Juxtabook

Goodbye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton

I had absolutely no idea that I wanted to read Goodbye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton. I'd watched various adaptations of course (Robert Donat (my Nan's favourite!) and Martin Clunes) and they're a pleasant, if undemanding way to spend the time, but nothing to make you rush out and buy a copy of the novella. For the tiny number of people who have not seen Goodbye, Mr. Chips in any form, it is the slightly sentimental story of a teacher in a minor British public school (public in the sense that you pay a fee to attend and board there) from the mid-Victorian period until he comes out of retirement to save the educational day during WWI. It was written in the 1930s by James Hilton who later won an Oscar for his adaptation of Jan Struther's Mrs Miniver, so he certainly knew a thing or two about selling British Values to the British Masses.

In that pleasant way of bookselling though, I fell in with a copy. There it was. There I was. Not feeling like tackling a new 'proper' read late one evening I picked it up and an hour later I was still reading. And do you know, it was much better than anticipated. Nothing earth shattering of course, and the adaptations are pretty close to the book so you're not ging to be surprised by the plot (I'm assuming this is one of those books where you're bound to see it before you read it), but it really was a lively and interesting read of its time.

Before becoming a bookseller I taught for five years. The schools I taught in were as far removed from Brookfield as it is possible to get and yet I recognised quite a lot: much of the teaching rang true, as did the relationships between the teacher and student (master and pupil!) and the way that a merely adequate teacher can evolve over years, with a careful and thoughtful approach, into the best asset the school has. Even now most schools have a teacher or two like this in the staffroom. I was also taken with a lovely exchange with a new headmaster where Chips defends his subject (Classics of course!) from the idiocy of edicts from above on how to teach it. Great scene, and great social history. Education as political football is clearly nothing new.

Another pleasant aside of living with one's work as a bookseller is the editions one comes across. My unassuming little grey volume (an early reprint) has some rather good Art Deco illustrations by Bip Pares. I was particularly taken by this image of Chips and Mrs Chips from the days when a teacher (or a vicar or a doctor) was employed by the institution which got his wife's talents for free in a sort of marital employment BOGOF.

 

"Tendering her advice in any little problem that arose..."

If you're interested in Bip Pares you can read more here. No doubt Pares also did the dust wrapper but my copy is without. (Yes, Wikipedia suggests she did - see panel)

One could, of course, subject Goodbye, Mr. Chips to some kind rigorous Marxist / post-colonial analysis and mock it to bits, but I think at heart it really is better than that and deserves more. It is not a book to change anyone's life but if it can reflect just a little of my experience as a teacher (in a state school in a seriously deprived Lancashire cotton town over 60 years after the book was written and over 100 years after it was set) then it's got something and I'm glad I read it.

Literary adaptations, Movie Mail and In So Many Words ...

Like many readers, when not actually reading I still need a story-fix and turn to drama. I particularly like to to see literary adaptations. This has become more irritating recently as my biggest source for DVDs was you-know-who and frankly I just don't want to spend more money with them than I have to. I was delighted to stumble across Movie Mail and I've just purchased my latest, rather obscure films from them very happily. They were a little slow, but then the films weren't likely to be high up on their always in-stock list. The range is impressive however, and prices very reasonable. I also like their email newsletters which feature a theme and tempt me to buy more DVDs than I should. This week's was crime fiction on film and as you can see it is a really good selection with lots of films one has either forgotten about or didn't know existed - not just the predictable old favourites, though they're there too. Movie Mail's about us is very reassuring, noting that they are, "a privately-owned independent UK company with no parent or offshore connections."

The last film I bought from Movie Mail was this one. No, really! That really is an adaptation of a classic crime novel by Hammer and starring Oliver Reed - and it was much better than I expected though nothing like the book!

 

 

My most recently discovered favourite non-crime adaptation is this one.

Whilst we're on the subject of films, if you're very fond of either literary adaptations or classic films of any kind and haven't discovered the blog In So Many Words... then you should really take a look. It is sumptuously illustrated and a feast of lost and forgotten treasures. It is my first port of call on a coffee break.

If you've any literary adaptations to recommend, or other classic film blogs you can shout about, or other good sources of DVDs to let us know about, please do!

Note: I have no connection with Movie Mail other than as a customer. The links are NOT affiliate links.

