At night - my little Lamp - and Book

The Sense of an Ending

2012-02-18T03:16:00.003-08:00

This was literally pushed into my hand by a colleague I barely know, who said, "I think you'll love this," and left it with me. Initially, I sighed, as I have an ever-growing pile of books to read already, and really didn't need another. However, I took the wee thing home and placed it on top of the pile by my bed.

It so happened that I was, shortly after, heading for two days in London to see War Horse and knew that I would finish my current read on the train. I therefore wanted something light to pack, so in went The Sense of an Ending. (Yes, this might be where a Kindle comes in useful, but I will always and forever argue the other side - in this instance, not having a Kindle meant I read a book I might not have done otherwise and would therefore have missed out on.)

It is short. It is also probably worthy of the Booker, though I am no judge of judgements; it's good. It's a good book. Let me clarify 'good' - it's enjoyable, clever, re-readable, quotable. You sense a 'however', however... and the 'however' is that I simply don't have very strong feelings about it. If you were to ask me about it in six months time, I doubt I would be able to tell you very much at all, except the 'sense' that it has left me with. Ah. Perhaps therein lies its genius...

It is a book of slow reveals. When I started it, I'll be honest and say I had little to no idea what it was actually about. Essentially, then, it is about a man, retired, remembering a particular time in his life, and then being left a surprising bequest that begins to change his understanding of past events. We learn as Tony, our protangonist - or rather, not protagonist, for, as he would argue, he has never actually made anything happen, but simply allowed life to happen to him - learns, so there is no dramatic irony, no sense of superiority for the reader.

Tony, however - another however - does not do himself justice. He compares his own way of approaching life disfavourably to that of the philosophical thinkings of his friend Adrian, and yet this is a deeply philosophical work. It is as much a treatise on time and memory as it is a story, and equally a lesson for us all in the need for kindness, even when kindness might be the last emotion we feel.

There is much in the first half of the novella that reminds me of The History Boys; some sections even feel like lost scenes from that play, such are the questions posed and answers given in school lessons. It also reminded me - or at least, the characters reminded me - of some of the works of Iris Murdoch, particularly The Black Prince and The Sea The Sea, though without the vastness of the mistakes made by the protagonists ( and her characters really are that, in the truest sense of the word) in those books. More simply put? One Day for the educated older members of the reading public, perhaps.

The Sense of an Ending is a worthy book, an enjoyable book, an easy yet thoughtful book; it is a good book, and leaves one with...well, the sense that one has read and understood it.

Marx my words...

2012-02-16T10:12:00.000-08:00

Groucho understood books and readers:

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

"From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday, I intend reading it."

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”

2011 in books

2012-02-16T03:34:00.005-08:00

Rule 1: Never apologise for blogging absences. Check.
Rule 2: Come back with something fast and jaunty.

So here it is. Lulu's fast and jaunty trip through books read over the past year, in order, with six-words-or-fewer reviews:

Cloud Atlas. Beguiling. What they say is true.
Florence and Giles. Fabulous narrative voice. KS4 love it!
Room. A present. Not my thing.
Prisoner of the Inquisition*. Disappointing.
Out of Shadows*. Powerful; political; really for kids?
The Bride's Farewell*. Thomas Hardy for teenagers. Gorgeous.
White Crow*. Typical Sedgwick - doesn't quite work.
The Tiger's Wife. Recommending it to everyone.
The Edge of Physics. Understood most of it, happily.
The Chymical Wedding. A bit Iris Murdoch.
Just a Man. I had my reasons...
Miss Ranskill Comes Home. It's Persephone, though not my favourite.
The Stranger's Child. Thought I'd love it. Didn't.
Dusty Answer. Evocative, claustrophobic, 1930s bildungsroman.
Le Grand Meaulnes. See above. But French.
The Parasites. Continuing my du Maurier reading list.
Picnic at Hanging Rock. Film better.
Bleak House. Lived inside it. For long time.
Infinite Variety: Marchesa Casasti. Where's she been all my life?
Ice Road. Couldn't quite get into it.
Alberta and Jacob. Wonderful.
The Journals of Robert Falcon Scott. Yes, I cried when Oates left...
Pure. Enjoyable and easy.
Gillespie and I. Cop-out court verdict.

*read for Carnegie Shadowing Group at school

LLB chooses Eloise

2011-02-28T14:03:00.000-08:00

Naturally, the bibliophile in me is gobbling up the BBC's current platter of book-based programming, and I was particularly delighted this evening to see Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen present Eloise as one of his 5 choices on My Life in Books. In case you missed it, I raved about Eloise in Moscow almost exactly a year ago.

Neglected classics

2011-02-27T03:13:00.000-08:00

Today's Guardian website suggests ten great neglected classics, and I agree with all of them; it may form the basis of a new spring reading list. It's wonderful to see at least one Capuchin and one Persephone in there, too.

The Bell

2010-11-28T02:43:00.000-08:00

Having come to Iris Murdoch two years ago, I have become convinced that she truly is, as so many critics argue, one of the greatest British writers of all time. I can still feel Christmas morning 2008, when I woke in my mother's house, padded downstairs to fetch a coffee and a warm mince pie, then returned to my bed and curled up under my duvet to resume The Sea, The Sea where I had unwillingly left it the night before, about halfway through. It was Christmas morning, for heavens sake - I heard the rest of the family stir and one by one go downstairs. Bits of broken conversation, laughter and smells of cooking mingled and drifted up to my room, but I ignored them and stayed with Murdoch. I simply couldn't put the book down, and only finally, reluctantly, even sulkily, did so when my mother came and knocked on my door to tell me that everyone was waiting for me so that we could open the presents. The Sea, The Sea remains one of my favourite books.

And so I have come at last to The Bell, one of the most popular of Murdoch's psychological studies of human behaviour. Here we find a group of social misfits - though largely, it must be said, no more 'misfitting' than any of us - holed up in a religious community awaiting the arrival of a new bell at the Abbey nearby. The opening sets the score, and is one of Murdoch's most brilliant:

"Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason."

Thus, are characters drawn with such a deft pen. And it is the characters who matter in Murdoch's novels. Ordinary situations are made extraordinary by the doings of ordinary people - momentary lapses of sanity, bad decision making and misreading of others motives create, for the characters in Murdoch's world, outlandish situations. In The Bell, I think I audibly groaned when Dora hatches her plan for the medieval bell that Toby has found at the bottom of the lake. I just wanted to shake her - don't be so stupid, surely you can see that this is going to go horribly wrong...? But of course, she goes ahead with it anyway, and of course, it all goes horribly wrong.

I love the way Dora's personality is cleverly revealed through her lack of belief in her own decisions. Frequently, she decides she will refuse to do something, and the next paragraph begins with her doing just that thing. Likewise, we are told early on that Toby has recently discovered and enjoyed the word 'rebarbative', and the word turns up regularly when Toby is the central character. Such simple techniques, so cleverly handled, are what raises Murdoch above her peers.

What really makes Murdoch stand out, though, is, of course, her brilliant understanding and encapsulation of the deep psychological motives, often unknown to ourselves, that govern our movements. A character - here, Michael, for example - may examine himself thoroughly, and believe that he has read a situation accurately, only to discover later that in fact he never had any idea what others were thinking or feeling and he has misjudged the whole scenario fatally.

Despite the academic depths of Murdoch's books, I am always surprised by how overtly readable they are. The Bell is funny, cringeworthy, pacey in its latter half (my only criticism would be that it takes a little while to really get going), intriguing, warm, and, at the end of the day, simply tells a good story.

For me, The Sea, The Sea is still Murdoch's best, but I have many more to go, having read only four so far, and The Bell, being comparatively short, is a pretty good place to start if you are unsure as to whether or not Murdoch is for you.

