A Touch of Mistletoe

by Barbara Comyns, Megan Nolan (Introduction)

'The morning I left home Mother was recovering from being poorly and she'd been sick in the vegetable basket.'
Sisters Victoria and Blanche grow up in their grandfather's house in Warwickshire. It's a secluded their mother is a war widow with a thirst for port and sherry and their last governess leaves never to be replaced. When their grandfather dies, their mother replaces drink with housework and the girls plan their escape.
Blanche heads off to train as a model at a dubious institution in London. Vicky wants to study art but answers an ad leading her to Holland, where she tends a pack of miserable bull terriers. This is just the beginning of the sisters' adventures, which take them from the poverty of cooking eggs over a candle in their Mornington Crescent bedsit, to a wider bohemian world, as they encounter love and the fluctuating fortunes that come when you're open to the strange twists life can take.
First published in 1967, A Touch of Mistletoe is a unique coming-of-age story that shows Barbara Comyns's

Genres: Fiction, Classics, British Literature, 20th Century, Novels, Book Club, Female Authors

256 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Barbara Comyns was educated mainly by governesses until she went to art schools in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. Her father was a semi-retired managing director of a Midland chemical firm. She was one of six children and they lived in a house on the banks of the Avon in Warwickshire. She started writing fiction at the age of ten and her first novel, Sisters by a River, was published in 1947. She also worked in an advertising agency, a typewriting bureau, dealt in old cars and antique furniture, bred poodles, converted and let flats, and exhibited pictures in The London Group. She first married in 1931, to an artist, and for the second time in 1945. With her second husband she lived in Spain for eighteen years.

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Touch of Mistletoe centres on Vicky, and in the background her sister Blanche, and their experiences from their teens in 1920s Warwickshire through to London in the early fifties. If I had to sum it up, I’d say it was about the small choices that can derail a woman's life, the relationships that can bury any sense of self, and the ways in which lack of money can shut down possibilities. Vicky wants to be an art student, escape her small village and her alcoholic mother, and see the world. For naïve Vicky the world turns out to consist of seedy, Camden boarding-houses, grubby bohemianism, rubbing shoulders with Dylan Thomas, and scratching around for a shilling to feed the gas meter. Then drifting into a series of traumatic relationships, each with its own brand of destructive, emotional upheaval. All recounted in Barbara Comyns’s own inimitable fashion.

Comyns’s a challenging writer to place, she’s been compared to Patrick Hamilton, Muriel Spark, even Angela Carter; author Camilla Grudova dubbed her “the unrecognised British Nabokov." Perhaps all any of these connections really tells potential readers is that she has a unique voice. Comyns has an interest in the marginal, the impoverished middle-classes, as well as the eccentric and the absurd but always represented without unnecessary or excessive embellishment, often with an admirable restraint and deftness of style. A Touch of Mistletoe is one of her more grounded novels, it lacks the surreal flavour of Who was Changed and Who was Dead, or the gothic atmosphere of The Vet's Daughter. In tone and subject-matter, this is closest to Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. All her novels seem to mine her past but of the ones I’ve read these have the most explicitly realist, semi-autobiographical air.

The story’s told by Vicky, in a direct, unsophisticated manner, there are moments of dry humour as well as some breathless, hurried passages. There’s an impressive attention to detail here, to time and place, smells, sounds and sights. All vividly reconstructed. I could picture the rooms Vicky lived in, the streets she walked through, hear the noises of her neighbours walking overhead. Even when Comyns’s character’s dealing with painful events, there’s a stoicism, an unflinching, peculiarly British attitude – similar to the kind detectable in wartime memoirs published by Furrowed Middlebrow or Persephone Press. The effect is like encountering a Jean Rhys novel revised by Nancy Mitford. I found that matter-of-factness and simplicity actually added to the novel’s power, making a far deeper impression on me than I’d anticipated. I don’t think this is by any means Comyn’s strongest piece, but it’s still a really good one.

