Alone on an Island

You’d be surprised by how often all I want to read is a Robinsonade–and by how rarely I really enjoy one. Like, I’ve tried writing people surviving in the wilderness with limited resources, and it’s not that hard.

I don’t think W.H.G. Kingston, author of Alone on an Island, found it hard either–he seems to have written several and also taken credit for his wife’s translation of some of Jules Verne’s. Unfortunately his ease with the subject did not, at least in this case, produce a satisfying book.

Harry Gurton is a nice boy with religious inclinations, which will no doubt be useful to him when he’s alone of his desert island. First, though, we have to get him here.

Let’s start by killing off his parents–unnamed diseases, within a few months of each other. Then let’s commission him as a midshipman on a privateer. Let’s provide him with a pocket-sized bible and a warning about the immorality of sailors (they swear a lot) both courtesy of his friendly local minister. With all that taken care of, we can send him to sea.

Now we must make the ship as uncomfortable ass possible. Everyone swears a lot. The officers are relentlessly awful to the sailors. The surgeon leaves the ship after a difference of opinion with some of the officers, and Harry is the only person willing to nurse the sailors when they get sick. His fellow midshipman threatens to destroy his pocket bible. Harry tries to be friendly to everyone, but relations between the officers and the crew get worse and worse. So: it’s mutiny time.

One of the sailors he nursed through an illness lashes him to a mast to get him out of the way. Then the crew murders the rest of the officers. Then they give Harry the choice of becoming a mutineer or being marooned on a nearby island. He chooses the latter, as he’s uncomfortable with the murdering and the swearing. So his sailor friend assembles the world’s most comprehensive care package and puts him ashore.

The one thing I really want from a Robinsonade is the mechanics of survival, in exhaustive detail. How is the protagonist starting a fire? Building shelter? What do they eat? Are they identifying plants? Are they making tools to hunt with? I want to know everything. There should also be elements of struggle–to gather building materials, to search for a missing companion, to familiarize themselves with the collection of legal tomes that was washed ashore in a packing case. Whatever. Those being my priorities, reading Alone on an Island was a frustrating experience.

Harry has it too easy. He’s got guns and fishing equipment, tent canvas, vegetabl seeds and saucepans. He’s got several months’ worth of salt beef and pork. He’s happy to find eggs, not because he needs the food, but because they’ll be “a pleasant addition to his larder.” At some point he thinks to himself that he’d like a cup of tea, so he looks through his stuff and finds that his sailor friend has given him a big bag of tea and another of cocoa. There’s just something about about being able to make hot chocolate on a desert island that suggests Kingston is missing the point. Want to know how this lone fifteen-year-old builds a house? Well, so do I. All we get is “He began putting up his house. [Three sentences about hunting and fishing.] [Three sentences about the garden.] He had now got up his house.”

There are tantalizing glimpses of the kind of detail I want. Harry’s first effort at cooking fails, and he learns that it’s better to boil his salt beef than to roast it. He knows it’s going to be hard to grow things in the sandy soil, so he burns the weeds he’s pulled and uses the ashes as fertilizer. Gathering salt is a little difficult, but eventually he has enough to let him preserve some fish he’s caught. It’s easier to dry or smoke fish, but he prefers the salted fish. I think Kingston was capable of writing the kind of book I wanted. The real problem here is that he’s moving too fast.

Harry establishes himself with little effort and a fair amount of prayer, and then we skip forward three years to another shipwreck, which brings Harry’s sailor friend to live on the island with him. Then, after some bible-reading, we skip forward another couple of years, and the pair is rescued. The sailor becomes a missionary, Harry gets a job, the end. This is a really short book, and it feels like Kingston managed that by cutting out most of the parts I wanted to read.

So, here’s my verdict: Alone on an Island isn’t terrible, but it left my Robinsonade itch unscratched. I’ll try to report back with something more successful.

Our Miss York

I think what we all need during this frankly awful time is, yes, another book from the teens about a young woman earning a living. Happy ending a must.

I can’t find out much about Edwin Bateman Morris, but he has an intriguing list of titles, and he was apparently considered worthy of Coles Phillips cover art. And while Our Miss York didn’t wow me, it has a lot of great elements.