Ministry of Stories

2010-11-18T04:33:00.000-08:00

In 2002. the writer that is demi-god Dave Eggers (who would despise me for calling him that, but he is, so nur) started a children's creative writing space in San Francisco. It was named after its location, 826 Valencia. Over the past 8 years, its success has led to 'franchise' projects in cities all over the states, each with its own themed shop - The San Fran branch has a Pirate shop, the Brooklyn branch a Superhero store, the Seattle set-up a Space Travel Suppy Company etc. Famous and not-so-famous authors hold writing workshops at the Centres, teachers offer one-to-one tuition, field trips and school trips are organised...

Last year, Roddy Doyle, inspired by Eggers' success, set up his own Fighting Words project in Ireland, and I am utterly delighted to read in The Guardian today that Nick Hornby is now fronting the first English equivalent, to be called, in a nod, one presumes, to Harry Potter rather than post-war Britain's penchant for creating Ministries for Everything, the Ministry of Stories. (The name concerns me slightly, as I can't help feeling that older children will be put off by something so obviously childish - where an 18 year old might feel fine saying they were off to 826 Valencia, will they really be so happy to say they're visiting the Ministry of Stories? A minor point perhaps, but not irrelevant.)

Anyway, as an English teacher, I could not be more excited about this. I have prayed for years that the 826 projects would extend as far as Britain, and now, my wish has come true. It only remains for a branch to open in the North of England, and my non-working hours will be filled.

Golden Age of Illustration

2010-11-16T05:01:00.000-08:00

The Edwardians have been described as a generation of young men and women who refused to grow up. Their's was the era of Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, stories which have come to define the dreamlike lives of many upper class boys and girls in the years preceeding the First World War. The Fabian idyll of the Belle Epoch could not have been ended more cruelly, but while it lasted, this was a time to embrace childhood and the imagination.

Between 1880 and 1930, some of the greatest artists in the world turned their considerable talents to illustrating children's books. Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and The Water Babies were inevitably popular choices, but many artists also looked to Fairy Tales for inspiration. I have collected here a small selection of my personal favourites by artists whose work you will be more than a little familiar with - and perhaps a few to whom this is your first introduction. Explore them further, I urge you. I grew up with many of these pictures, and they still have the power to make my heart beat faster in wonder.

Arthur Rackham (1867 - 1939) is probably the best known children's story illustrator of the time - maybe of all time. His Art Nouveau style never patronised, and his use of muted colours instilled a twilight realism into every image. Below is a scene from Cinderella (or Aschenputtel) and below that, from The Goose Girl:

These next two are from Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, and exhibit a dangerous beauty all of their own:

Over the Atlantic, Jessie Willcox Smith (1863 - 1935) was creating similarly dark illustrations, in which many of her heroines seem to cower and shy away from the fairy folk that approach them, as seen here in Cinderella and Snow White:

Kate Greenaway (1846 - 1901) had, of course, been drawing for children for a long time by the 1880s, and her pictures provide a sharp contrast to the threat that seems to lurk inside the pictures of Rackham and Smith. Greenaway was all about spring and meadows and flowers and washed out pastels. Here she shows tea parties and picnics in benign settings:

Likewise, Mabel Lucie Attwell (1879 - 1964) developed a twee style that is instantly recognisable as her own, but she was not averse to tackling some of Anderson's darker stories, such as The Ugly Duckling:

Even Edward Burne Jones (1833 - 1898), arguably the most talented of the Pre-Raphaelites, sourced ideas from Fairy Tales, using his trademark rich colours to imbue weight and depth to the stories he illustrated. This is taken from a series of pictures of Sleeping Beauty:

Edmund Dulac (1882 - 1953) is, for me, the most alluring of children's illustrators. His pictures from the Snow Queen have adorned my walls all my life, and he is part of the reason this is my favourite Fairy Tale. There is a loneliness, a haunting aspect, to his characters that really touches a nerve in me. Can you make out the Snow Queen herself in this first image?

And this, from the Little Mermaid, demonstrates again Dulac's simultaneous coldness and warmth:

Kay Nielsen's (1886 - 1957) work is more stylised, as shown in this illustration for The Tin Soldier:

...as is that of Wilhelmina Drupsteen (1880 - 1966). These two come from Snow White:

All of these artists influenced the way children's books were illustrated for decades to come, and in no work is this more evident than that of twin sisters Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone (1928 - 1979 and 1998 respectively). I have shelves of books from my own childhood that have been lovingly brought to life by these two exceptional artists. Their prescision is phenomenal, and their use of light... well, you only have to look at these few examples to understand. This first is from The Princess and The Pea. Look at her dripping skirt!

The above illustration for The Little Match Girl is, to me, so flawless that even without knowledge of the story, it can break hearts. The truly beautiful can do that, I think.

And this, from The Frog Prince, pulls together flavours of the medieval and the Roaring Twenties in one single image that seems to even smell of wet trees and damp rock.

All of this is not to say that there are not stupendous children's illustrators at work today, for there truly are. But I think the era from which all the above pictures come is known as The Golden Age of Illustration for a reason...

Dark Matter

2010-11-15T07:57:00.000-08:00

I have just moved into a Grade II listed cottage, built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, held up with beams from ships that sailed with the Mary Rose. No wall is straight, no doorway high enough for a man to pass through without stooping, no window large enough to let in more than a teaspoon of light. Pear tree branches scrape at the glass at night, wind howls down the chimney and through gaps in the ancient doors and windows, and the floorboards creak and groan continuously.

And so, alone in my cottage, I decided to read a ghost story.

Dark Matter is the tale of a doomed arctic expedition which results in one man, alone with his diary and a pack of huskies, living in perpetual night at the northern end of Svalbard (Spitsbergen at the time). He sees things in the snow and on the rocks, but more significantly, he feels things - horror, fear, malevolence, the things that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up without tangible explanation.

Michelle Paver writes well, though with a fondness for simple sentences that I found slightly childish (she is best known for her children's series beginning with Wolf Boy, after all). It is a book about place, which those of you who read ...Lamp - and Book regularly will know is my particular love, and it is indeed even about the very place I most dream of visiting one day.

Dark Matter is atmospheric, characters are well-drawn and likable enough where they need to be, though I might also suggest a little bland, and it is suggestively creepy enough to count as a ghost story. But did it do what ghost stories should do above all else, and scare me? Did I dread turning the light out at night? Did I see things in the corner of my eye, and fear what might be standing outside my bedroom door when I opened it? No.

I could make some suggestions as to why not - primarily, for me, it is too definite in its adamancy that what Jack experiences is a 'real' ghost, and way too simplistic in its reveal of the reason for the haunting. Far more interesting, surely, is the potential ambiguity that comes of the psychological trauma of being alone in 24 hour darkness in a landscape so brutal? The idea that even Jack could not be sure that what he saw was real, rather than a trick of his mind, would have made this more powerful. In all ghost stories, it is the not-knowing that is the most frightening aspect.

Although it is not being marketed as a children's book, I would recommend this to teenagers rather than adult connoisseurs of the genre. It is short, and enjoyable from the point of view of someone for whom experiencing first-hand this landscape and the Aurora Borealis is the number one dream, but is most certainly not terrifying. Not even to a young woman reading it alone in a 400 year old cottage in the Peak District...

The Fry Chronicles

2010-11-15T07:04:00.000-08:00

And lo, the wind of Christmas blew in its annual drift of celebrity autobiographies. Obviously, Danny Dyer's was top of my list of must-reads, but it was Monsieur Fry's that ended up in my bag. And actually, I rather wish it hadn't been.

I love Stephen Fry as much as the next man, woman, child or endangered species does, but I found The Fry Chronicles cloying. It's not really, as it purports, about his time at Cambridge - this takes up a fairly miniscule amount of the book. The majority is concerned instead with, as Fry himself is at pains to stress in every other line, his enormous good fortune in finding highly paid work that he loved doing.

There is noticeably little about Hugh Laurie, for which there are many possible explanations: Fry didn't feel comfortable writing about him; Laurie didn't want anything but a few vague mentions; Laurie's American agents or lawyers didn't want anything but a few vague mentions; that's all to come in the next installment... I don't know, and, I realised as I read, that increasingly, I don't really care.