[JimZ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another exquisite work by one of my favorite authors, Barbara Comyns. 🙂

Just like with some of her other works, while reading her book I was saying out loud or writing notes to myself:
• “Good God,”
• “OMG,”
• “too funny”
• “I don’t believe this,”
• “good good God.”
• “yuck””
• “how does Comyns write this? Where does she come up with this?”
• “I don’t believe this. I seem to be saying that a lot.”

The stuff that came out of her pen or typewriter…is there anyone else quite like Barbara Comyns? Please tell me so I can read him or her! 🙂 🙃

I read most of this in one day and finished off the 336-pager the next morning. I do not think I would have had access to his book if it had not been for Daunt Books who re-issued this (they also re-issued Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead).

I can try and give examples of her writing that blew me away, but not sure I can do her justice. The stuff that amazed me was pretty much on every page…I wonder what it was like living with her.
• (Her sister is crying…) She would stand there for an hour or more with this towel draped over her head, and sometimes when I returned home from work I wouldn’t be able to open the door because she was using it as a wailing wall.
• She appeared to be glowing with health and had lost pounds in weight; but she told us she was being treated for tapeworm.
• Although the lack of food seemed to affect Blanche more than me, I was the first to get a boil. It came right in the middle of my forehead like a unicorn’s horn.
• She (her landlady) was in the middle of stuffing pillows with the combings from her dog’s coat and appeared to be enjoying herself
• (Her sister and her arrive at a boarding house…) We looked at out heavy luggage and wondered if we should follow her example and escape while there was still time and were whispering agitatedly together when a woman who resembled a hippopotamus appeared. She had not the charm of a hippopotamus and there were stiff white whiskers growing on her chin. This hippo-woman was called Miss Bowles and she was in charge of the hostel.
• He worked at night in a bakery and looked like a piece of mildewed bread and people said he was a gambler.
• He was so angry he was cross-eyed.
• (People standing in in line in London during the Blitz in WW II for food rations and such) There were people who loved to queue; they joined any old queue that was going.

I couldn’t say it any better than these reviewers (Graham Greene was an early fan of hers): Quite simply, Comyns writes like no one else. [Maggie O’Farrell]; Everyone should read Barbara Comyns…There is no one to beat her when it comes to the uncanny. [Guardian]; You never quite know where you are with Comyns – which is what makes her novels so intriguing. [Daily Telegraph]; Strange and unsettling. [Margaret Drabble]; A neglected genius. [Observer] 🙂 🙃

Summary of book:
• Sisters Victoria and Blanche grow up in their grandfather’s house in Warwickshire. It’s a secluded existence: their mother is a war widow with a thirst for port and sherry and their last governess leaves never to be replaced. When their grandfather dies, their mother replaces drink with housework and the girls plan their escape. Blanche heads off to train as a model at a dubious institution in London. Vicky wants to study art but answers an ad leading her to Holland, where she tends a pack of miserable bull terriers. This is just the beginning of the sisters’ adventures which take them from the poverty of cooking eggs over a candle in their Mornington Crescent bedsit, to a wider bohemian world, as they encounter love and the fluctuating fortunes that come when you’re open to the strange twists life can take.

Reviews:
• Wonderful review….I am so in agreement with her who clearly loves Comyns as much as I and many others do: http://furrowedmiddlebrow.blogspot.co...
• https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2019/...
• https://granta.com/best-book-1967-tou... (Granta Online Edition, December 29, 2016
• Very long review which covers all of Comyns’ oeuvre…and relates the reviewer reading some entries from Comyns’ journal (Comyns never wrote an autobiography although some of her books are semi-autobiographical…Sisters by a River and Our Spoons Came from Woolworths).