Margaret York is an orphan, reluctantly adopted by an uncle who has no patience for children, and less money than he once did. She grows up industrious and efficient, in contrast to her friend David Bruce, who has a moderate income and drifts from hobby to hobby without ever settling down to work at anything. When Margaret’s uncle dies, she takes a stenography course and goes to work at the Waring Company. She learns the business as thoroughly as she can, and draws the attention of Willis Potter, the director, who gives her advice and steers her towards new opportunities–though whether for her benefit or his own, it’s not always clear.

Margaret does well–has some adventures, reconnects with her childhood friend David, makes friends with an older businesswoman–but, as books like this too often do, Our Miss York narrows down to the old business or family question, and the answer is a little too much of a foregone conclusion. Also, I would have liked to see Morris tie together and follow through on threads that he only casts in the same direction, like how Margaret’s upbringing–or lack of it–influences her. But it’s hard to complain about a book full of people being good at things, where the heroine gets to have both personal and professional success, and also pilot a motorboat. I don’t love Our Miss York, but I do recommend it.

Dora’s Housekeeping

What we all need in the middle of a pandemic–if we have the time/energy/attention span–is some light reading. I’ll try to find some for you soon, but for now: Dora’s Housekeeping, by Elizabeth Stansbury Kirkland, is very dull.

You know how Ten Dollars Enough can drag a little when there are too many recipes in a row? Dora’s Housekeeping never stops dragging. I recommending getting your cookbook-in-novel’s-clothing fix elsewhere.

Oh, you want to know what it’s about? Well, Dora Greenwood is a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl with four younger siblings. Her mother is sent abroad to recover from an illness, and Dora takes over as housekeeper. She’s got a helpful aunt and cousin next door, but she has trouble finding and keeping a good cook, and she still has to go to school.

I liked that Dora has the capacity to be a bit of a brat–sure, you’re definitely the person most affected by your servant’s mother’s illness–and that her father is a little finicky and not always as nice as one would wish. But Kirkland really looks down on the servants, and there’s too many recipes to too little story.

This is a sort of a sequel to Six Little Cooks; or, Aunt Jane’s Cooking Class, in which Dora’s helpful aunt teaches Dora’s cousins to cook. I think I won’t read it.

The Blue Envelope

Is a book ever as good all the way through, especially when there’s a romantic climax to get through and authors can’t be depended on not to forget what their characters are actually like, or pretend that actually it was love at first sight? Sophie Kerr, author of The Blue Envelope (not to be confused with The Blue Envelope by Roy Snell), isn’t much more dependable in that way than the average author, but she built up so much good will in the first half of the book that I wasn’t really disappointed.

Gladiola Murphy

Gladiola Murphy is an interesting book. The things it does, it does well, but some of them would be better not done at all. The author is Ruth Sawyer, who also wrote the Newbery Medal-winning Roller Skates. This is about a child too, in the early parts, but it’s not for children.

Support

Well, I continue to be extremely me: I really wish Margaret Ashmun had spent more of Support on the business venture Constance Moffat embarks on at least two thirds of the way into the book. Other than that, it’s a good divorce novel, it kept me guessing, and the ending is satisfying.

Rope

Do you ever read a book and wish the author just cared a little bit more about the things you cared about? Rope, by Holworthy Hall, sounded perfect for me, and it could have been, with a slightly different emphasis. As it is, it’s pretty great.

The Strange Countess

What is there to say about an Edgar Wallace thriller, really? They’re all good in the way his books are good and bad in the way his books are bad.

The Strange Countess focuses on Lois Margaritta Reddle, who is about to leave the lawyer’s office where she works to become secretary to the Countess of Moron. She also has a young man who follows her around–she assumes he’s angling for an introduction–and a mother in prison, although she doesn’t know that until a few chapters in. Someone keeps making attempts on Lois’ life, and the countess and her friend Chauncey Praye are definitely up to no good. The young man turns out to be a detective, who’s interest in Lois isn’t romantic–at first. Then there’s the countess’ son Selwyn, who isn’t as stupid as people think, and Lois’ roommate Lizzy Smith. They remind me a bit of Dolph and Hannah in Georgette Heyer’s Cotillion.

What else do you need to know? Someone shoots a couple of dogs, but offstage, so to speak.