The problem I had with The Fry Chronicles is rather post-modern and is concerned with the set-up, which follows this pattern: Stephen tells us a story about how such-and-such a wonderful person (namedrop, namedrop) offered him a writing / acting / advertising job which paid an embarrasingly large sum of money with which he bought another house / car / computer, then proceeds to spend 4 pages whining about how none of this made him happy, and how he feels guilty that he still suffered from depression, and how he knows I, as his loyal reader, will HATE him whining about this, but how he still feels he must do it because that is his nature and after all, I'm reading the book because I am interested in his nature, aren't I?

Well, yes, Stephen, I suppose I am, but I am also interested in what that nature has to say about things outside of his own personal story. The parts where, for example, he uses Ben Elton's success as a springboard to give insightful commentary on the place of the arts in Thatcher's Britain, and suchlike, is far and away superior to whinging, self-indulgent moaning. His views on Rik Mayall, Alexei Sayle, class and alternative comedy are riveting and informative, particularly for one, like me, who was just old enough (in my early teens) to appreciate the rise of that scene. Now, that's not to say I wasn't expecting whinging, self-indulgent moaning, because of course I was, and I was expecting Stephen to apologise for it too, which he does at great length, but so much of it could have been edited out without taking away any of the sense. Stephen suffers from depression and feels guilty about it. We know this. He's told us before and he tells us again here. But once, twice is enough to get the measure of a man. Continuously telling us, and the measure begins to diminish.

I still love him, of course I do, and I still froth at the mouth for new QIs, but this book, unlike Moab is my Washpot, did not increase the fondness at all.

The Hopkins Manuscript

2010-11-15T06:21:00.000-08:00

This isn't my usual kind of book, and I have no idea why I chose it; I was just strangely drawn, I suppose. After all, I bought it from the Persephone shop, so it's not like I just fancied a Persephone and this is all my local Waterstones had... Anyway, buy it I did, and what a happy accident it was.

The Hopkins Manuscript is a 1930s Sci-Fi novel, and tells of an impact between our Earth and its moon. It is, however, so refreshingly different in style to the fast-paced, action-packed, thriller-esque Science Fiction we are offered by today's cinematic experience as to belong to a different genre almost entirely; our hero, for it is written in first person, is an unlikeable middle aged rural chicken breeder, pompous, self-important, and rude. One of the small percentage of people to survive the collision, he sets about the day to day tasks of rebuilding 'normal life', but he and others are scuppered in their desire to simply continue a simple and peaceful existence by the larger machinations of warmongering government.

This book has haunted me since I read it. I cannot look at the moon anymore without thinking of The Hopkins Manuscript. The larger portion of the story is taken up with the build-up to the collision, with the moon's increasingly bulbous monthly appearance in the sky as it nears Earth described in such vivid terms that one does become surrounded by the creepy vacuous winds that accompany its approach, and one starts to see the otherworldly light in which Earth becomes bathed as its monstrous satellite begins to fill the night sky. There is a feeling of helplessness, of the natural horror of the impending destructive power of something so utterly beyond human power to halt.

Despite his selfishness and judgemental attitude, Hopkins becomes a trustworthy ally to us as readers, and dare I say it, we do, I think, warm to him. He is the right guide for a book which shows us the very smallness of our quotidian lives within the bigger picture; The Hopkins Manuscript is a 9/11 novel, in the sense that it makes you consider the life you will have lived in the event of a world-altering catastrophe. It is also, of course, a book still haunted by WW1 and living in the shadow of an approaching WW2 (it was written in 1939), and allegories are not hard to find. It is interesting that the final threat comes from the Islamic world, which adds a prescient nature to the novel, although better informed historians than I may well point instead to inevitability.

This is an alarming and powerful novel, both gentley prosaic and wildly terrifying, and I recommend it unreservedly even if you would never normally go near Science Fiction. It fits perfectly into the Persephone canon, and as both wonderful storytelling and historically significant document, is hard to beat.

Life On Air

2010-09-30T10:21:00.001-07:00

I doubt there are many people who don't think Attenborough is God. Certainly, I think he's as close as we'll ever get to a higher being. On the environment and conservation, he makes more sense than virtually anyone else. For entertainment value, his programmes simply cannot be beaten. In light of this, Life On Air could be considered disappointing, simply because it is not the greatest book I have ever read - indeed, it's not even the greatest autobiography I've ever read. It is a little dry, a little "this happened, then this happened..." and there is a distinct sense of restraint that permeates the pages. However, it does do what it says on the tin, and it is most definitely not without many merits.

The focus is, as the title suggests, on the television side of Attenborough's life. There are brief insights into his personal life and the animals he has kept at home (a whole tribe of bush babies at one stage), but it is very much about what happened in the office, as it were. This, however, gives us a very interesting insight into the early days of television, and into BBC production values. On his new position as Controller of BBC2 in 1965, Attenborough says:

"...we were not in the business of producing carbon copies of programmes that were already being shown on other networks. Nor would we accept mindless programmes... We would present single gigantic productions that occupied an entire evening on subjects of particular importance that needed examination in depth... Following this came stylish serials based on novels such as Henry James, Sartre, Tolstoy... Music?...analyses of difficult modern works using scores with notes that animated as the music sounded so taht even viewers who were not accustomed to raeding musical scores could follow the structure of the music."

It sounds like dream television to me, but I'll not depress myself considering where it all went wrong.

Life On Air is absolutely an enjoyable read - how could it not be? Look at the author! It is written in Attenborough's distinctive voice, and is full of humourous anecdotes, history, archeology, zoology... The hardback is rammed with colour photos, an aspect lacking in the paperback. If this man holds any interest for you whatsoever, Life On Air is a must read - just don't expect it to be as groundbreaking as his tv programmes.

Literary Lego

2010-08-31T14:20:00.001-07:00

Well, it's one way of getting kids into the classics... Where's Virginia Woolf?

The Siege

2010-08-29T04:35:00.000-07:00

Helen Dunmore is a prolific writer, though I have never been drawn to her books. This may have something to do with the covers, which I find singularly banal, or with the fact that the regularity with which she produces new books subconsciously suggests to me that they can't be of a very high quality. Nevertheless, The Siege has been sitting in my To Be Read pile for some time - I can't remember when or why I bought it - and I decided to give it a go.

I know little about the 1941 siege of Leningrad, save that during one of the worst winters known even in northern Russia, German troops surrounded the city and through a series of Blitz-style bombing raids and an almost total blockade which prevented any food or medicine getting through, starved millions of citizens to death. In a letter reproduced at the beginning of this novel, it is made clear that Hitler had no intention of taking over the city - he instead "decided to have Leningrad wiped from the face of the earth." Against this backdrop, then, Dunmore has set a love story.

Or at least, that is the skeleton of narrative over which the flesh of the novel takes shape. But this, for me, is not a love story. The two central characters, Anna and Andrei, meet, fall in love instantly, and then must survive this hellish winter, yes. But The Siege is not a narrative-based novel. It is a descriptive account of a factual event. Fictional characters simply enable the event to be brought to chilling life, and this is the great strength of this book. Dunmore's attention to detail is crucial in showing us how crumbs of bread and broth made of shoe leather become lifelines, and how food, or the lack of it, becomes obsession. This is not a novel one can curl up with and live inside; this is an educational ride through a dark historical chapter.

The style is stilted, giving it the impression of being in translation, and as such, does in fact feel authentically Russian. The characters are neither particularly likeable nor unlikeable; they are vehicles through which a story that must be told, is told.

I wouldn't say I had enjoyed The Siege, but I feel a better informed human being for having read it. And my desire to visit St Petersburg, as it is now (again) called, is all the greater. It is most certainly not a holiday read, or even a summer read, but I think it's an important book, and does deserve the attention it still garners.