A note on Daunt Books (I think I’m going to be reading a whole bunch more books from Daunt Books…great to find such a publisher!
• In 2010, Daunt Books launched a publishing venture with Saki's Improper Stories, and has since republished many other out-of-print and new books. It publishes literary fiction and non-fiction, including both forgotten titles and new works.
• Daunt Books Publishing is launching Daunt Books Originals, a new list for bold and inventive writing in English and in translation. [https://dauntbookspublishing.co.uk/da...]

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comyns is still not as well-known as she should be, this novel being a case in point. Published in 1967 it is semi-autobiographical and covers one woman’s life from the 1920s t0 the 1960s, through three marriages. As always Comyns’s women are buffeted by circumstance, often by poverty and usually by men. There is a bleakness as there always is with Comyns:
“where had love led me? To poverty and overwork, with only the old age pension to look forward to.”
Childhood is always rather perilous with Comyns and this is no exception for the main protagonist Victoria and her sister Blanche as Victoria provides an account of her mother’s periodic issues with alcohol:
“Our mother rather lost interest in us after the thirst got hold of her and, although our grandfather was vaguely fond of us, he certainly wasn’t interested. Edward was sent to a second or perhaps third-rate school recommended by the vicar and Blanche and I had to make do with ever-changing governesses who seemed to know they were doomed as soon as they arrived and hardly bothered to unpack their boxes. The last one was a Miss Baggot, who was old and finding it difficult to get work; although she was frequently in tears, she stayed for nearly a year. Mother finally hit her with a parasol and she left after that.”
The novel is mainly set in London, apart from a brief and rather grim period in Amsterdam. Most of the time Vicky is poor and struggling to make ends meet. She attends a sort of art school and periodically works drawing and illustrating. We follow her through three marriages, a child, an abortion, several deaths and a few lovers backed up by a whole range of jobs. Despite some of the rather bleak material, there is a lightness of touch to the whole. It is a sort of coming of age novel, but it’s also a coming of middle age as well. This feels very British and Camilla Grudova describes it as “Panto realism”, but describes Comyns as “the unrecognized British Nabokov”. There is a shabby gentility, but the poverty is real enough. There are some good descriptions of life in Second World War London, in fact London life in general at a certain level. There is a matter of fact-ness about the trials and tribulations.
There is a pleasing oddity to this as there is with all Comyns’s novels. She does note however that once you reach forty there is no sense looking for love, settle for companionship instead!

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Daunt Books for my being able to read this Comyns. (Psst, I’m hoping someone will also republish the only Comyns's I haven't read: Out of the Red, Into the Blue and Birds in Tiny Cages.)

My whole experience of Mistletoe became wound up in Comyns's other books. Echoes of Sisters By a River and even The Skin Chairs are present at the start. The first-person narrator, Victoria, has a peripheral brother and younger sister, Blanche. Their alcoholic mother, obsessed with cleanliness when sober, neglects the girls. After the patriarch’s death, Vicky travels on her inherited money to work as domestic help in a horrific situation similar to one in The Vet's Daughter. When the sisters live together in London, in poverty and hunger, the story becomes very reminiscent of Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. These four novels were published before Mistletoe; but with Blanche’s marriage and Vicky's artistic jobs and leanings, I also found the later The Juniper Tree (sans its overt fairy-tale elements). Daily life during the Blitz brought to mind the even later Mr. Fox.

Mistletoe is a straightforward story of limited choices, hard work, and luck of both kinds. It’s told in Comyns’s trademark propulsive style, albeit with more clear-eyed realism and less naiveté than some of her other works. Victoria has only two siblings, but I’m guessing Mistletoe is as autobiographical as, or even more so than, Sisters.

The ending of Mistletoe and the meaning of the title are poignant, though not sentimental; the latter is never Comyns’s style.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing! I first read this 3 years ago, and stopped about the 45% mark. I wrote in my review - " . . . there are so many others books covering similar content in this time period, that are better" - the exuberant Country Girls trilogy, or Antonia White's Clara. I didn't rate my old review.

