Prepare for high-stakes romantic melodrama, early 1920s style. This Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up is about Dornford Yates’ first two novels. Anthony Lyveden was published in 1921 and its sequel, Valerie French, appeared in 1923: they were written after he had made his name with several collections of brilliant and witty short stories about London life among the aspirational gentry. Both novels are passionately intent on making the reader feel dreadful about the plight of the unemployed ex-officer. They are romantic love stories, with ghosts, and a possessed Gothic forest. Their plots depend on misunderstandings and how the workings of Fate might ruin the hero’s life.
They are also novels about a kind of metaphorical shell-shock, a form of amnesia brought on by supernatural influences, that represents the horrors endured on the Western Front, and how these experiences prevented soldiers from having a normal life, post-war. They’re intense novels, and very, very opinionated: you won’t miss the author’s own views about how class and social rules matter in society. They will exasperate you as the hero and heroine continually have near misses, fail to tell each other crucial pieces of information, fail to ask the right question, and don’t realise that a vital letter has got burned in a railway accident. They give the workings of Fate good value for money.
The eponymous hero of Anthony Lyveden is an former British Army officer who suffered no particular wounds or damage, but, one or two years after the First World War had ended, is desperately looking for work. How can this be possible? He’s a gentleman. Gentlemen don’t need to look for work. They have lands, and estates, and invisible income sources. Not this one: he was orphaned early in life, brought up by an uncle, and then his uncle’s will gave him all the uncle’s large fortune, with the prior condition that to receive the estate he had to have achieved a knighthood. Anthony has not been offered a knighthood, of course. Yates expects his readers to learn from this that if you are a gentleman you don’t angle for such an honour (are you listening, Nigel Farage?), and to wangle a knighthood to acquire a fortune is to demonstrate your own unworthiness. If Anthony wants a fortune, he will have to make it himself, just like the rest of us. Thus the novel instructs early 1920s society on how to behave in the matter of knighthoods and fortunes, with, Yates hoped, a trickledown effect on other matters of social usage.
The novel opens when Anthony is on his way to be interviewed for a post as a footman. He succeeds, and enters domestic service for the first time as footman to a couple of the grossly exaggerated lower-class war-rich. Mr Slumper is a financier and his wife is a really horrible woman with no education, looks, manners or saving graces whatsoever. The rest of the servants in the house are greedy and grasping, so Anthony is the only one to give the couple any kind of honest service at all. When Mr Slumper comes home in a state knowing that his business is about to fail spectacularly, Anthony does not abandon his employers, but gets them to the train station, and his reward for faithful service is some of his due wages. Lesson no. 2: always give good service, no matter who it’s for, and your example will rub off onto even the vilest of people.
Anthony’s next job is with a titled family, which means less agony for him in serving the unworthy, but more agony because these are people he would have avoided socially because they are cold, ungenerous and unpleasant. Yates is really keen for us to realise the horror of such things now being possible. The vile son of the family bullies Anthony in a shockingly lower-class, caddish way, until Anthony knocks him out after one insult too many. The father applauds this event, but has to let Anthony go. Some things just can’t be forgiven.
So you see, this novel is beginning to look like the Pilgrim’s Progress, with the perfect hero undergoing trials of temper, pride, and self-control, and coming out in the right every time. Anthony’s third post is a put-up job, since Anthony has met The Girl. He owns a dog (most Yates heroes own and worship their dogs), which he boards in kennels in the countryside while he’s in service, and goes to visit at weekends for long walks in decent gentlemanly solitude. His dog gets into a fight with another dog, which Anthony breaks up very efficiently (moral: a man who can separate two fighting dogs is admirable), but he accidentally offends the other dog’s owner, while falling head over heels in love with her at first sight. She secretly returns his feelings, but when they accidentally meet again, he is handing the visibly appalling Mrs Slumper into her carriage, while The Girl is awaiting her own servants and carriage.
