Rollicking good retro reads: OPERATION HEARTBREAK by Duff Cooper, POOR COW by Nell
OPERATION HEARTBREAK by Duff Cooper (Penguin Classics £9.99, 146pp)
Operation Mincemeat, the story of a military corpse with secret (false) Allied invasion plans washed up off southern Spain to fool Hitler, has inspired books, films and musicals, but Cooper’s role as a wartime Cabinet minister brings authentic detail.
The book imagines a previous life of fictional William Maryngton, orphaned son of a soldier, who is desperate to serve his country but is too young for the First World War and too old for active service in the Second World War.
His disappointment is not just professional; he misjudges romantic love and friendship but finally, with a cruel turn of fate, William posthumously achieves his longed-for heroism.
Moving and bittersweet, it’s a tribute to Glyndwr Michael, the real body donor.
POOR COW by Nell Dunn (Virago £10.99, 138pp)
Considered shocking when first published in 1967, this portrayal of sexually promiscuous, working-class Londoner Joy (based on a friend of Dunn’s) is still exhilarating.
Left alone with baby Jonny when abusive, thieving husband Tom goes to prison, she meets his kind, loving friend Dave and, briefly, finds hope and happiness.
Then Dave is also sent to jail, so Joy survives by working in a pub, nude modelling and satisfying her sexual appetite for a few quid here and there.
Amoral and contradictory she may be, yet it is her sensual love for her son, luxuriating in his warm body and smiles, that gifts Joy a purpose and dreams as she faces her dismal future.
OWLS DO CRY by Janet Frame (Virago £10.99, 256pp)
Frame draws heavily on her own troubled life in this debut modernist novel set in Waimaru, a fictional 1950s New Zealand town.
The impoverished Withers family has four children: Francie, epileptic Toby, Daphne, and baby Chicks, but when a (truly shocking) tragedy happens, everyone’s life shatters.
We follow Daphne’s years in psychiatric units (like Frame) unvisited by family and lost in dream-like visions, Toby’s battle against ignorance and rejection and Chicks’ snobbish reinvention of herself as Teresa, as each descends into darkness.
A howl against conventional life and the treatment of the mentally ill, its use of language is as memorable as the story itself.