The Help

2010-08-23T05:56:00.000-07:00

I had started reading Villette while I was travelling, but I'm afraid that after 120 pages, I had to give up. Maybe the story of a lonely Victorian governess in dark, rain-sodden France just wasn't working for me as I reclined on a sun-lounger in 42 degree heat in Andalucia, or maybe it was that the style was so over-wrought and almost sycophantic; whatever the reason, I just couldn't get into it, and have left it sitting woefully in a villa in Spain.

When I returned, then, I was bookless. Currently not-reading. The first thing I did was go through my ever-increasing bought-but-not-yet-read (the 'yet' is crucial) pile, but nothing grabbed me. My head was all over the place and anywhere but here, and I would read 3 pages of something and put it down in frustration, unable to connect with the written word. Grrrr.... Then I picked up The Help. And it turns out it was exactly what I needed.

Now, this is not a great work of literature, a life-changing novel; it is not the new To Kill a Mockingbird. Had it been written and published in 1964, it most certainly would have been both of those things. But context is an important aspect in the making of a classic, and while I loved this book (and I am far from alone there), I think it is important to wade through the praises heaped on it, and to consider it as simply an exciting story filled with wonderful characters, well-written and easy to digest. It is a reminder of the way things were - although I am aware that similar communities do still exist around the globe - and looks at the Civil Rights Movement from a new perspective; from, in fact, an entirely female perspective. This gives the story a unique spin because, as Minny and Aibileen discuss at one point in the novel, women can exact a far more ruthless revenge than men can; their ability to work slowly, chipping away at the foundations of a life they intend to destroy is a far more effective and frightening method than a one-off violent act. The women in The Help are both each other's support and each other's worst possible enemies - the way the League ladies treat Marilyn Monroe-alike Miss Celia is as appalling and as prejudiced as the way they treat their maids. But she is from the wrong side of the tracks, and in Jackson, Mississippi, only Miss Hilly Holbrook's side matters.

Hilly is an almost cartoonish villainess. She is a southern belle Cruella deVille - the description of her final visit to Miss Skeeter, hair akimbo and clothes hanging out, reminds me of nothing less than Cruella's defeat at the end of 101 Dalmations. And yet Hilly's defeat is a long way from total - we know, as readers, that she will pick herself up and continue to treat the black members of her community in the same way she always has. We know this because we know people like her still exist. And we know, more worryingly, that though there may be only a few as awful as Hilly Holbrook, there are many, many Elizabeth Leefolts: the friend who is too weak to do anything, too scared to speak up, too preoccupied to form an opinion of her own. These people - the ones who sit by - are the majority, and are just as damaging.

Kathryn Stockett uses key events in the struggle for Civil Rights as pegs on which to hang her story, and this is a useful and effective technique. We can place the fictional characters in the real, historical world. We can dress them accurately, we can feel the wide outside swirling around them, even as Jackson seems caught in a web of time, unable to free itself and move forward. Miss Skeeter's desire to be free of this claustrophobic society is brought to a simple, easy head when she hears Dylan for the first time on the radio and realises that elsewhere in the United States, the times are indeed a-changing.

The three narrators have endearing voices, and we warm to each of them immediately they open their mouths. Stockett's use of dialectical phrase is just right - Aibileen's words ring true and honest, not foreign enough that we struggle to understand her, but with an accent that places her exactly.

This novel is an ideal easy-read, without being vacuous and forgettable. It does nothing new or daring within itself - indeed, it is almost a novel-by-numbers; questions are set up one after the other that ensure we stay with the book till the end: what happened to Constantine? Did Minny really do to that pie what we fear she did? What is the matter with Miss Celia? What did Stuart's ex-fiancee do? We care, we really do want to know the answers to these questions - and that is Stockett's skill. Her talent lies in her creaton of wholly believable characters, in whom, within mere pages, we are entirely invested.

There is a short epilogue-of-sorts, in which Stockett delivers a mini-autobiography. The fact that she has written from some personal experience, in this case, adds to the book. It authenticates the stories of Aibileen, Minny and Miss Skeeter. I know that there must be snippets of real events in here - some incidents must be founded in reality. I can't help but wonder if the pie story is one of them. And I can't help but hope it is, hope that some white lady, somewhere, really did get her just desserts...

Writers on fire!

2010-08-18T15:45:00.000-07:00

It's not cool to smoke, kids. Except that sometimes it absolutely, irrevocably is. Check out these authors and their wicked addictions:

July - a month in reading

2010-08-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

As the end of term approached, all grey matter began to seep out of my ears... reading became less important to me than travelling. But I don't have a travel blog (though I do have a travel notebook) so I kinda fell off the edge of the blogging universe for a bit. However, I return now, a nutty colour (not pistachio - maybe walnut shell?) from a Thelma-and-Louise* style tour of southern Spain, head filled with Moorish architecture and tummy stuffed with paella. And what of reading during this time?

How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall
This has been well-blogged about, so I shan't dwell. It was my first by this author, whom I know has had a lot of praise heaped on her. She has a very clear, crisp style, and an authoritative tone, and whilst I enjoyed this book, it felt a little experimental to me. A bit Rick Wakeman: a bit 'I do this because I can'. The shift in gear as one is jolted from one narrator to another can be hard to adjust to, as it is not simply a change in voice, but in tense and person. Interestingly, the story I thought would be most intriguing turned out, for me, to be the least gripping (that of Annette and the Bestia), whilst my favourite character was not even one of the four narrators - Danny, Suzie's dead twin brother, stole my heart.

It is an existential novel, one that requires attention and thought, and the questions it raises are simultaneously tiny and huge - why does Giorgio paint bottles? Is there more to the thread that links these people's lives than the tenuous one apparent - and what does this mean for the threads that link all our lives? (This could become a little 6 Steps from Kevin Bacon...)

How to Paint a Dead Man is essentially a book full of, and about, subtext; what is below the surface and between the lines. It is about the nuance of relationships, and the traffic between life and death. It is about the subtleties of shade, the position of art in life and life in art. It is not a curl-up and live-in kind of book, but it teased my brain, and woke me up. I look forward to trying some of Hall's other novels.

The Passage by Justin Cronin
Yes, I fell for the hype and the beautiful packaging. And I really fancied something that wouldn't tax me too much, although I hadn't bargained on it weighing quite so much and nearly spraining my wrist. So, weighty in volume if not content. I do not tend to read horror or sci-fi, let me state that up front. Both genres, for me, work better in film-form. I've read the modern classics - Interview With The Vampire, Neuromancer, and cinematically, I'm not averse to a bit of neck-biting or zombie action. But reading The Passage was a bit left of my usual centre.

I would say that you need substantial stretches of time to spend in chunks with this book. It doesn't work if you just dip in and out. You have to take a deep breath and commit. I did, and it came up with the goods. It's well-written, and once the future-post-apocalyptic world comes in, I found myself really warming to the characters and actually caring about them - I came dangerously close to shedding a solitary tear when one particular character dies. The world of the book is well-constructed and believable, the action fast-paced and clearly, in places, written for the Big Screen, to which I have no doubt it will be coming soon. My only bugbear is...I'm not convinced that it's original enough to be getting all the praise it's had. It has elements for me of those terrifyingly bleak Children's Film Foundation films I was raised on in the seventies, things like Brother in the Land and The Weathermonger, in which a few surviving youngsters cross nuclear-attack ravaged Britain to find sanctuary on the Isle of Wight or somewhere. The Vampires - or Virals as they're called here (and that's another thing - hasn't that been done in 28 Days Later?) - are interesting: part Giger creation, part Aphex Twin video, they are potentially something new, but I don't know if that's enough to make this whole novel something new.

At the end of the day, you know whether you want to read this or not. Either it's your cup of Earl Grey, or it isn't. It is more literary than most in the genre, for sure, but that doesn't convince me that there's going to be thousands of discerning Persephone readers suddenly turning up in the horror section of Waterstones. An enjoyable, bloody romp, to sound like a Sun newspaper reviewer.

Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd
Dowd died in 2007 of Breast Cancer, leaving a legacy of brilliant YA novels keeping her name alive. This one deals with the troubles in Northern Ireland in the eighties, and is an intelligent and beautifully crafted story. For young people outside of Ireland, I would suggest a brief grounding in the history of the IRA and particularly Bobby Sands and the Hunger Strikers to be of help in understanding the plot - Dowd assumes knowledge, and does not patronise with background. It seems particularly poignant at the moment, with pockets of rioting flaring up again, and could be an important reminder for all of us of how complicated and violent life can be under extreme circumstances. There is a lesson here in the price one pays for nailing oneself to a cause, a lesson that a whole new generation might need to consider. Probably not one to go onto straight from Horrid Henry...

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
I was sitting in Costa Coffee in Manchester Waterstones' when I literally had, totally out of the blue, an overwhelming desire to read this book. I honestly do not know what inspired this desire, but there it was, like the urge for an ice-cold Coca-Cola, and so I acted on it. And I was not disappointed. What an extraordinary style of writing! It almost feels like an unfinished manuscript, and yet that is exactly right for the nature of the story. In the same way that Charlotte Bronte gave us landscape as character in Jane Eyre, so Rhys does in Wide Sargasso Sea, and the rip, the tearing, we feel as Bertha is taken from this Caribbean dreamland to Rochester's tower is tangible. Rhys teases us: the nature of madness is questioned, played with, and our only response, surely, can be that insanity is relative; relative to one's surroundings, to one's family, to one's acquaintances, to one's treatment. There is an edge of hysteria to the whole short novel, and yet an eerie calmness to the denouement.

For me, had I not known Jane Eyre well, it would have been a more difficult book, but loving Jane Eyre as I do (in the old-time debate, yes, I prefer it to Wuthering Heights), the deeper dimension offered here was rich and delicious. It's quite unlike anything I've read before, and it has stayed with me in ways I didn't think it would. I may never read Jane Eyre in the same light again.

Just Kids by Patti Smith
Horses is my favourite album of all time. That, combined with the beautiful photograph on the cover of this partial (it is solely about Smith's relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe) autobiography, meant I simply couldn't wait for it to come out in paperback.

Smith's love for Mapplethorpe is evident all the way through the book - every word she uses drips with adoration, sometimes worship, sometimes a cooler respect, but always with unadulterated love. It was, for me, however, educational in terms of Smith's own artistic intent. I was surprised, given that I've always sensed an undercurrent of violence to Horses, to find that Smith was/is so much of a hippy. I was fascinated also by the way she considers herself a poet who happens to have rock musicians playing alongside her; not that I didn't know she's a poet - I have books of her poetry - but that she seems to have genuinely accidentally become a rockstar. Her entire approach to her own career is intriguing, and does in fact, from about halfway through the book, become the dominant interest.

Despite my sometime lack of tolerance for all things hippy-dippy (astrology, witchcraft, meditation etc - I was brought up with it and rebelled at an early age), I find Smith an engaging as well as profoundly talented artist and person, as well as edgier than I suspect she thinks she is. Just Kids is an extremely interesting and insightful book, and a wonderful record of the oh-so-dirty glamour that surrounded the Chelsea Hotel and New York in the seventies. Pass me my CBGBs tee-shirt...

* Driving the roads of the high eastern Alpujarras in the Sierra Nevada very nearly resulted in a re-enactment of that film's ending. I even had my headscarf at the ready...

Literary Thespians

2010-06-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered what actors read on set?

Anna Karina gazes through her false eyelashes, the epitome of French literary chic.

Gregory Peck is in more thoughtful mood...

...while even power cuts can't keep Sophia Loren from her newspaper.

James Dean's choice of article to read aloud seems to have sent Liz Taylor to sleep.

She could learn a thing or two about reading posture from Charles Laughton...

...as could Audrey Hepburn, who may find her feet start to ache after a while.

And Clark Gable, while sitting comfortably, is perhaps a little obvious in his choice of material.

The Glass Castle

2010-06-19T04:38:00.000-07:00

There is very little I can say about this book, except that it is excellent. Simply put, it is the - not autobiography, it's not as dry as that - memoir of Jeannette Walls, whose parents drag their four children around the deserts of the western United States in a variety of clapped out cars, sleeping under the stars and scavenging in bins for food, all the time owning a perfectly good house in Phoenix in which they feel trapped and refuse to settle permanently. When they are small, this is an adventurous life that the kids love, but as they grow up, and as winters and sojourns with odd relatives - odd in every sense, and in some senses, utterly distasteful - get harder, life becomes increasingly unbearable for the siblings. But mum is an artist, dad an inventor (who never actually builds any of his inventions, though there are blueprints aplenty) and their philosophy of life sits uncomfortably with the modern world. The children are taught independence, astrophysics and how to identify the flammability of different strata of coal, all worthy subjects, but there comes a point where their health and wellbeing is being sacrificed for the selfishness of two adults who will not accept responsibility. There are heartbreaking moments - their father's alcoholism leads to his stealing shamelessly from the children what little they have, and the moment where, having not eaten in days, they discover their mother hiding a huge bar of chocolate under her blanket, will make tears spring into your eyes. But this is not a wallowing book, and is long long way from being a 'misery memoir'. These kids are tough. And they somehow, against all the odds, force themselves into becoming successful and - I hope - happy, grownups. Or three of them do. There is one sacrifice to their upbringing.

Walls has an engaging tone and her writing is sparing. Emotion does not run deep in her words: instead she allows the stories to tell themselves and for us to put our own feelings into them. The Glass Castle has an episodic quality reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, in which chapters and incidents can stand alone, although if I were shelving it with an 'if you like this, you'll love...' tag, I'd put it next to Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight.

I found The Glass Castle almost impossible to put down - truly - and highly recommend it, particularly if, like me, you are currently so bogged down in other things that you need a book that will transport you with little effort on your part.

Wish Her Safe At Home

2010-06-13T03:46:00.000-07:00

I'd never come across Wish Her safe At Home before, and I saw it lying on a table as I was on my way to pay for a few others I'd never come across before at Daunt Books in London. The cover pulled me towards it - I love a bit of vintage glamour, and the title was intriguing. I started reading John Carey's introduction, about how he had unsuccessfully championed it when it was longlisted for the Booker years ago, and so, always a fan of the underdog, I decided this needed reading. Oh, and it's about a middle aged woman going mad, so naturally, it appealed on that level too...

It is an uncomfortable book, let's get that straight from the get-go. It niggles at the reader, not least because there is the fear, I think, in all of us, that we sometimes skate on the slippery boundary between imagination and insanity. What makes Wish Her safe At Home stand out as a study of increasing madness is that it is written from the point of view of the person going mad. Rachel tells her story, oblivious herself to her increasing retreat from reality, and so we, reading between the lines, begin to cringe at what are clearly, to start with at least, minor social faux pas, but which become a full blown Baby Jane-style breakdown.

There comes a point when we realise that Rachel's internal monologue may no longer be quite so internal as she thinks - that she may in fact be saying aloud a lot of the things she believes she is thinking. Conversely, there are times when she claims to have said something, but we are not so sure that she actually did. And herein lies Stephen Benatar's genius. There is a scene in church, enough to make you want to read with your head beneath your bedcovers, so appallingly embarrassing is it, in which Rachel comments throughout the sermon, throwing in opinions and questions of her own, completely inappropriately. But how much of it is said aloud, and how much is merely Rachel reciting the witty retorts she wishes she had been brave enough to make, is impossible to work out. And this is where the fear factor comes in - we begin to question ourselves whether or not we really keep our internal monologues inside, or whether perhaps, occasionally, we let slip the odd comment not meant for other ears...and, once begun, how quickly might that escalate...how soon might something we have created in our imaginations begin to spill over into our real lives, leaving us spinning in the no-man's-land between the tangible and the fantastical, with no way of reaching the frontline of either, and therefore never knowing what is actual and what is make-believe. In short, Rachel makes us wonder how close we are ourselves to insanity.

