Miss Pym Disposes

My great love of meandering novels that emphasize atmosphere over plot explains my enthusiasm for Tey's Miss Pym Disposes. Set Leys Physical Training College, a prestigious institution that seems to teach a combination of physiotherapy and gameswomanship, it follows celebrity psychology Lucy Pym as she becomes caught up in the life and passions of the college.

Despite her initial desire to spend as little time as possible at Leys, Lucy finds herself won over by the charm and individuality of the final year students and decides to delay her return to London until after graduation. She potters around, covering some lessons, invigilating exams, and enjoying a position that puts her midway between the staff and the students leaving her privy to the confidences of both. When the happy but charged atmosphere of the college breaks when the principal offers a plum position at "a sort of female Eton" to a student that both the junior and senior common rooms feel to be unworthy, Lucy finds herself in a particularly invidious position. She knows but cannot prove that the headmistress's trust is misplaced and when an accident befalls the unworthy pupil, she finds herself in possession of evidence that suggests that foul play may have been involved.

Although ostensibly a crime novel, Miss Pym Disposes is actually more of a study of the sort of febrile, intense atmosphere that prevails when a group of determined young students are put under great physical and mental pressure to perform at their absolute best. The pressure, extreme enough to have pushed former students into nervous breakdowns, is entirely artificial: as the headmistress explains it to Lucy, the students are being pushed in order to give them a last change to shin and feel important before they resign themselves to marriage, or careers as physiotherapists or games mistresses at minor schools.

The (almost) entirely female cast of the novel gives Tey a chance to create some wonderfully memorable characters. Miss Pym is a delightful narrator, wry and self-deprecating with a warm sense of the absurdities of life. Willing to offer her own opinion when she feels it necessary — she sticks her oar in over the appointment of the unworthy student — she's acutely aware of her own fallibility and spends are great deal of time behind the scenes agonising over the best course of action to take.

Henrietta, the principle of the college who had been Head Girl at Lucy's school, is well drawn and her determination to protect and promote Leys is wonderfully convincing. Even her great mistake is completely comprehensible. The way she justifies her decision to Lucy makes perfect sense, given her ignorance of a key fact: the school needs an extrovert games teacher, a position well suited to Rouse's temperament and training abilities, but completely unsuited to Innes' introspective academic brilliance.

The final year students, who could so easily blur together into a single undefined mass, are all well drawn and differentiated. The mishap-prone Dakers, whose easy and rather forward charm does a lot to draw Lucy into the community; the four disciples, who finish each others' sentences and who are determined to set up a physio clinic in Manchester; the rich and successful Beau Nash; the introverted Innes, daughter of a struggling doctor; and Rouse, the slightly sulky and always slightly off working-class girl determined to make a future for herself. Also very fine is Lucy's great friend among the final year students, a Brazilian woman called Desterro. Dubbed the Nut Tart, both for her country of origin and her tendency to spend her time flirting with her older cousin, she has only come to Leys to study dance and shares Miss Pym's semi-detached membership of the college.

Miss Pym Disposes offer a lot to like. A great cast, a strong setting, an extremely charming narrator and, eventually, a whodunnit. It also casts a long shadow. The closed community reminded me of both the nursing college in P.D. James' Shroud for a Nightingale and the theological college of St Anselm's in Death in Holy Orders. The character of Henrietta reminds me, rather inevitably, of Celia Bannerman in Nicola Upson's Two for Sorrow — which, also, now that I think about it, also reminds me of Shroud. Best of all Jo Walton adopts the name of Arlinghurst, the female Eton at the root of all the problems at Leys, as the name of Mori Markova's school in her superb Among Others; the irony being that Mori's injured leg means that she's unable to take advantage of the school's jolly hockey sticks tradition and instead spends the majority of her time in the library reading science fiction novels.

Highly recommended.

Experiments with matplotlib

I've been doing quite a lot of work with python and numpy and matplotlib of late and I've made a couple of useful discoveries:

• numpy structured arrays are an almost perfect replacement for tables in R, provided that you don't try to use the dtype parameter to explicitly request a field type of |O4, e.g. to accomodate datetime objects, because (a) this seems to cause the current version of numpy to complain; and (b) seems to be unnecessary.
• using matplotlib.ticker.FixedLocator to override the standard X-axis ticks provides cleaner labelling than most of the other methods when working with time/date sequences.
• doing a yaxis.get_major_ticks()[0].label1On = False switches off the first label of the Y-axis, avoiding ugly collisions between labels on the two different axes.

I've used these discoveries to put together a script that plots out nmon and topas data for one or more machines, making it easy to compare and contrast the performance of nodes that share the provision of a service, e.g. GPFS, LoadLeveler etc.