The Book of Months

Fiction ~ novel (kind of)
Published May? 1903
Approx. 56,000 words
(First read 15/12/2013)

I said in my introductory paragraph that I wouldn't pull any punches, that if I found something bad, I'd say so.  Well, The Book of Months isn't bad ~ it's atrocious.  
As with most of these books, I had no idea what to expect before reading this ~ I'm never even 100% sure whether it's going to be a novel or something else.  (See for example As We Are ~ opinion is divided as to whether it's fiction, current affairs, or ... well, something else.)  Well anyway, here's what happened when I picked up The Book of Months [this review contains spoilers, not that there's much to spoil]:

I see it's divided into twelve chapters, a month each, starting with January.  Fair enough, I think, it's a diary-type novel, nowt wrong with that.  The narrator starts off by moaning about the weather in London; then, it having become clear that he's an author, he recounts a couple of anecdotes of his daily life.  Then he goes off to Switzerland for a skating holiday.  At this point I'm starting to think Erm, who is this chap? ~ surely the resemblance between him and the author is more than coincidental.  The episode closes with the narrator befriending a little girl staying at the same hotel.  Hmm, well, maybe not then.

February (don't worry: I'm not going to go through every month like this) arrives and we're treated to a really quite heart-wrenching anecdote about a street newspaper-boy who the Great-God-Benson shows us just long enough for us to like ... then summarily kills off.  Please note: This is the only passage in the book worth reading ~ it lasts two or three pages.  Our narrator then goes to a house party where, one night, he goes 'rain-running' (the hero of Ravens' Brood does exactly the same thing), which is to say that he strips down to his pants and goes running around outdoors soaking up nature (etc.)  I say, this is terribly bold of EFB to admit that he's done this himself.
March is nothing but maundering waffle, in the unmistakeable voice of E F Benson (or is it?).  So is April.

Then comes May and [quote] "Dick Alington and I were very old friends: we had been at school together, and his father's house was next to ours in the country, the woods belonging to each running contiguous, separated only by the park paling."  The mystery deepens: I have no recollection of that name in EFB's biography ... and besides, the Bensons surely never lived in a property like that ...  Then, lo and behold, not only is there a 'Dick' but there's a 'Margery' too and [wait for it, another quote]: "Then quite suddenly I became aware that I had fallen in love with her."*
This is page 47 of 124.
It's a novel: the narrator is a fictional author who just happens to be exactly like the real one; and these people are characters.  Reader, I swallowed my own tongue.  Now I realize I might sound like a complete dullard saying this but up until page 45 I was convinced I was reading "A Year in the Life of the Author of Dodo".  It's not till one third of the way through the novel (p. 48) that we even find out the narrator's damned name (Jack).  It felt like a confidence trick ... or a cheap magic trick ... or a hoax ... or something.  And the worst of it is that at no point in the remaining 250-ish pages (counting this and the sequel A Reaping as one) do we ever really know who Jack is.

Well, that's the long and the short of it.  I should add that not only is Jack a complete and utter zero, but he must surely be the most crashing bore Benson ever created: he just rambles on and on and on and on and on ... about nothing ... for pages and pages and pages.  For example, virtually the whole of August (once the plot's been safely cleared out of the way) is devoted to him going to Bayreuth to watch Wagner operas and he describes their plots in minute detail ~ it was horribly, painfully, sickeningly, stomach-churningly, brain-rottingly boring to read.
So, my advice, steer well clear of this one.

Still and all, if you are that kind of masochist, the whole book is available online here.  (Don't say I didn't warn you, though.)

For the sequel, go to A Reaping.


*There follows the inevitable dull love triangle: Dick loves Margery too; Margery chooses Dick (as who wouldn't?); the narrator chooses to hang around suffering nobly.  Dick, like so many a doomed character, is mildly likeable, so Benson kills him off in the Boer War.  Margery dies of a combination of grief-at-the-news and childbirth.  The baby (for once) survives Benson's mad axe ... but thereafter vanishes off the face of the earth.

THE CRITICS

The Book of Months is not, properly speaking, a novel at all; if we may coin an expression to fit this style of novel, we should call it "fictional autobiography." At the beginning the reader takes the book as a real description of the mental processes of Mr. E. F. Benson; but later on, when two love-stories are worked into the text, the same reader must conclude that the book is pure fiction. The earlier and less narrative parts of the book are the best reading, and the author when he describes his midnight outing in his friend's grounds to enjoy the full delights of the first night of spring is singularly successful in getting the young man's joie de vivre "over the footlights." There is a delightful optimism about the book which renders it very pleasant reading, and some of Mr. Benson's theories of life are shrewd enough to give food for reflection. As a whole, The Book of Months is well worth reading.

