Catherine Peake

Catherine Peake's Books and Writing

Humour in writing

Prime of Life

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Can a book whose main point is personal betrayal be funny? Muriel Spark’s novella The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961 after appearing in The New Yorker, could be such a book. With the main character a spinster who works as a teacher and regards herself as ‘in her prime’, added to a group of schoolgirls who move from age ten to adulthood in the book, the story develops the various themes of education, growing up, work and private life, illustrating the human interactions with all of their accompanying emotions.

In imparting her particular brand of education, aimed at producing adults who will take their place in the world as members of the ‘crème de la crème’, Miss Brodie stimulates her girls to think outside the insular confines of suburban Edinburgh in the 1930s. In refusing to follow the standard curriculum, her teaching contains subjects such as art appreciation, the politics of the time and the development of personal awareness, not to mention elements of Miss Brodie’s own romantic history. Miss Brodie thereby produces a group of girls at odds with the rest of the school, leading to difficulties with the headmistress and other staff members.

One of the highlights of the book is Spark’s understanding of the female adolescent mind and how it interprets the partially understood facts of life as gleaned from overheard conversations. Liaisons between Miss Brodie and the two male staff members stimulate the girls’ imagination, enlivened by Miss Brodie herself who fills in much of the detail as she talks to her girls.

Much of the action of the story is seen through the eyes of one of the girls, Sandy, with some of the story told via ‘flash forwards’, or through the hindsight of the individuals in the group who reminisce as adults. Through Sandy, the character Jean Brodie begins to serve as a focus of pity and contempt, as well as love and affection. A story not always funny in itself, the humour is contained in the way Spark has written it.

Spark keeps her characters at arm’s length, but in the end the reader is left with an understanding of what motivates them. The book does not finish with a completely light touch, but it is perhaps a fitting closure to an illustration of humour in the daily lives of not always attractive characters, who are not in the end undeserving of the reader’s sympathy.

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Author

Muriel Spark

Title

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark; The New Yorker

What the Devil?

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If you don’t want to bother with reading a book about a dozen or so characters (mostly older married couples) occupying themselves in their retirement, then you may as well not read Kingsley Amis’s 1986 Booker Prize winner The Old Devils. On the other hand, if that is not such a chore, you might find the book enjoyable and even funny, give or take one or two scenes.

It is debatable whether or not Amis is making the point that people don’t change over time, and that a person’s behaviour in their twenties is bound to be repeated up to and including the time of their retirement. The Old Devils illustrates the possibility of it anyway. The return to a Welsh town of the central character Alun Weaver and his wife Rhiannon, also sees a return to behaviour that mirrors the indiscriminate and casual liaisons of his youth, all with the same people who unlike him have not moved away from the area.

Alun has forged a career on the coattails of a Welsh local writer, Brydan, a fictional portrayal of the real-life writer Dylan Thomas. Alun writes a bit of poetry and emphasises his Welshness, but his main thrust has been regular appearances on television in England and a consequent expectation of media attention wherever he goes, including Wales. With Alun (born Alan), the novel encompasses the idea that once a fake always a fake. And, as with his wife, once a nice person always a nice person, even if arguably Rhiannon’s youth was spent in a way similar to Alun’s own.

Amis has his other characters, mostly couples of a similar vintage, weave in and out of the story around Alun, and they begin to reminisce during their regular drinking sessions (the men in the pub, the women in someone’s house), not in a particularly revelatory way, but as a reflection of the kinds of people they have always been. Whether or not this is of interest to the reader may depend upon their own vintage, but Amis illustrates a human perspective of events and character traits that can be seen as humorous in the long run.

The novel is incidentally also about love, from youth to older age, which dignifies some aspects of the characters’ reminiscences. Kingsley Amis’s son novelist Martin Amis regarded the novel highly, saying, ‘it stands comparison with any English novel of the century.’