Wish Her Safe At Home took me a little while to get into - though once its secret is revealed, it becomes sickeningly compelling. Not much happens to start with. We become acquainted with Rachel as she inherits a house from a recently deceased Aunt and moves in, alone. She decorates, has the garden landscaped, and becomes good friends with the young gardener and his wife and new baby. And here, again, Benatar's genius rears its complicated head: to what extent are this couple genuine, we find ourselves asking, and how much is an attempt to take advantage of a lonely middle-aged (seemingly wealthy) woman, with no children to inherit her estate... They ask her to be godmother to their son, and our hackles rise. We are protective of Rachel and suspicious of the motives of others. Benatar manipulates our emotions with precision. Small incidents begin to worry us - did she really say that to the chemist? Is she starting to see things? Her confidence blossoms, which is at first wonderful...but then it starts to take her over and she becomes rude and bolshy, though also painfully hilarious. She contradicts herself. She had told us at the beginning that she was a plain child, but now is telling us that even her school teachers were jealous of her beauty... We daren't read on. But we must read on.

This book has the slightly camp quality that so often accompanies the artistic portrayal of a woman breaking down. It references A Streetcar Named Desire, Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Havisham... one could easily add the Beales of Grey Gardens and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane to the list. What is both sad and beautiful is that Rachel herself identifies with these characters. She sees them as heroines, pioneers, romantic peers. It is heartbreaking that at the end, she is delighted, rather than devastated, to be able to quote Blanche Dubois with reference to her own situation: "I depend upon the kindness of strangers," she says, happily, and promptly replaces her bonnet and turns her face from reality for good.

London bookshops

2010-06-07T09:40:00.000-07:00

A recent jaunt to England's fair capital found me spending a fortune in two wonderful bookshops. The first, Persephone, will be familiar to many already.

It was a real joy to spend half an hour wandering amongst the piles and boxes of titles so familiar to me from the catalogue and magazine, and I found it interesting that I came away with not only one title I had wanted for ages (The Journal of Katherine Mansfield) but also one I'd never really considered before (RC Sherriff's The Hopkins Manuscript). I could easily have purchased ten books on the spot, but with my TBR pile growing faster than I am able to read them, I forced myself to leave it at two. I did, however, also buy a Persephone bag, which now swings rakishly from my bike handlebars, and I very nearly bought a notebook too - imagine, the classic Persephone design, filled with one's own scrawlings! But again, I have a box full of as-yet-virgin notebooks, and couldn't justify another.

Two Persephone books I wanted are currently being re-printed, so the aim is to get the two I bought read so that I can make a guilt-free return visit in the summer.

The shop itself is lovely, achieving the perfect balance between modern-vintage (think Cath Kidston without the garish flowers) and Dickensian curiosity shop. Of course, the books themselves are the stars, and I can never seem to quite get over the beauty of the dove grey and ivory design: to see them piled in such quantities rather than sitting sadly isolated amongst less considered paperbacks was a joy, even a little overwhelming. Clara and Nicola carried on the business of the company in the back half of the shop, and the whole place had an idyllic air of industry teamed with relaxation; despite the pouring rain outside, a beautiful browse.

After coffee and a few minutes admiring my purchases (seriously, is anything more beautiful than a brand new Persephone?), I headed into Marylebone (ostensibly for shoes) and fell into Daunt Books.

What a treat! The very first shelf inside the door displayed The Letters of Sylvia Beach, which I have looked for unsuccessfully in several other establishments, so I knew I was in for a little taste of heaven here. This was followed with the discovery of Dreamers of a New Day by Sheila Rowbotham, about women who pioneered social change during the 1890-1920 period. I must have typed another 10 titles into my phone as I wandered round this unique bookshop, and came away with Stephen Benatar's Wish Her Safe At Home, Chris Cleave's Little Bee and the autobiographical The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls.

In theory, Daunt is a travel bookshop, but it is, as its own publicity states, so much more than that. The Travel section itself houses not only guides and language books, but also fiction from or set in the country or area, and I could have spent hours - days, even - just moving round the world, browsing titles.

After this, I had planned on visiting Lutyens and Rubenstein in Notting Hill (which had been closed the day before when I had been in the vicinity), but having already bought so many beautiful new books, I couldn't risk it, and am saving that delight till my next trip Londonwards.

And to think, up here I have only Waterstones...

A Most Unnecessary Post

2010-05-23T11:20:00.000-07:00

I feel it must look as though I've either stopped reading or have taken to reading things too embarrassing to admit to, and though I try to avoid those "sorry I haven't posted in a while" posts, I can't really excuse this one on any other grounds. This blog isn't supposed to be a diary, and it also isn't supposed to have a particular theme, or genre of book that's written about, but the fact is that whilst my reading time, as noted previously, has diminished somewhat due to exam and coursework essay marking, the books I've been reading are probably not going to find much of an audience here. I began House of Leaves, having been given it as a present, but it's text-book size and shape and I just can't carry it around with me, so I've relegated it to the 'summer holiday' pile. I've just read Everything: A Book About Manic Street Preachers, which is a truly great rock biog (in which my old fanzine is mentioned, heartwarmingly), but it's 11 years out of date and unless you're really into the Manics, not of great interest. And if you are into the Manics, you probably read it 11 years ago... So now I'm just grabbing things off my shelves, thing that are easy-to-read and small enough to fit in my bag. I've read half The Virgin Suicides in the garden today, which fitted perfectly as the weather has made everything look like Sofia Coppola's beautiful film version, and almost made me wish I was blonde again. That finished, I think I may head into Elaine Feinstein's biography of Ted Hughes, about which I will make a detailed and 'proper' comment. There, as I said; a most unnecessary post.

Wherever I lay my book...

2010-05-18T11:33:00.000-07:00

Its exam time, and my teaching workload is so enormous that by the time I crawl - often literally - into bed and open my book, I manage little more than a paragraph before my head is drooping... so I grab reading time wherever and whenever I can at the moment. Five minutes at the end of lunchtime, ten with a cup of tea when I get home... Where and when do you snatch those precious reading moments in a hectic day?

Do you curl up under the duvet...

...or risk dropping your book in the water?

Do you prefer, like Greta Garbo, to be alone...

...or are you more comfortable surrounded by your friends...

... or your family?

Do you like reading outdoors...

...or would you rather be inside..?

Do you usually succeed, against all the odds, in finding a few golden minutes for reading?

And do you even care where you are, so long as you're comfy and you've got a book?

Richard

2010-05-09T03:10:00.000-07:00

I know. This sits uncomfortably amongst the books that surround it here; it stands out like a Manics' fan at Glastonbury in the days before the invention of that modernist oxymoron, 'festival chic'. But ...Lamp - and Book is nothing if not eclectic. I'd like to take it a step further and say ...Lamp - and Book is a dichotomy, but that implies something altogether more planned and active; ...Lamp - and Book is more gently at odds with itself than that, and so is merely eclectic. I digress. Richard.

Ben Myers has fictionalised the story of Richey Edwards, lyricist with the Manic Street Preachers until his unexplained disappearance in 1995. I was sent this proof for a reason by a friend who works in the book industry. The reason is simple - we were Manics' fans.

We must have seen them 30 times between 1992 and 94. Once in 1996, but the Richey-shaped hole stage-right was too much to bear and we drew a line under that part of our lives. I have never read any of the books about the band or Richey, I have read and seen very few interviews with the remaining three members of the band in the last 15 years and I have avoided thinking about what happened to Richey / what Richey did, for the simple reason that I will never know the truth and speculation seemed irrelevant and indeed, irreverent. I don't think my friend expected me to read this book; I don't think I expected to read it myself.