Anyway - long story short, I recently read in a group Comyns' fanstastic The Vet's Daughter (1959). I gave it 5 stars - no reservation, so I thought I should go back and complete - A Touch of Mistletoe. Unfortunately I was right first time around. Yes, we can say it's an interesting historic depiction of war-time London, an interesting review of a woman's life - covering the years 1924 to 1957 - approximately. One book I have, the Virago edition of The Vet's Daughter indicates Comyns was born in 1907 - and this edition - actually a Kindle version by Daunt Books indicates 1909. Because the story is so clearly autobiographical, I just added 17 years to Comyns birthdate to try and pin down the year, the time frame in which Mistletoe begins. And Victoria's age is quite clear at the end, she mentions, Blanche, her sister's age - she is one year older than when their mother died. (Mother 47, Blanche 48 and Victoria two years older - 50). It is a significant age at which to stop and review your life.

A Touch of Mistletoe was published - 1967, so that would make Comyns 60 when she wrote this. A woman summoning up her difficult life.

I've also read The Juniper Tree, first published in 1985, which I really enjoyed. There's a plot, there are characters, and I loved all the information on the antique shop - which formed part of her real-life. And I've read Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, which in some places is stated as her first novel and in others has a date of 1950, which places it after Sisters by a River - (1947), which I haven't read.

I'm now in the rather trepidatious position of do I or don't I make a beeline for Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead - a quirky story, which she based I think on a village in France where there was a mass poisoning. ! Date of publication for this one is 1954.

The one thing that did interest me profoundly in A Touch of Mistletoe is the death of Eugene (Gene) Vicky's first husband, from a type of treatment that was supposed to help with schizophrenia. I looked up this Insulin-induced coma treatment, and read that approximately 1-4% of patients died. This section of the book is deeply shocking. Comyns' dead-pan style of delivery is very effective here, because there are the facts and there's nothing at all to be done, except face the facts. The young doctor who is so keen on the treatment, a Dr Rees, and Gene's father are the only people to attend the funeral - and Vicky herself, who several chapters later admits she was in a state of shock for several months.

Yes, the book is relevant if you want to know the real-deal in reference to young women trying to find work and support themselves - The Doves of Venus, Olivia Manning's book from 1955 - covers very similar material. Her protagonist, brave Ellie even does the same type of work that Victoria does - painting furniture in a studio.

And Victoria's awful husbands - psychologists would have a field-day with that. The mother is an alcoholic and absent from her children's childhood, the father has died much earlier on - and so there is no money for either Victoria or Blanche. The house goes to their brother Edward, and the girls must rely on the support and charity of near and distant relatives - Violet Scoby for instance, "a fifth cousin or something" is Victoria's description, but she rescues the sisters from destitution several times.

Yes, back to the husbands: poor Gene who dies when he must have been about 22/23, and then handsome Tony the alcoholic; the man from the North, a practical relationship, that lasts for about 3 years and then E. D. Dadds. Comyns is explicit about Vicky's sex life - she recites French nursery rhymes (in her head) while Dadds does the business.

It's a pity the material was not organised in a more digestible fashion. Comyns I think was reviewing her life and marriages; and certainly comparing herself with her sister (Blanche), who appears to have had a happy marriage with (John); but I think the problem is, you can't just do a survey in a novel. She covers 33 years, and certainly documents women's lives realistically, but it is just not working for me. It is, however, really clear from reading The Vet's Daughter followed by Mistletoe that mental-health was something to be deeply ashamed of in these decades. When Gene is sent to a mental asylum, Vicky insists to his co-workers and her friends that he has appendix trouble and then realises this won't cover his absence any more. And the complete lack of friends, and family at his funeral. That particularly sad section reminded me a great deal of Janet Frames' ordeal with mental illness - a disease she didn't have. She spent 9 years in psychiatric hospitals in New Zealand; and only when she came to London in the early 1960s, was given a confirmation by a respected doctor, that she had never had schizophrenia.