~The Spectator, 02/05/1903

 

It is full of charm ~ real, persuasive, penetrating charm ~ the charm of a wayward, irresponsible, winning personality. There is sentiment, and sometimes sentimentality; but there is an underlying manliness, which renders even the most sentimental reflections strong and unaffected. The book is, above all things, sympathetic. Many notes are sounded, and in all of them there rings the sincerity of real feeling and purpose … [we] recommend it unreservedly to all sorts and conditions of readers.

~The Daily Chronicle, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater and Juggernaut

 

The book contains fine work, notably the beautiful word-pictures of 'Spring in April', 'Capri in September,' and half a dozen others, which in themselves make it well worth reading.

 

~The Athenæum, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater and Sheaves

 

It is an uncommon and a charming book.

~Illustrated London News, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

Mr. Benson, the author of Dodo and many other novels which have been severely criticised and widely read, now turns to a new field. These little prose essays, one for each month, record the out-of-door experiences and the reflections of a London man-about-town. In a measure, they suggest the work of Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, but they are in a manner simpler and less affected. A single reflection may be quoted: "The man who rings a bell for a small child who cannot reach it has done his duty and his part in the world's work far better that day than any philosopher who thinks a great deal and does nothing." A slender vein of humor and a considerable knowledge of society may be found beneath the surface of Mr. Benson's writing. The book is put in holiday dress with elaborate decoration in colors.

 

~The Outlook (US), 28/11/1903

Certainly, Mr. Benson is here at his best: quaintness, originality, some powerful descriptive passages, and very human nature gives an intimacy and charm.

 

~Daily News, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

The author reveals himself a keen observer and the possessor of a poetic fancy, expressed in vivid incident and sketches of human nature and scenery in all parts of the world. It is a book to be taken up at any time, and opened at any part.

 

~British Weekly, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

In some of the twelve episodes which Mr. Benson gives us in this volume he goes deep to the foundations of joy and sorrow. Much of the book is narrative; one or two of the stories are deeply and poignantly melancholy; other parts of the book are throbbing with vitality and the delight of life. Passages of descriptive writing, gay and sombre, occur which are wonderfully good work.

 

~Vanity Fair, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

 

It expresses the thoughts and feelings of a sane and mortal man; it reveals him in his private moments, and it throbs with his pleasure and his pain. It is all eminently natural, and it is 'mind-narrative' of a kind that will win the sympathy of average people by awaking echoes of their own emotions. Add to this that in style it is scholarly, in many pages lofty and poetic, and there is no need to explain away a charm which will be instantly felt. Besides the arts of sympathetic self-revelation and moralising, Mr. Benson has the rare gift of humour, and a talent for description and for narrative.

 

~St. James's Gazette, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

 

The charm of the book lies in its perfect sincerity, and no one will take it up but will find in it something which will bring him into closer relation with himself, and inspire in him a greater sense of the joy of life.

 

~The Bookman, quoted in the endpapers to An Act in a Backwater

And finally: I can only conclude from this that all these people were reading some other book of the same title, by an author of the same name.

The Book of Months [(April 1903)] is an agreeable if rather desultory book which is difficult to categorise, being neither a novel, diary, collection of essays, autobiography, nor a gardening book, but an amalgam of all of them; a record of experiences, both material and emotional, with the thoughts to which they have given birth, within the space of one year.

The critics were caught off guard by this change in tempo and direction and did not know what to make of it. Most of them praised it highly, in a rather surprised kind of way; only the Saturday Review, never a fan of E. F. Benson, spoke of “these maunderings on lumbago, and the gibberish he talks in his bath, and above its dreary humour, its wilted sentiment, is the amazing insensibility with which the thing is done.”

~Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd in E. F. Benson As He Was, 1988

The Temple

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Hutchinson's Magazine, November 1924
Collected in Spook Stories (1928)
6,655 words
(First read 30/10/2012) 

A distinctly long, leisurely, rambling journey into the wilds of northern Cornwall, not far at all from Ravens' Brood and The Inheritor country.  Unnamed Narrator, who's a writer, and his chum Frank Ingleton, who's an archaeologist, tip up in the village of St Caradoc's for one of those work-cum-golf-cum-piquet holidays of which U.N. was such a fan, provided he could find the right chap to accompany him.  Anyway, they eventually stumble across a vacant cottage; they rent it so as to avoid the hotel crowds; they discover it stands in the centre of a prehistoric stone circle (the temple of the title), and that it and the house come with one of those barmy curses Benson specialized in.  Still, it all ends happily.
Though the idea at the heart of The Temple is singularly gruesome (the yarn is more 'horror' than 'spook'), the story itself sadly contains about as much tension as a pan of spaghetti you've accidentally left on the boil for an hour and three quarters.
It's available online here.