But it’s OK: Yates does not intend Valerie French (for it is she) to knowingly fall in love with a footman. (He has already written a really vicious short story about the hell that awaits a girl of good family who marries beneath her, which is truly fiendish in its revenge on the erring victim. He did not approve of mésalliances.) Valerie can tell instinctively that Anthony is a man of her own class. Luckily she has friends who are also working in service, in a very cushy job indeed, so she arranges for Anthony to get a job there too, and he is at last in a safe haven. He has friends of his own class, the work is light, decent and honourable, and the employers are delightful, grateful lower-class darlings. They know their place, and the other servants are paid to make sure that these upper-class footmen and housemaids can eat separately, on a table they don’t need to lay or clear themselves. Some things really matter.
The inability of the ordinary demobbed soldier to get work after the end of the war is pretty much ignored in this novel, because Yates is very keen to draw out the agony of how awful it is for a gentleman to suffer this fate. He artificially twists the plot to increase the humiliation, suspense, tension and reversals of fortune that the perfect ex-officer without a job must undergo. But why? In both Anthony Lyveden and Valerie French Anthony undergoes starvation, is enslaved by an enchanted forest while working as a kind of deranged Forestry Commission worker, loses his sanity, loses a girl, is nearly seduced by another girl, has to perform increasingly demanding tests of noblesse oblige, and constantly displays extraordinary exhibitions of loyalty to his dog. These ordeals of chivalry increase our sympathy for the ex-officer hero, and present these injustices as evidence of the national disloyalty to those who fought in the War and are yet unrewarded. At the very least, we are expected to feel indignation at the state of the post-war nation which can’t look after its gentlemen.
Is Anthony worth it? His heroism and natural leadership is typical for 1920s popular fiction, as the British ex-officer working with demobbed Other Ranks. At the beginning of Valerie French, the reactions of the demobbed Other Ranks to Anthony the starving and desperate ex-officer in need are extraordinary: not only do they feed him, they take him in their lorry to a pub, where the landlord, on hearing Anthony’s accent, immediately offers him unlimited credit, and then the lorry drivers slip Anthony twenty shillings, pretending the notes had fallen out of his coat. Shortly after this, Anthony inadvertently helps a thief steal a spare wheel off a car, meets a stupendously shouty barrister called Sir Andrew Plague, is instantly trusted despite the evidence, and is rescued from court simply because he looks and sounds like a gentleman. All this demonstrates the importance of class loyalty.
With Sir Andrew, Yates really lets rip with his trademark lexical exuberance and repetitive allegorical word games. For some readers these can be wearing. But the constant cranking up of the tension through both novels (often over very trivial things) is more stressful. It has the effect of cliff-hangers wandering around the plot looking for the cliff: are we really expected to get worked up about Valerie’s hysterics about her rigid codes of honour in every chapter? Is it such a drama to choose between telling or not telling Anthony his past when he recovers from ‘brain fever’ without his memory? This illness is a metaphor for shell-shock. After Anthony has been rescued from the utterly bizarre psychotic wood called Gramarye, a malign enchanted ecosystem that can twist time and space, his mental condition is precarious, and he needs to be nursed, unable to be a whole man again without long and careful recovery. In contrast, Valerie’s histrionics of honour because Anthony cannot remember who she is are tedious.
But overall, both these novels are very satisfying. There are spectacular plot twists, there are large helpings of useful instruction on how to perform noblesse oblige, there are some excellent dramatic characters, who are practically eating the carpets while screaming at each other. Anthony himself is a curiously inactive and passive character, perpetually tossed by fortune. He is given things by everyone who meets him, and he has a ridiculous chivalric habit of sacrificing himself to extraordinary lengths so as to not to embarrass a lady or allow her name to be maligned.
Thankfully there are characters with good comic value, since Yates understood the purpose of sparring and invective, to relieve this stiff-upper-lip tension. There are constant misunderstandings of motives and reasons through upper-class inarticulacy. There’s a girl called André, who I think must be modelled on Theda Bara, who slinks and smoulders, but has to shout to get the attention of the astonished gentlemen about to murder each other for her honour (Yates concerns himself a lot with a lady’s honour). There is a spectacular three-way fist fight between Sir Andrew, Colonel Winchester and Anthony, resulting in a broken leg and a broken door. What with the whips, it’s like a medieval cat fight, with honour sticking it to everyone in sight. Thankfully, the story ends with a return to classic British values of the period: Anthony finally recovers his memory when Valerie is attacked by a less than human foreigner whom he has to strangle. These are epic novels of drama and nightmares, but they are also delightful, if you leave your sense of proportion at the door.