But I have. And so... what of it? This is going to be a hard book to comment on - for me now, and for future reviewers - as the chances are high that we will all offend someone somewhere whatever we say; that is inherent in anything that touches on this subject. Myers must have known that when he started writing the book, and must be braced for whatever hurricanes will come his way upon publication in October. He's a brave man. For there are as many theories about what happened to Richey as there are people who care, and the loyalty that Richey inspired in his fans means that even after all this time, every one of those theories is fiercely believed and guarded by its thinker. We all had a little piece of Richey, we all knew him in our own way, all had our own relationship with him (I'm talking existentially here rather than literally, though for some, the latter may apply). Therefore, there are things that we all KNOW, in our hearts, he did or did not do in February 1995. I KNOW, for example, that he did not jump off the Severn Bridge. I have no evidence for this, I just KNOW. Call it gut feeling, call it wishful thinking, call it denial if you want, but I KNOW. What he did do, or where he went, I have no idea. Honestly, I've never felt the need to think about it. But that he didn't jump, I am absolutely certain.

So to read a book, written in first person - in other words, that purports to be Richey's voice - that may trash what one has KNOWN for fifteen years, is quite an undertaking, and will be so for the thousands of fans who will devour this when it is finally available. It was brave of Myers to write it, and it is brave of the fans to read it.

In keeping with the spirit of its subject matter, then, Myers' book does some things brilliantly and some things less so. I'll start with what it does well.

Primarily, it tells a very plausible story. I won't give away the ending - and it's interesting that though a true story, Richey's is one that has either a choice of endings or indeed, no ending at all - but for me, it seems that this is very likely as a recounting of what happened in those (possibly) last days. It fits with the Richey I knew - existentially, again.

It has forced me to look again at certain aspects of the 'Legend' of the Manic Street Preachers: for example, that seen from the inside, the so-called Cult of Richey put an enormous strain on Richey himself. He must have felt a huge responsibility for the kids that copied his look, that cut themselves and wrote poetry and cried out to him. Yet what could he do for them? They were just another statement of his own impotence; he created them, these beautiful, screaming misfits, he validated them, yet he could no more ease their pain than he could stop his own. And look what happened to Shelley's Victor Frankenstein.

In amongst the bleakness, there is humour. And these few moments - fewer, to my mind, than they should be - are where Myers' Richey seems most real. Short bursts of banter with the rest of the band make him inescapably, beautifully three-dimensional.

Myers splits his narrative into two clear parallel tales: one, the first person present tense story that starts the morning Richey leaves, and the other, flashback, and it is here that my first literary problem with this book begins: the flashback narrative is written in second person. It is Richey talking to himself. Now, we all do it, we all talk to ourselves, whether aloud or in our heads: "Oh, you idiot, what did you do that for?" we will reprimand ourselves. But this is a very tricky technique to use well in a novel, as it must be sustained over a long period, and it works only in the hands of a very accomplished writer. I can understand why Myers did it - there is a clear trail of schizophrenic discourse throughout - but for me, it's just not a valid narrative form, certainly not when it is, in present tense, recounting what happened in the past; this is, however, a very personal view - see my problems with Wolf Hall, also.

And this brings me to my other problem with the book, one which I doubt I will be alone in having, and one which Myers must have realised would be a controversial sticking point. Third person would have worked fine - I'm a Rupert Brooke fan, and loved Jill Dawson's fictionalised account of his life, The Great Lover, because she never assumed she could get inside Brooke's head. And this is the overwhelming difficulty with Myers' book: that first person. In order for Richard to really work, it has to find Richey's voice, and I'm afraid it simply never does that. It just doesn't sound like him. It's a competent telling of the story of the Manic Street Preachers with emphasis on Richey, but it isn't Richey telling the story. It's too dumbed-down for it to be Richey. Richey would never just have told us his thoughts were shattering; he would have written a page that looked like something squeezed from the mind of ee cummings. Myers has underestimated his readership (which, surely, is comprised mainly of Manics' fans - who else will read this?) We have read Sartre and Kerouac. We can understand and make sense of fractured syntax: Myers' Richey tells us that he cannot finish a sentence, and yet he does, in page after page after page of perfect grammar. It does not follow, then, that these are Richey's thoughts. I will not second guess Myers - I don't know whether it was lack of confidence or lack of ability that resulted in this stylistic blandness, but as the story of a man's descent into madness, it just doesn't convince. And as Myers is also, in another life, a poet, this is doubly disappointing. Richey was a living, walking soundbite machine, yet there is not one attempt to create something similar in here. Not one line of Myers' would I quote, and yet I am supposed to believe that these are Richey's thoughts. Richey's raison d'etre was breaking moulds; Myers should have pushed himself to follow that philosophy. But of course, cynical old me can't help thinking, it would have been a risk to sales figures. Innovation doesn't sell. Look at Clegg.

I'll be honest and admit that I was sceptical from the first moment I heard about this book. It would have had to have been something truly extraordinary for me to really like it, and it just doesn't hit that button, though it is, as I have said, competently written (though competent was never a word I remember being applied to Richey...) But it shouldn't be dismissed out-of-hand. And I know Manics' fans well enough to know that some of them will do just that - it's a way of forming a protective shield, over themselves and over Richey. But this is a work of fiction, and it's important that we remember that. And I cannot begin to imagine what someone would make of it who had never heard of Richey - that, I suppose, we will discover in October.

I will leave you with this final thought - though plausible, Myers' version of events has one flaw: it never mentions the £200 a day that Richey withdrew from cash machines in the two weeks leading up to his disappearance. Myers' Richey has the money with him, yes, but he never mentions the sustained, considered, systematic way in which he came by it. Those withdrawals are surely (correct me if I'm wrong; as I say, I've not read much) the main indication that somewhere inside all the scribbling madness in his head, Richey had a plan. And Myers' Richey has no plan. So, believable as this story is - and it really is. I really do think Myers presents us with an entirely possible series of events - it still does not lay to rest all the questions and the niggles and the buts that have come to define Richey's memory.

Writers at their 'writers

2010-05-02T16:01:00.001-07:00

Ever wondered which writers prefer the tap tap tap of the keys to the scratch of the pen? Here's a choice selection of those that
love(d) their portable - and not-so-portable - typewriters.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

2010-05-02T07:10:00.000-07:00

Shirley Jackson, author of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, also wrote the book on which my favourite spooky film is based, that being the 1963 version of The Haunting of Hill House. I first saw that movie when I was about thirteen, and the scene where Claire Bloom and Julie Harris are in the bedroom while 'something' crashes past the door, trying the handle on its way, terrified me for years, while the film's closing line, "Here at Hill House, we all walk alone", chilled me to the marrow. The recent re-issue by Penguin Modern Classics of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson's last book, seems to have reawakened interest in the writer, and always one for an intriguing title, I greedily grabbed at a copy.

It's a book about which I could write either very little - simply, it's the story of two sisters and their Uncle, sequestered in the family house after the elder girl is acquitted of the poisoning of the rest of the family - or vast essays. I know very little about Jackson herself, but of the two stories of hers with which I am now familiar, it seems that she was deeply affected by the idea that people apart from the world can retreat into a house from which they do not, or cannot, escape. The house is simultaneously, in Jackson's books, refuge and prison. In both Hill House and ...Castle, the female protagonists, highly sensitive young women, become almost the blood, or internal organs, of the buildings they inhabit, and the house is a living entity into which the women are assimilated. There is a real fear evident in Jackson's work of the outside world, a need to be barricaded inside something solid, to cocoon oneself and to keep everyone and everything else out. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is an agoraphobic book, less supernatural than Hill House, but with essentially the same outcome.

Merricat is an alluring narrator. It becomes quickly evident that she is slightly mad, though in what way specifically, it is at first hard to say. There is a psychopathic edge to her thoughts, which, when combined with her evident childishness, is a tried-and-tested recipe for creepiness. The childish adult, or adult child, is a deeply unsettling stock character. Food, and mealtimes, are intrinsically important in the book, and are used to create an unhealthy mother-daughter relationship between the two sisters - Constance cooks for Merricat, they talk almost incessantly about food and what they will eat, they add jars of preserves to an already overflowing cellar...food seems to be the medium through which love is shown, but it is also the method by which murder is committed. Food then, as much as the house itself, is a controlling factor in the lives of these disturbing and disturbed young women.

