Thoughts on Two Re-reads – Coates and Benson

Posted: July 26th, 2024 | No Comments »

A couple of reeeads this week….

I’d forgotten how much I rather like Austin Coates’s The Road from 1959. 1950s novels are always much more overtly sexual than you expect. Coates was a District Officer in Hong Kong with a wry eye and a deft pen. And so his comic novel of 1950s manners includes an attempt to build a road on an outlying island, a rather over-focused official, his scandalous novelist wife, the crooks on the island, a dodgy temporary Governor, a host of venal civil servants, wealthy bit vacuous mid-levels types, dopey academics and an hilarious scene at a British Council event (as all British Council events are rather doomed to be ridiculous) is on the money. Plus ca change – Nothing changes, everything changes. A charming period piece still.

Stella Benson was worshiped in her day (the 1920s) though, i think, it’s a little hard to see why nowadays. But interestingly she lived in many obscure treaty ports (wife of a customs officer) and Hong Kong while being feted in far off literary London and occasionally visiting to escape backwater Pakhoi or Nanning and swan around Bloomsbury. She lacks the light gossipy touch of an Ann Bridge or the insider knowledge of a Nora Waln – both slightly later contemporaries in China – and rather overwrites her scenes. Still, The Poor Man, a tale of a failing man who drinks a bit much and eventually ends up in China has some nice Peking and Chungking scenes – places she knew well.

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