I write a great deal more about these novels and Yates’ other works in Novelists Against Social Change (2015).
Sax Rohmer (
Rohmer was a British writer who began his career writing for the music hall before writing novels. He seems to have fostered a reputation for being active in the occult, and certainly wrote a great many novels in the 1920s and onwards that dabbled in mysterious religions. The Fu-Manchu books did not have so much to do with the supernatural or the weird as with basic Imperialism, with a dash of drama based on science. They were serialised in weekly fiction magazines, and were wildly popular, with Rohmer being persuaded after a ten-year break to write more Fu-Manchu novels from the 1930s, until his death in 1959. I’ve only read two or three, but because they were very formulaic, and had a simple structure, I’m going to assume that they shared the same form and delivered the same messages to the readers, who wouldn’t have bought them in such large numbers otherwise.
The narrator of The Mystery of Fu-Manchu (the American title of the novel was The Insidious Fu-Manchu, by the way, if you’re looking for the free download from Project Gutenberg) is Dr Petrie, and he is a medical man, as he often tell us. He is settling down to do some writing one evening, when his old friend Nayland Smith walks in, and the drama begins. Dr Petrie and Nayland Smith are a very obvious Watson and Holmes re-run, right down to the eccentric investigator’s smoking habits, and his ability to make deductions out of nothing. But unlike Sherlock Holmes stories, the pace of the action in this first Fu-Manchu novel is, initially, a headlong torrent. There is no let-up for the reader. It seems as if Rohmer wanted to write an action-packed thriller with a dollop of detection, where the speed of events and the drama were to be the attraction for the reader. There is no time for narrative reflection, but, interestingly, there is a lot of time in Petrie’s narration for repetition, and repeated tirades against the ‘Yellow Peril’ which threatens the entire white race. Reading this fiction now, it seems extraordinary that anyone could have thought in such a way, or even enjoyed the sweeping generalisation, because it is so blatantly all for effect, not for sense, rationality, or even plausibility. And that’s where the interest in novels like this lie: people liked this kind of writing, and bought it to read for pleasure. What does that tell us about what their enjoyment was based on? And should we read this stuff today?
Let’s go back to the plot. Nayland Smith is a civil servant, an old Burma hand, back in England on leave because he knows that Dr Fu Manchu has reached these shores, and is going to do evil and terrible things. The plot progresses as Petrie follows Nayland Smith from one locked room mystery to another, in which Eastern experts die in horrible and inventively implausible ways. It’s interesting that the power and secret knowledge that the East wants is located in the West. There is no shortage of knowledge in the East, as well as secrecy, glamour, villainy and multitudinous deadly methods: it’s astonishing how much nonsense was laid at the East’s door that the readers of the West were willing to believe. Again, that’s something worth thinking about: why did readers fall for such claptrap, even if only at the level of reading cheap and entertaining fiction?
In another case, Petrie is taken to see the recovery of an Egyptian boy, Aziz, because the boy’s sister, the lovely Karamaneh, has been vamping Petrie from the moment she appears in the book. She wants Petrie to help her escape from Fu-Manchu’s clutches, and so she keeps appearing in exotic outfits wearing a highly traceable scent, to tell Petrie to come with her secretly and not tell Nayland Smith, and the poor fool does it every time. He is really a very unprofessional sidekick, constantly getting himself into danger, and never learning from his mistakes. Karamaneh starts off as just a glamorous villain, but Rohmer seems to have changed his mind about her quite quickly, possibly because he had such a good time writing about Petrie’s susceptibility. Petrie even thinks about marrying her, but in the end, she and her brother sail back to Egypt, and Nayland Smith gives Petrie an ambiguous mission to Egypt as well, to encourage the readers to buy the next instalment.
Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
Larry Niven, Ringworld
I haven’t seen Arrival, but I wanted to read the book because the story as told to me by someone who had seen the film interested me greatly. I spotted the book in the bookshop because of the Amy-Adams-in-a-spacesuit cover, and was surprised to see that a whole film had been based on a short story. I’d heard of Ted Chiang, but only vaguely. I’ve finished all the stories in that collection now. Oh my.