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Authors

Kingsley Amis; Martin Amis; Dylan Thomas

Title

The Old Devils

Sticking to the Formula

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Anyone can write them. All you have to do is follow the rules.

Limericks have a simple verse formula and instantly recognizable style: five lines, a strict rhyme scheme of AABBA (that cannot be tampered with), and a readily understood topic with humour an expected accompaniment. There is also an immediately recognisable metre to the scanning of a limerick, with some parody limericks making a humorous point of changing the metre of the last line or altering the rhyme scheme.

The composing of limericks has become so common, that if you get stuck with your poetic endeavours there are online limerick generators to assist, where all you have to do is feed in a few words and the computer will do the rest. But most budding versifiers prefer to write their own.

The limerick was made popular in the nineteenth century with the nonsense poems of Edward Lear, some of which he published in his A Book of Nonsense (1846). He didn’t use the term to describe them though, and took liberties with the five-line format by reducing it to four, but with his third line combining the third and fourth of a traditional limerick he retained the metre and rhyme scheme. The following famous verse is a particularly well-known Lear limerick.

There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, “It is just as I feared! –
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard.”

The origins of the limerick go back to the eighteenth century and earlier, where they are found in a form of folklore verse, and while it is assumed that the limerick is named after the Irish city of the same name it is not clear why.

There are several topics that form distinct groups of the limerick, such as the romantic limerick, the nonsense limerick, and those written for children, which have the added bonus of forming a good introduction to poetry. One of the most popular groups is of course the rude limerick, and the famous first line, ‘There was a young man from Nantucket,’ stands at the head of a multitude of different verses written by (mostly anonymous) authors.

The following anonymous limerick puts the rude limerick into perspective.

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

Why do some forms of verse remain popular? Surely humour has something to do with it.

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Authors

Edward Lear; Anonymous

Titles

A Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear

The Stuff of Nightmares

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Possibly not to everybody’s taste, due perhaps to the frequent incursions of eighteenth-century learning into its narrative flow (not to mention various unbridled prejudices), Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock is undeniably funny. Written and published in 1818 (the same year as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), Nightmare Abbey is a novella-length satire aimed at the gothic and romantic clichés of the current-day novels.

With a country house setting in the form of the ancient Nightmare Abbey, and a cast (parts of the novel are set out as a play script) representing various stock characters from popular fiction, Peacock sets his story around a love triangle with the son of the house, Scythrop Glowry, at the centre.

A manufactured gloom is the prevailing atmosphere of the Abbey, with Scythrop’s father regularly entertaining guests whose eagerness to engage in morbid and inconclusive philosophical discussions perfectly matches their host’s negative view of the world. Happily for the occupants of the household there is a distraction available in the form of madeira, a popular tipple of the day.

Providing a counterpoint to the endless metaphysical debate, although still managing to retain his place in the misanthropic atmosphere, Scythrop sets about recovering from an earlier failed love affair. He develops a plan for saving the world, writes a treatise, then rapidly falls in love with two women at the same time, each of whom believes she is his intended bride. Various dramas ensue which end up involving most of the household and result in Scythrop falling into a deep depression. Luckily he has his father on hand to add to the development of the plot line.

Taking some of the models for his characters from poets he knew, with Scythrop a parody of his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley and two minor characters based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron, Peacock moves his story along with an added interest for his readers. He somehow also managed not to offend his friends in real life.

Peacock was one of the first wave of writers, such as Jane Austen who counted the Prince Regent as an admirer, that was beginning to change the status and relevance of artists in broader society. A new market for novels was developing in the increasingly affluent middle class, and books that provided acceptable entertainment for their leisure hours had the opportunity of becoming popular and their authors well-known. For some of the authors, including Thomas Love Peacock, their books have survived the time of writing and are still read today.

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Authors

Thomas Love Peacock, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Jane Austen

Titles

Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Daily Doings

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A light and funny read, The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield was written in 1930 and has never been out of print. Structured in the form of episodes taken from the mostly domestic life of an upper-class English countrywoman, the Diary sketches the characters and events of her immediate family as well as servants, friends and neighbours.