Fear in the Sunlight by Nicola Upson

Fear in the Sunlight is the fourth in Nicola Upson's series featuring crime novelist Josephine Tey. We begin the book in future after Josephine's death and her friend, detective Archie Penrose receives a film and documents relating to a multiple murder than happened a decade ago. The murders occurred during a traumatic weekend spent at Portmerion and we flash back...

Two different but overlapping groups are meeting at the atmospheric village. Josephine is 40 and is meeting friends for a celebratory weekend but all the under-currents from her relationship with Archie and her new romance with the already attached Marta are causing her worry.

More interestingly still is the fact that Alfred Hitchcock and a large entourage are also at the hotel that weekend. Actress and writer Marta has been professionally involved with them before and has passed Josephine's A Shilling for Candles onto Hitch's screenwriter wife Alma. Alma wants to meet Josephine to discuss terms for adapting the book into a film. Meanwhile Hitch's group of fresh young things and embittered older stars are being subjected to his elaborate practical jokes.

It is hot, a thunderstorm is brewing and the air crackles with tension in every sense of the word.

Josephine Tey was a pseudonym used by Scottish writer Elizabeth Mackintosh and I've written before about this conversion of Josephine-Tey-writer into Josephine-Tey-character, and I think it is, despite my reservations over Josephine's character in book three (Two for Sorrow), a very succesful transition, and book four solidifies some of the character twists in Two for Sorrow that I was unsure about. The mixture of real and fictional here is of course very complex. Mackintosh did write A Shilling for Candles under her Tey pseudonym and it was adapted by Hitchcock with a screenplay by Alma Reville as Young and Innocent (or The Girl Was Young in the US), one of his last films before they moved to Hollywood.

I said in an earlier review of A Shilling for Candles that Tey, "is better on criminality and society than she is at constructing a great whodunit," and I think that applies to Fear in the Sunlight too. The structure (1950s letter of confession, flashback to whole weekend in the 1930s, and back to the 1950s revelation of the perpetrator) means we already know who didn't do it and the field of possibilities seems to narrow pretty quickly: in the end we are watching to see how Penrose was fooled. The night the murder happens cleverly sets loose several characters on walks in the rain at vital moments but the end, when it came, was no real surprise.

What is fascinating however is the truly wonderful characterisation. Hitch and his wife are both terrifying, in different ways, Josephine seems much more defined and is getting sharper and more real as we read, Archie Penrose is sympathetic and so like Grant I forget which is which, the actors and production crew in Hitch's group are all beautifully shaped and there is a local connection to some of them which twists and intrigues. The characters then are what hold this book up. Initially I was a little disappointed because I was reading it as a straight crime novel, but when I stopped that and read it as a novel about people who just happen to be involved with a crime I found I was getting so much more out of it. In that sense this is not genre fiction at all.

Also fascinating is the debate that Josephine has with herself about her novel A Shilling for Candles and whether she should let it be filmed and, if so, whether she should insist on writing the screenplay herself and battle against every change that the productions team would be bound to impose, or whether she should take the money and sit back, letting they do what they would. Her frank crisp talk with Alma over the same subject is a masterclass of dialogue. But one of my favourite scenes is right at the end when Archie takes Josephine to see Young and Innocent:

'Where have all my characters gone?', she asked bewildered. 'The killer's not even in it. And who they hell is Old Will or Inspector Kent?'

And that sums up what is great about both Tey and Upson: characters. Meddle with them and you undermine everything. Some crime fiction from the 1930s and 1940s is so tightly plotted it is like a chess game and the characteristion is a flat as as those stock characters of chess too. On previous showing Upson is a very competent plotter, but in this novel at least, Upson has become, like Tey, the opposite of a chess master: they write about people first, and that's the thought to hold in mind when you read Fear in the Sunlight.

Hitch says of his practical jokes in the novel that he wants to see how people behave when they experience fear, not in the dark of the night, but in the sunlight. That, in the end, is what Upson shows us, what fear, and violence, do to you in a presumed place of safety. From local characters who have in the past suffered and seen different kinds of attacks in their own homes, to the present of that weekend in Portmerion when a place of holiday and pleasure, designed for nothing but beautiful times, is contaminated with something dreadful. Hitch's experiment in the novel is clever but cruel and dangerous, Upson's experiment with form moves the tension away from the 'whodunnit' element and onto the characters under pressure and the contrast with the place. Ultimately the key ingredients are fear and loss, not a sense of puzzlement, and in this it is fascinating.