The Shuttle

I’ve been meaning to read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Shuttle for years, but somehow never managed to get there until I got a very compelling email about it from RQ reader Franziska. Yes, I knew it was about an American heiress marrying a titled Englishman, but did I know it featured a competent young woman restoring a crumbling estate, or an abusive husband being defied and punished? I couldn’t have, or I would have read it ages ago.

The Billiard Room Mystery

Hi there. My New Year’s resolution is to update regularly again. We’ll see how it goes.

Maybe starting with a bad book will make things easier? The Billiard Room, by Brian Flynn, is very bad. It feels like it was written by an alien whose only knowledge of human society was gleaned from other second rate country house mystery novels. Apparently it’s the first of a long series. I wonder if Flynn got any better, but I’m not curious enough to try to find out.

Spray on the Windows

The thing about Spray on the Windows (by J.E. Buckrose) is that I’ve only just admitted to myself, a month and a half after finishing it, that I don’t like it. I feel guilty about that, because it’s not bad. It’s just that Buckrose’s thesis is that no matter how much life sucks, it’s going to be okay if you’re with the person you love, and to prove that thesis, she has to make life suck pretty bad. For most of the book, things are sort of okay, but you know where it’s going, and “how unhappy is everyone going to be?” is my least favorite kind of suspense.

Our protagonist is Ann Middleton, who has just moved to the seaside town of Wodenscar to work for the wealthy and eccentric Mrs. Barrington. Mrs. Barrington has a nephew who Ann would like to marry, and he likes her, too — but not necessarily enough to offer her marriage. Then there’s Ann’s neighbor Stephen Finlay, poor and disgraced and possibly a bit of an obstacle to Ann marrying for money.

You get to stress through her romantic decisions, stress through her married life, and stress through some possibly supernatural deaths and near-deaths. It’s…not that much fun. But I suspect that if I was a little less prone to anxiety, I would have liked it a lot more.

The Third Miss St. Quentin

I’ve been avoiding Mary Louisa Molesworth’s books for years, for no reason I can explain, but sometimes I go looking for something Cinderella-y and this time her The Third Miss St. Quentin was the thing that I found. And I’m glad of that, because it’s really good.

When I go looking for Cinderella stories, it’s because I don’t have a better way to look for what I really want: stories about people who are treated badly for a while and then get to have lots of nice things. The Third Miss St. Quentin isn’t that at all. Instead, it’s sort of a riff on the plot of Cinderella, but with a completely different emotional arc. The keynote of the story is that the Cinderella character is actually treated really well by almost everyone, almost all of the time.

Room 13

I am all set to go on an Edgar Wallace kick. It will actually be a delayed-onset Edgar Wallace kick. Thursday last week I was hunting around for something to read and found myself wishing I owned more Edgar Wallace. I eventually settled for one of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise books — and then three more — but the yen for Edgar Wallace was still there and last night I went over to Project Gutenberg Australia (is it illegal for me to download post-1923 books from there? I don’t think I want to know) and read Room 13, featuring Wallace’s series detective J.G. Reeder.

So, here’s the thing about Edgar Wallace — I’ve talked about it before — every time I try to write about one of his books in particular I end up taking about his books in general. It’s like most authors’ books are individual objects, which can be discussed and compared, but Edgar Wallace’s fiction is a fairly homogenous substance to be measured out in page-lengths. I’m going to pretend for a moment that it’s not, though, and that Room 13 stands alone and has nothing to do with any other book. And when I am done, I will have described a pretty typical Edgar Wallace thriller.

The After House

The After House is, as a whole, the most creepy and suspenseful Mary Roberts Rinehart mystery I’ve read yet. Sometimes I get irritated with Rinehart’s inevitable had-I-but-knowns, but there are cases where it really works. If fits with the conversational style of When a Man Marries, for example. And somehow, in the Tish stories, it makes the various ridiculous things that befall Tish and her friends even funnier. And it works from the very beginning here, heightening your sense that whatever’s going to happen onboard the converted cargo ship Ella is going to be really, really bad.

And it is. Mary Roberts Rinehart is occasionally called the American Agatha Christie, but this isn’t a body in the library kind of mystery — it’s a bodies hacked up with an axe in various parts of the boat one.