As she goes about her daily activities, the provincial lady of the title confronts and deals with various situations that are mostly trivial but which keep the momentum of the story going. Reflecting the kind of life that many people of the time (and later) would have been familiar with, the constant round of activities, obligations and minor domestic challenges contribute to the identification with the writer of the diary that many readers have found. The use of repetitive devices such as philosophical notes-to-self in the form of bracketed comments reinforce the wry self-deprecation that provides much of the interest and humour in the story.

This presents the interesting conundrum of how far The Diary of a Provincial Lady can be read as a record of the author’s own life and thoughts, bringing to the fore the idea of how much autobiography can be integrated into an ostensibly fictional novel, particularly one in the form of a diary. In Delafield’s case, the answer appears to be quite a bit.

Writing under a pseudonym (Delafield is a play on her maiden name of de la Pasture), Delafield has mined her own life for subject matter, incorporating her husband and two children (although with different names), and using local events and situations such as those connected to the local Women’s Institute of which Delafield was a president in real life. Other characters reflect the habits and idiosyncrasies of her near neighbours, with the talkative vicar’s wife and the intrusive Lady Boxe having regular walk-on roles.

In a broader context, the novel is in the tradition of other humorous stories written in the form of a fictional diary, such as the Grossmiths’ The Diary of a Nobody and Bridget Jones’s Diary by Fielding, although both of these books are markedly different in content and characterisation.

The Diary of a Provincial Lady was originally published in the form of regular columns in the publication Time and Tide, which also incidentally appears in the novel. Delafield wrote three further books that featured the provincial lady, depicting periods of her life set in different places and situations, all adding grist in support of her fictional posterity.

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Authors

E.M. Delafield; George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith; Helen Fielding;

Titles

The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield; The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith; Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding

Means to an End

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Who says finding humour in potentially offensive subjects is outdated? Written before the time of thinking about what you say before you say it (and thereby not saying it), Blott on the Landscape is a triumph of British humour. Comfortably at home with vulgarity, class distinction, implacable revenge and dirty deeds, author Tom Sharpe also manages to encompass wrongful imprisonment, private-life deviations and a disintegrating marriage, not to mention casual if arguably accidental murder.

Sharpe sets his story in a stately home with its main characters in turmoil over a proposed new motorway that may or may not be directed to run through the property. Written in 1975 the book is still funny 45 years later, with the subject of compulsory government acquisition of property in the name of whatever passes for progress (in this case the new motorway) remaining as topical as ever.

Taking repeated pot-shots at local government and petty bureaucracy, while managing not to get bogged down in the intricacies of overly officious decision-making, Sharpe creates a set of characters whose intent to do each other down almost rises above the initial problem. Deciding what to do about the possible loss of their home leads the characters into some hilarious situations.

The aptly-named main characters, the unhappily married Lady Maud and her politician husband Sir Giles Handyman, strive to destroy each other in the confines of the ancestral home Handyman Hall and its adjacent Cleene Gorge, both now under threat. Resident gardener Blott (played by actor David Suchet in the televised version of the book), a leftover POW from the not too distant World War II, has his own plans that develop as he realises he is in love with Lady Maud.

After various shenanigans involving the local planning authority, including motorway construction head Dundridge who is intent on creating as much destruction as he possibly can, added to the unfortunate if foreseeable fate of Sir Giles, the scene is set for a happy ending.

While keeping the action on the level of farce, Sharpe nonetheless makes some pointed observations about greed, self-interest and ambition. Using a multitude of plots and counter-plots, Sharpe brings to life the opportunities inherent in a rural setting, local bureaucracy and deceitful use of public relations, and has created a funny and entertaining novel whose relevance extends well beyond its origins in the maybe not-so-distant 1970s.

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Author

Tom Sharpe

Title

Blott on the Landscape by Tom Sharpe

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