Stories of Your Life and Others (the original title of the collection known as Arrival) will expand your mind relentlessly. The knowledge is only part of it: you don’t have to be a computer scientist to be pulled along by the scientific dilemma in ‘Understand’ because it is utterly human. All the stories are about being human, and dealing with the extraordinary. ‘Story of your life’ is the highlight for me; a perfect, beautiful story, beautiful in how the structure reflects the evolution of the story and what we learn from it as we read (the as-we-read bit is important, because this story is about the accumulative process). ‘Tower of Babylon’ was strange and deeply satisfying, and ‘The evolution of human science’ is a pocket firework.
The invented sciences are marvellous and slightly chilling, treading closely on the boundaries of dystopia. But I am annoyed that no-one told Chiang that he can’t write British English dialogue. Both the third-person narrative voice and the ‘English’ characters make blooper after blooper, despite Chiang’s exceptionally good reconstruction of Victorian England. The story might have worked better if he had set it in New York, because then the Americanisms would have been appropriate. But to create an English society so faithfully, and not even posit that it was somehow American-English, and then drop clangers in phrasing, social usage and syntax, is just not good enough. No-one in England, now or 150 years ago, ever talks of a ‘steer’ when they mean a cow. Maybe the narrative voice is supposed to be American (but why?), which would explain why ‘Lionel had Robert wait outside’: no English voice would say that, not now or in the nineteenth century. No school-teacher scientist would address a peer without adding ‘my lord’ at the end of his request. No Victorian peer would drink ‘whiskey’, and he certainly wouldn’t pour it himself.
This 
When Peter leaves school and comes home, he realises with cold horror that his cackling grandfather and demonic violent father are waiting eagerly for him to fall into their bullying, violent, cruel ways. Peter runs off to London and takes a job in a second-hand bookshop. This is a quite a jump in the plot, made possible by the meetings Peter has had in a mysterious junk shop in Treliss, where he encounters the enigmatic, romantic and also mysterious Mr Zanti, who offers him the job. Zanti is a deliberately curious character when he first appears, giving an impression of being all astrakhan coat and dark curling moustaches. He is important because he keeps appearing at all the turns in Peter’s fortunes. Consequently we take him at Peter’s estimation all through the novel: first as a figure of glamour and cosmopolitanism, later as a kind benefactor, then as a hapless victim, and finally as a devoted and loyal friend.
Fortitude is also the first of what would be later grouped together as Walpole’s eight London novels. London is quite clearly the centre of the known world for Walpole’s characters in this novel, with a range of Dickensian socio-economic and class settings. Walpole also added some pointed portraits of people who might well have been of his friends and acquaintances in the literary London of his own day, including Henry James, of whom he was a protegé. But the London parts of Fortitude begin in the 1890s, so as well as recreating his own early successes from the Edwardian period, Walpole also does a nice job of recreating the society that was withdrawing the hem of its garments from The Yellow Book, ten years earlier. Walpole is writing this novel for insiders and for those who wanted recent literary fashions revisited.
What makes this a true novel of 1913, if you ignore the now timeless Gothic bits and the David Copperfield plot, is the secret socialist circle and the anarchist bomb plot. Anarchism had been fashionable in fiction for some time, and Walpole duly inserts an anarchist episode into Fortitude. Closely linked to the Cornish Gothic is the new fashion for rural extravagance, to be made popular by Mary Webb’s novels The Golden Arrow and Gone to Earth, during the First World War. Walpole expends a great deal of effort establishing the character of the big, muscular, simple and faithful farmer and lovelorn suitor Stephen Brant, who waits and suffers for literally decades while the woman he loves is married to another man. Stephen is Peter’s faithful friend and protector, going to extraordinary lengths to keep him alive in moments of danger, and to bring him news from home. But as soon as the woman is free, she and Stephen hop onto a ship for Canada.
