44 or so)
No. 32 – Miss Kitty Buzzard
No. 34 – Mrs and Miss Carpenter
No. 35 – Master Elphinstone
No. 37 – The Allinson Family
No. 39 – Mr Waveney
No. 41 – Tenterden
No. 42 – Eastwood
No. 43 – Mrs Iremonger
No. 44 – The Schofield Twins
I mostly enjoyed following the characters through a year of their lives, but some more than others. And I did find a place or two where I thought the narrative dragged a bit. But I also found something about the way Mackail describes it all that made me think of Greenery Street. I tried to come up with a way to describe why the two books felt similar and why both of them seem are so evocative of something that I can’t quite put my finger on. It has something to do with appealing to the urbanist in me.
The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym
A wonderful novel by Pym. I know that is a redundant phrase, but it is so true. Leonora goes after antique dealer Humphrey or is it really his nephew she is after. It’s wryly funny and sometimes a bit uncomfortable. Had a kind of Sparkian dark undercurrent to it.
Angel by Elizabeth Taylor
And speaking of a dark undercurrent…Angel is a precocious young
girl who literally writes her way out of (near) poverty. She writes fantastical
novels that come right out of her imagination and are completely ignorant of
the world. Lots of over the top nobility doing things that a poor little girl
imagines rich people doing, or book on Greek antiquity that mixes up and
interchanges Greek and Roman details willy nilly. Her books are panned by the
press and wildly popular with the masses. She ends up creating a really
oppressive world for her mother and anyone else who comes near her, yet she
seems to think everything is normal.
Even thought this didn’t turn into “young girl makes good and lives
happily ever after” as I had at first hoped, I quite enjoyed it and found it
hard to put down. The one thing that didn’t ring true to me was that Taylor
makes it clear that Angel doesn’t read at all. And she doesn’t have TV or
radio, or the cinema, or plays, or church, or anything else yet she still manages to dream up all these
worlds. But how does she do that with no cultural points of reference? She
doesn’t write science fiction so it isn’t like her books are total fantasy, so
where does Taylor think she gets her fodder?
The Far Country by Nevil Shute
This book is so Shute-ian it would probably take a fan to
like it. And I did. Every page of Shute’s simplistic, workman-like prose is
dripping with can-do attitude and hatred for socialism and the then newly
instituted National Health System. Shute
posits Australia as the antidote to everything that ails the UK. Not surprising
since Shute himself emigrated to Australia because of the post-war political
situation in Britain. I am know I am making it sound more serious and less fun
than it is. But if you have every read a Shute you might get into the groove of
this one. If you haven’t, skip it in favor of The Pied Piper, On the Beach, or A Town Like Alice.