I rest my case - two stars. It's not enough to have a dramatic and/or difficult life and then document it; it needs to be shaped so that readers can engage and be changed and benefit from Comyns insights and experiences.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not her best, but nobody writes that particular peculiar English poverty like she does. Eccentric and authentic as always.

[Tania · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this one last year, but just couldn't get into it. I picked it up again this week and had no problem, so it was just the wrong time for whatever reason.

It's one of her more realistic novels, and apparently she used details from her own life in the plot. It centres around Vicky, and to a lesser extent, her sister Blanche, living a bohemian life in London and having a series of pretty disastrous relationships with fragile men. Well worth reading - once I was able to do so.

[JacquiWine · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5 Stars)

I’ve come to love Barbara Comyns over the past few years, a true English eccentric with a very particular style. Her novels have a strange, slightly off-kilter feel, frequently blending surreal imagery and touches of dark, deadpan humour with the harsh realities of life. There’s often a sadness to them too, a sense of poignancy or melancholy running through the text. First published in 1967, A Touch of Mistletoe is very much in this vein. Like some of Comyns’ earlier fiction, it feels semi-autobiographical in nature, rich in episodes and scenes that seem inspired by real-life experiences.

The novel is narrated by Victoria Green, who we follow from adolescence in the 1920s to middle age in the late ‘50s. In some respects, one could describe it as a sort of coming-of-age story as the narrative subtly explores the choices many single women faced in the mid-20th century. More specifically, Comyns gently probes the question of whether it is better to marry for love or financial security and companionship – not an easy decision for a single woman to have to make, especially when money is tight.

Right from the very start, Comyns draws on a couple of her favourite elements; firstly, by introducing two innocent children caught up in the trials of a dysfunctional family, and secondly by conveying their story in a disarming, matter-of-fact voice.

Following the death of their father, Victoria and her younger sister, Blanche, are educated by a string of hopeless governesses while their elder brother, Edward, attends school. The children’s mother is an alcoholic, alternating between sustained bouts of drinking and feverish spells of cleaning, much to the sisters’ confusion.

‘I’m afraid my daughter-in-law is poorly’ or ‘Your mother isn’t quite herself today, poorly, you know’ were words that frequently crossed his [Victoria’s grandfather’s] lips, and when we children heard the word ‘poorly’ applied to anyone who was ill, perhaps an innocent child suffering with measles, we took it for granted that they had been drinking bottles of port or sherry. (pp. 3–4)

By eighteen, Victoria is ready to flee the nest, keen to travel and pursue her interest in art. Following a traumatic spell working as a dog-handler-cum-skivvy for a dreadful woman in Amsterdam, Victoria finds herself in London, staying at a girls’ hostel near Baker Street; joining her there is Blanche, who is also eager for life to begin. The narrative mostly follows Victoria, although there are glimpses into Blanche’s life too. While Victoria inherits enough money from her grandfather to fund her first term at art school, Blanche hopes to pick up work as a mannequin or an artist’s model – cue various close shaves with seedy, unscrupulous men!

In time, the girls move to a bedsit near Mornington Crescent, where they try to survive on as little as possible. It’s a gloomy, bohemian environment, with meals mostly consisting of stale eggs, bread, cheap cheese, and cocoa without milk. Food must be heated over a candle or eaten cold, particularly if there are no spare shillings for the meter. But as ever with Comyns, these scenes of poverty are touchingly evoked.

To read the rest of my review, please visit:

https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2023...

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Similar in theme and plot to Comyns' Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, this later, more polished social realist novel follows a pair of sisters from their relatively safe village childhood with their alcoholic mother into an eventual life on their own in squalid bohemian London. Before they meet up together in London, though, the sister who is narrating the book, Vicky, takes a housekeeper appointment in Holland that goes horrifically awry. For a while, the book reads like a slow-motion trainwreck as both sisters fall prey to nearly every exploitative scam you can think of that has been propagated upon young women of low means throughout history. Eventually things do settle down slightly although the sisters are still living an extremely empoverished lifestyle in London and having poor luck with men.