QUOTABLES
There is, I feel, a certain air of unseemly relish in U.N.'s description of the temple's sacrificial stone:

It was on that stone that young boys and maidens, torn from their mother's arms and bound hand and foot, were laid, while the priest, with one hand over the victim's eyes, plunged the flint knife into the smooth, white throat, sawing through the tissue till the blood spurted from the severed artery ... 

"Does it come with chips?"

Negotium Perambulans

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Hutchinson's Magazine, November 1922
Collected in Visible and Invisible (1923)*
6,160 words
(First read 26/01/2012) 

In a remote and isolated Cornish fishing-village some unspeakably horrid thing has lurked for centuries, feeding on the flesh and blood of sinners.
More horror than spook story, Negotium Perambulans ('walking pestilence') suffers from the same drawback as so many EFB yarns: about a quarter of the way through he tells you what the horror is, then a bit later he gives you an example of it at work, then another, and at the end yet another ... and each time it gets just a shade more humdrum.  The only difference with the last occurrence is that our Unidentified Narrator (a retired lawyer, for a change) actually witnesses it himself.
Still, the descriptions of the village, of the narrator's childhood there and nostalgia for the old place, are rather nice.  You can read it online here. 


* The term 'visible and invisible' features in this very story, when the narrator is talking about the natives of the village, Polearn:

 [...] it is as if they had all been initiated into some ancient rite, inspired and framed by forces visible and invisible.

For more of this kind of thing see Ravens' Brood (1934).  I've often wondered if EFB genuinely believed that Cornish village-folk had some kind of mystical knowledge denied to the rest of us, or if it was all just a literary conceit.

Ravens' Brood

Fiction ~ novel
Published August? 1934
Approx. 104,000 words
(First read 30/07/2002; second read 28/11/2013)

There's no two ways about it: Ravens' Brood is fun ... in comparison with a lot of the rest of EFB's output.  Okay so it's fun of a rather rarefied, perverse kind, but what the hell.

Set in the second half of the 19th century, it tells the story of a consummately dysfunctional family all living in a heap (well, in a farmhouse, actually) in rural Cornwall: John Pentreath, a part-time religious fanatic and full-time alcoholic; his second wife Mollie, a demented harridan supposedly gifted in folkloric supernatural stuff; his widowed daughter-in-law Nancy, a preening gadabout with an eye for anything in trousers; his stroppy-strapping grandson Dennis; and Mollie's niece Nell.  John and Mollie are estranged, to put it mildly; he lusts after Nancy when he isn't slagging her off for being a jezebel; Mollie lusts after him; Dennis and Nell lust ~ fairly chastely ~ after one another.

Well, obviously, lust is the key.  As Geoffrey Palmer and Noel Lloyd say in their introduction to my copy¹, amongst Benson's other stuff Ravens' Brood "stands out like a cromlech in a cornfield ... black magic, sexuality, blasphemy, violence and ecstasy surround and penetrate the plot and characters."
I'm not saying any more: I recommend it.  But don't read it in the expectation of finding light social comedy in it.  Expect, rather, to put it down and say, "Blimey, did the author of Mapp and Lucia really write this?"

¹ Published by Millivres Books, 1993.

P.S. This has only just occurred to me today [28/01/14]: 'Ravens' Brood' isn't the name of the Pentreaths' farmhouse, which doesn't appear to have any particular name; also, to the best of my recollection, Benson never refers to the family as being like a bunch of young ravens; in fact, there's no mention whatsoever of ravens in the book.  There is an owl, though. 

"Rip me bodice, bigfella!"

STOP PRESS! ~ apparently the late Mr Rock Hudson owned a copy of Ravens' Brood ~ LOOK.

OTHER CRITICS

A bit far-fetched perhaps, but this suggests an English counterpart of Tobacco Road*, in its picture of degradation and its atmosphere of hate and depravity and sexual desires, in its ironical contrasts of belief and action, in the sense of its being a world removed from current life. Not a pleasant book, as one can guess by the above. Farm life in Cornwall against which is played out the drama of old John Pentreath's fear of God and love of the flesh and drink, and his growing hatred of his grandson Dennis, [whose] saneness alone lifts the story out of an abyss of degeneracy. A far cry from Benson's usual work.

 

~Kirkus Reviews, no date.  * A 1932 novel by Erskine Caldwell.  Never heard of it, I'm afraid.