Late in the Day, The Doll Factory and Girl, Balancing

Middle age, it's a funny time of life. Well, not exactly funny in the hands of author Tessa Hadley, the jokes are pretty rare. In Late in the Day, two couples, "both alike in dignity", are lifelong friends. The men were boys together at school and so were the girls. To tell their story, Tessa Hadley jumps back and forth in time, a device that works really well. The penultimate chapter could have easily been the first.

In less capable hands, this novel about the domestic lives of the four and their families could have been a bore. But Hadley is such a good writer, her prose slips effortlessly off the page. The one section I will never forget is when one of them buys a run down chapel and converts it into an ultra modern art gallery. A little pretentious, but I loved it. In retrospect, the last third of the book had a growing inevitability of something quite dramatic. My fourth book by this writer and it wont be my last. 

What a dissapointment. The first two thirds of The Doll Factory by Elizabeth Macneal were fine. An enjoyable, evocative story, well written and cleverly constructed with very short chapters, alternating passages for Iris, Albie and Silas. Some good humour and wit with occasional menace. Lots of interesting stuff about painting, perhaps some study of art appreciation along the way. (I failed Art "O" Level). The sudio was "brimfull of clutter". Louis says " I've never belived in cataloguing things - of putting books here, and others there, and what not. It shows such a want of taste and imagination ........ such a dismal mechanical mind that tidies". (Well that's me told).

Then the last third changes direction completely to become a made for TV sordid thriller. Lots of repetition. Such unoriginal and gratuitous female abuse leading to an inevitable conclusion. I rushed through the last hundred pages. Such a shame. 

More than 30 short stories published after the death of the brilliant Helen Dunmore are, in the end, an uneven set. Some are very short, just a few pages, whilst others are a lot longer (between 20 and 30 pages). I much preferred the earlier ones. "Taken in Shadows" is a portrait of John Donne that is eloquently imagined. Others are quite unnerving, a prisoner in one and an almost drowning in another. I loved "A Night Out" with Ruth and Aruna. However the stories of the final third of the book go under the title of "THE PAST", and these I found generally tedious. But they do not detract from the superb earlier collections.