Even though this novel treads very familiar ground to Our Spoons Came From Woolworths it offers more compelling reading. The cast of characters is on the whole more interesting and expansive, the plot is more nuanced, and there is more of Comyns' trademark humor, which offsets both the bleakness of the poverty she is portraying and the complex situational futility inherent in being a woman during the interwar years that she so excels at explicating in fictional form. The novel also follows its characters into WWII and Comyns pens illuminating descriptions of harrowing experiences living through the Blitz as well as more quotidian details of wartime life in London. Finally, while the closing chapters—much like those in Our Spoons Came From Woolworths—felt somewhat rushed, with a lot of telling not showing, the novel comes to a more graceful close than Spoons does. Overall, it's a better book written by a more experienced novelist. Comyns is a master at deflating the romantic concept of artistic poverty while simultaneously exposing the powerlessness and compounding indignities endured by women early in the 20th century, particularly those living in dire economic conditions. While I still prefer her novels that are less firmly rooted in realism (e.g., Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, The Vet's Daughter), I'm glad I read this one. (3.5)

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's always something odd about Barbara Comyns' novels, and this one is odder still in that it is the only one of hers I've read that is truly plotless. It tells the story of Victoria Green from age 17 to around 50, and that's all - her relationship to her sister, her three marriages, her struggles with poverty and odd jobs, raising her son often as a single mother in London before and after WWII, and her failed attempt to be an artist. And yet there's something deeply moving and engaging about her life, and always the abiding strangeness and grotesquery of her prose.

[Troy Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite book of 2021 (to date). Barbara Comyns is a genius.

[Andy Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t imagine why this was out of print for so long, but great that Daunt have brought it back into the limelight as it so deserves.

It’s her typical style, what seems sad childhoods born with resilience and good humour; folk making the best of things. Her trademarks are there, sprinkles of the absurd, the macabre and dark wit.

Specifically this tells the story of two sisters from childhood to middle age. It’s in the ilk of Mr. Fox and Our Spoons taking place either side of the Second World War. Before reading this I would have said I prefer Comyns at her most dark, as in Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, but this is wonderful story telling of the harsh realities of the most unpleasant aspects of being a woman in the 1930s and 40s.
It’s a better book than those I compared it to above as it has a more complex plot and takes place over a longer period; there’s more substance.

A scene as an example is when the protagonist, Vicky, is about 20 years old and takes a job as a salesgirl in a London jewellery shop. She and the other female employees maintain a level of decorum during opening hours, but as they kick their heels off and change the window displays after hours, a far more obvious camaraderie is revealed..

a considerable amount of sexy talk used to go on, mostly old wives’ tales about young brides who had had their nightgowns torn to shreds on their wedding night, childbirth and abortions, monster babies and the almost mystic horrors of the change of life.

This really is Comyns at her best. Her work is so underrated that there’s a sense of discovery in reading gems like this. In Vicky, she has created her best character; charmingly innocent, and yet with the wherewithal and resilience to face adversity and make the most from any situation. There’s a bit of Comyns in all of her protagonists I think, but here perhaps something more of herself.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There was a group of people who looked like existentialists huddled in a corner, and when I felt I had looked at them long enough I left to buy toothpaste."

Another Comyns comic-dark masterpiece! Comyns running theme is the collapse of families around hapless, neglected children who try to escape. Several of her novels embrace this grim setting, but Mistletoe takes it further, allowing the novel to be taken up by a girl's entire life after escaping with her sister from their alcoholic, widowed mother. Vickie and Blanche head to London and abroad in their quest for consistency, love, and stability. Vickie narrates her fortune in at least love, if not stability, with the running theme of the mysterious mistletoe (a poetic hallucination of her first lover) running throughout the book like a thorn in the heel of your foot.
As always, Comyns is hilarious and almost barbarically unsettling. These are very feral novels, written to disturb and humor, something not easily pulled off. She always pulls it off.