It’s not too far-fetched to read Peter as Stephen’s surrogate child and light of his life. Stephen does a fair amount of raging through the winter fields at sunset, recalling very forcibly the Starkadder brothers in Stella Gibbons’s much later Cold Comfort Farm, but he is out of place in London, even in the poorer quarters. There is a cataclysmic scene when Stephen and Mr Zanti and Peter are playing a riotously enjoyable game of romps with Peter’s baby son, and all seems happy and natural and all boys together, until Peter’s wife opens the nursery door and stands there, glaring icily down at them. She disapproves of them playing with the child at all, and she hates everything about Cornwall and Peter’s former life. Stephen is shrunken by her hatred, and he and Mr Zanti slink out of the door.
I don’t think Walpole knew or cared much about women, or babies. He was, as the obituaries in the quality press say, a confirmed bachelor. Clare is an appalling monster because of her weaknesses and improbable characteristics, whereas her mother is a masterwork of socially-sanctioned monstrous behaviour, who calmly moves into her daughter’s marital home at the first sign of trouble, and never leaves until disaster arrives. Compared to these London ladies, the demonic Gothic horror waiting for Peter when he finally returns to the House of Scaw was always going to be a damp squib. Walpole manipulates our expectations and produces a truly surprising, and oddly satisfying ending to the novel.
You can find her novels in print-on-demand editions, and sometimes the genuine second-hand article, and in older public libraries that haven’t yet thrown their less borrowed books into the bin to make room for more computers. Her first novel was published in 1899, and her last in 1944. She was prolific, producing forty novels and short story collections in just over forty years, of the type that would be asked for in libraries between the war as ‘a nice book’. But they’re rare: she was never a top of the range best-seller, and in the Second World War, the bombing raid on London in 1940 that destroyed Paternoster Row and the heart of the book trade also burned all her publisher’s stock. Because of that her books are simply very hard to get hold of. I managed to republish one, The Affairs of John Bolsover, in 
But he is a relatively minor character in this novel, which is about a girl called Keren Ashe, who lives with her father, Dr Ashe the alchemist, in the Forest, south of Colchester in Essex. He is a descendant of Dr Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s alchemist, and Keren’s mother was a gypsy from Bohemia, so Keren has a strange and distinguished bloodline. She works as her father’s lab assistant, and seems perfectly content to do this for the rest of her life, until well-meaning Tobiah mentions to Betsy Shipp in Colchester one day that there is a 17-year old girl growing up wild in the Forest, with no older woman to instruct her on household duties or to see that she does not stray into temptation. Betsy is Dr Ashe’s distant cousin, so she takes Keren to live with her in the town, which seems to be a good plan for all. Dr Ashe disappears shortly afterwards on a secret journey.
Tobiah seems to be the head preacher for all the Dissenting sects, those troublesome Protestants who broke with the Church of England and insist on splitting theological hairs in defining their own religious beliefs, until there are almost more sects than believers. When Tobiah is out of town, Samuel Calderbeck sneaks back in, an ignorant man with a mania about demonic possession and witchcraft. When Betsy goes to London to see her married daughter and the new grandchild, her fussy husband installs his sister, Rachel Shipp, in the house to keep an eye on the maids. Rachel is a Calderbeck enthusiast, and very strong on the girls attending all possible religious services. At one, Keren forgets to kneel down for prayers, because her mind is elsewhere, so after a stern interrogation by Calderbeck and Rachel, it is suspected that she must be possessed. This is not a good time for Keren to be under suspicion of witchcraft, because her sneaky cousin Kate already has a downer on her. Keren can see easily through Kate’s hypochondrical ways, and Kate is very good at being devout when it will do her good. Keren has also been making lapis lazuli, a straightforward alchemical experiment that she has never managed to work accurately before, so when this too is discovered (it was a present for her nice cousin Betty) she is sent straight to her room and locked in, awaiting judgement in the morning.
So, when I read this title, I Am Legend, I automatically think of Tim Curry in magnificent raunchy curled horns and stomping devil hooves, terrifyingly, hugely red, from Ridley Scott’s 1985 film Legend. Or John Legend. Or perhaps the film with Will Smith in it. In descending order of recognition, that title barely scrapes a thought for Richard Matheson’s 1954 vampire novel. Pity. Matheson certainly didn’t invent the vampire, but he put it into 1950s pulp fiction, and imagined vampires in American high streets and grocery stores.