[Aspasiiya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read it with great interest and was truly engaged in the story, and the proze was beautiful, to say the least. On the downside, I was not a particular fan of the astonishing passivity of the main character, everything happened to her. Also got jumpscares a few times from occasional racism and appreciation of oh-so-romantic russian culture.

[Laura]

Dnfing at 48%. There is a breathless, relentless pace to the story - the voice of Victoria our narrator. I just can't summon up enough enthusiasm. The lives of two young girls in 1930s London, there are others much better - I can think of Olivia Manning's 'The Doves of Venus' - set in London, similar time period; that splendid duo in Edna O'Brien's 'The Country Girls' trilogy - ok not London, but a coming of age story, set in rural poverty and then Dublin poverty. Or even better 'The World My Wilderness' by Rose Macauley - Barbary in post 2nd World War London.

I won't award stars because I think the book should be complete - new policy - and I may come back to it.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to follow.

[Jana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this author. I really must make an effort to read more by her. This was the story of two sisters making their way in the world (England in the lead up to WWII). Well it’s mostly about one of the sisters. I adored her and all of her quirks and flaws. I was in no hurry to finish the book and leave her world. Highly recommend.

[Snort · Rating 2 out of 5]

"A Touch of Mistletoe" was probably another Comyns too soon, after the delightful "Our Spoons Came From Woolworths", for I tired quickly of Vicky, our luckless innocent-at-large. Comyns' protagonists seem to channel the same guileless passivity, while all the men are weak, reedy creatures utterly incapable of virtue and distinction.

Mistletoe, traditionally associated with the festivities of christmas, really belongs to a family of parasitic, poisonous plants. I suspect this unpleasant, lesser known quality - perhaps a metaphor for depression, dependance and anxiety, is what the author is really referring to. As life deals yet another bleak shade of blue, Vicky confides that she was "really tainted by mistletoe which stayed on me forever".

Despite that and Vicky's infallibly merry tone, this novel does address dark but meaningful themes around the poverty, mental illness and unwanted pregnancies - it is no coincidence it was published in 1967, the year the Abortion Act was passed in the UK. Quite unfairly - 2 stars, as it could quite easily been 3, had I waited for another few months!

[Dayna · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastic writer! I feel like I should study her and figure out how exactly she makes a story so consuming and readable. But then I don’t want to ruin the magic.

[Debby Binns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fortunately I had read that this wasn’t a Christmas book – as the title suggests. The mistletoe here is poison, and a blight.

This is very much my type of book. Pre-war, then war, then post-war. It was domestic, sad, funny and the prose are very blunt. Being a single parent through these times was really interesting. I loved reading about London in those difficult times and imagine my grandparents (and my parents as children) being part of this difficult world. Barbara Comyns is definitely an author I want to read more of.

[Mrs]

Really enjoyed.

A coming of age novel, Vicky narrates her life in a manner of fact way, reminiscent of Our Spoons Came From Woolworths; there is the same unnerving quality in which she relates the ups and many downs in the same tone, the horrifying poverty in which she and her sister lived, after being used to relative comfort. Blanche is taller and more beautiful and makes different kinds of marriage choices, Vicky is not lucky.
Many social issues are touched on, particularly the choices that women faced - marriage, abortion, divorce, difficulties in the workplace, and mental health treatment.
Despite the vicissitudes of her life, there is never despair.
Fortitude!

[Lisa Brantly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful writing -
Imagine a long dinner (with drinks) asking someone to tell you their story. It's like that.

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

My used copy contained a newspaper clipping from August 4, 1992 with Comyns' obituary, calling her novels "idiosyncratic, episodic, vivid, funny and sinister." It also has an anecdote about Graham Greene expressing frustration at being sent books by lady novelists, but then calling Comyns marvelous, as they both wrote with the "sense of wreckage and of evil in the air." I've never read Greene so I don't know.

What I do know is I love this book which follows Victoria Greene through odd jobs and relationships with fragile men. She is unpretentious, funny and contrarian. She sometimes worries about money and sometimes spends frivolously. She's delightfully random: "There was a group of people who looked like existentialists huddled in a corner, and when I felt I had looked at them long enough I left to buy toothpaste."

The introduction says mistletoe is a metaphor for universal miseries and how we handle them, and I'd also say that mistletoe is a metaphor for irrational instincts and menacing thoughts. More internal than external.

[Alison Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my very favourite books which I have read several times. The story of two sisters, Vicky and Blanche who, in their late teens, embark on a series of adventures in the Netherlands (Vicky) and then in London (both of them). They lead a precarious, Bohemian life, frequently endure extreme poverty, until Blanche is rescued by a distant relative and Vicky falls in love and marries an art student.
The novel is full of unusual, eccentric characters and often funny observations. My favourite line, when the girls are starving hungry but trying to be stoics, is said by Blanche:"Damn fortitude! The only thing I want is roast beef with roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding."
The book spans more than thirty years in their eventful lives. Each time I read it I find something new to admire in it and, as I get older (I first read it when I was in my 20s) the ending seems more and more poignant.
Highly recommended.

[Helen McClory]

her way with a sudden unexpected similie is unparalleled. I hoovered this one up, though I'm not sure it will stand in my memory as long as some of her others. A very slice-of-life sort of a book, albeit one with broken bits of of painted trash and dog hair inside of it...

[Luann Ritsema · Rating 4 out of 5]

Life with few safety nets, Barbara Comyns style.

[Sue Heaser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, concentrated writing. So much packed into this novel. It left me thinking about the characters afterwards and how real so much of it was. A brilliant author.

[Hugo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A life story, this, so no great narrative to follow, beyond Comyn's trials and tribulations, but told with wry and often surprising humour and a sense of dismal veracity.

[Sandybeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was such a painful read at times. Barbara Comyns has such a way with words that she is drawing you in to her world and playing with your anxieties right from the start. You desperately want Vicky’s life to be an easy one, but you know it will just get tougher and tougher. Like Our Spoons Came From Woolworths the main characters have a dysfunctional start in life, living a seemingly middle class and privileged upbringing (servants, rambling gardens, eccentric relatives) but with little in the way of life skills to match the artistic determinations. The ending was abrupt but fitting. Victoria and Blanche ended up back in their home village and able to reflect on their lives with mixed emotions. Comyns’s novels stay with you to haunt you for weeks after you have finished them.

[Felicity · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel occupies common ground with most of Comyns' fiction: the artistic woman trapped in premature and serial marriage, motherhood and impoverished living conditions, but Victoria Green, whose name, according to her first husband, 'sounds like a station' -- now there's a novel chat-up line! -- seems signally unconfined by her circumstances. Any anger she feels has long since been spent in a dire experiment in dog-minding for a Dutch harridan. Compared to this early trial, everything else is tolerable, even enjoyable, however arduous and ill-paid her subsequent employment, and however substandard her living conditions in wartime London. (Anyone who has endured bone-chilling attic bedsits or gloomy bargain basement flats, even without the bombs, will appreciate the graphic descriptions.) Victoria, however, copes with the vicissitudes of life amidst urban decay and marital disharmony, viewing them with surprising equanimity. It's a wry but forgiving novel without a trace of victim feminism, for which I am profoundly grateful. This recent reprint of the novel follows the Virago convention of supplying an introduction by a currently popular author. As far as I'm concerned, Comyns needs no introduction: her prose speaks for itself.