Jackson does not answer many of the questions she sets up. There is a reveal which has already been guessed by the reader, but we never find out why Constance shields Merricat as she does, or indeed why Merricat is the way she is. The ending is oddly fairytale-esque; the house, or castle, becomes wrapped in vines, the girls themselves on the way to being no more than local myth, stories with which to scare children.

There is so much that one could say about this book; its themes range widely from those mentioned to analogies of adolescence and the repressed female as witch. There is humour in here, as dark as it may be, and there is a softness too, in the simple routines of Constance and Merricat, in their interaction, in the descriptions of the estate, its plants and animals and Uncle Julian. It is a short novel, but one which is much bigger than its component parts. It has traces of The Little Stranger, and of Grey Gardens, as well as the tortured youth of Carson McCullers' protagonists. It is a book I will revisit, definitely, and I think has the potential to become something of a cult classic. "I was chilled", as Merricat would say, but I would have to add, "in an entirely good way."

Corrag

2010-04-27T11:17:00.000-07:00

This book is phenomenal. I have rushed straight out (in the sense that I've nipped over to Amazon) and bought Susan Fletcher's two previous novels, because I cannot bear to be away from her writing for any longer than I need to be.

But I'm rushing ahead of myself. Let's back up a wee way.

Corrag has had mixed reviews in the press. I remember looking at Oystercatchers, Fletcher's second novel, a couple of years ago, and though the story didn't appeal at the time, I was drawn in by the style and poeticism, and it went on a "to buy" list, but was never bought. Corrag, however, I leapt at, for two reasons. Firstly, as I have mentioned previously, I am, as Corrag herself would say, "for places". I love stories that are set in specific landscapes, where that landscape is as much a part of the book as are the characters, where the land itself is a protagonist. The Bronte's and Hardy epitomise this style of writing, and Lorna Doone is my favourite 'Classic' - I'm for wildness and savagery, wind and storms and snowdrifts, crags and peaks. Corrag is set in my favourite of all such places, my favourite place on earth: the Scottish Highlands.

That was the first reason I was drawn to Corrag.

The second was, quite simply, that when I sat down and read the first chapter, the beauty of the language was such that I could barely breathe, and I had to read the chapter again before my lungs were well enough to carry on.

Corrag is written as, essentially, a monologue, the voice that of the eponymous heroine, a young seventeenth century woman accused of witchcraft and awaiting her death sentence. Chained and starving in a stone cell, she is visited by churchman and Jacobite, Charles Leslie, who hears that she was at Glencoe a few weeks previously when the Macdonald clan were slaughtered in their beds by soldiers they had been sheltering for the winter.

The bones of the story, then, are fact. The flesh is added by Fletcher. And what flesh! Corrag's voice is so perfect, so beautiful, so poetic, that after living inside her head for the past six days, this - what I write now - feels plodding and heavy, clumsy. I am almost embarrassed to be commenting on Fletcher's ability as a writer - no, she is not a writer, she is a wordsmith - in this dull, thick prose. I can open Corrag at random and find lyricism in any line. Listen to this:

"...the heart has its scars. It has its spaces, so that I wondered if it whistled when the wind was strong. I wondered if it leaked, on rainy days. A heart with holes in it."

Change the form, and you have verse:

The heart has its scars.
It has its spaces,
so that I wondered if it whistled
when the wind was strong.
I wondered if it leaked,
on rainy days.
A heart
with holes in it.

Corrag has sent me spinning into a tizzy. Its lightness of image and delicacy of phrase sends one soaring over the ridges it describes. It is a tale of heart-rending murder recounted with compassion in every syllable, at its core a character - oh, but she is so much more than that flat word conveys! - whose desperate, divine life is lesson to us all.

I sense that we will hear a lot more from and about Susan Fletcher in the coming years. Most talk will be of her wordcraft. She is a force of letters, and I urge you to let her use her power to transport you as she has me. Corrag is a book about the deadly yet redeeming strength of nature, of love... and of words themselves. Corrag talks of the words that make people and that change people, that cause wars, that hang innocents: "witch", "hag", "king" and a raft of others. She is naive, but she listens, and she sees the layers that lie behind what she hears. Don't let the cover of this book - another wistful woman in a desolate landscape - put you off. Like Corrag, look at what is behind the first impression.

Not-so-dumb Blonde

2010-04-21T09:34:00.000-07:00

Arguably the physical ideal of womanhood, married to the godlike Arthur Miller,and star of some of cinema's most enduring movies, Marilyn Monroe was a great self-improver and read frequently: any where, any time, any place, and in any position.

Orange Shortlist

2010-04-20T10:28:00.000-07:00

Oh dear, I'd better get reading...

I'm getting a little fed up with the ubiquitous Wolf Hall now. To my mind, it has three faults, and three faults is one too many for it to be great book. (For those of you interested, the three faults are: present tense; too much use of the male singular pronoun, causing confusion in places; and the Henry-Anne story has been done to death, even if this is from a new point of view. And it is the Henry-Anne story, equally as much as it's Cromwell's.) The Booker's enough for any author, surely - let's give someone else a chance.

I'm interested in the Rosie Alison, possibly because it's the right era, although I do realise, looking at the cover, that I've passed over it in bookshops. Again I am forced to consider the importance of a decent jacket.

I'll wait for The Lacuna to come out in paperback, as it's just too big to carry around on a daily basis - shades of The Children's Book in that problem.

It's interesting, as judge Daisy Goodwin comments, that even the long list was filled with "grim" subject matter. Art reacting to The Recession, perhaps? Or a peculiarly female affliction, a post-feminist depression?

Resistance (2)

2010-04-19T08:06:00.001-07:00

I didn't expect to like this as much as I did. I think it may be that the cover put me off, although in light of the content, I'm happy to reappraise the jacket in terms of the careful 1940s colours, the green and cream and muted red. I'm still not keen on the image itself though; there's something rather uninspired about it, which gives the lie to what's inside.

Resistance is a slow book, a simmering book. It is described by Jan Morris, in a quotation on the cover, as a "thriller", but I wouldn't class it as such at all. It is almost a pastoral, owing something to Hardy in its evocation of place, of farmland and of farming ways specifically. It is a book which allows the reader a measure of intelligence; Sheers does not spell events out, but allows conclusions to be drawn in our own time, coaxing us gently in the right direction where needs be, but never patronising. The story starts with the womenfolk of a tiny sheep farming community waking one morning to find their men gone. Twice, it is alluded to that all the women slept late that morning, that none of them can remember much about the night before. Clearly, they were drugged by their husbands, but this is never stated; we are trusted, as readers, to be able to figure it out for ourselves, and there is something deeply satisfying about that.

The Olchon Valley is the real star of the book, lovingly brought to life across the seasons. It overshadows the characters, as it perhaps is supposed to do. But that is not to say that the characters are not drawn with utter conviction, for they are. Sarah is earthy, clever, quick, determined, and yet drowning; in work, in loss, in loneliness. Albrecht is sharp, jaded, chilling. My reaction to him is complex - he is a good guy, sensitive, artistic, battle-scarred. And yet he is threatening, callous - the way he deals with an escaped insurgent is cruel beyond measure, and yet is done with a weariness, an inevitability that is so detached that it is hard to say whether I found him sympathetic in the end or not.

They say poets are sensitive souls - perhaps that is why Sheers writes so well about women, and why the book, though about war (it is set in a 1945 in which German troops invade and occupy Britain) is essentially about two people finding each other in the remote Welsh countryside. It is a fragile, lilting story, like the Welsh accent. There are lines of pure poetry; one character has a wound "in the shape of a melting star". When another speaks,
"[e]verything he said seemed carved from the air. Precise and exact." The best words in the best order, as Coleridge said.

I was perhaps slightly disappointed with the ending, not because it didn't work, or seem fitting, but because the air of menace that rises like volcanic ash and hangs over the novel never really catches fire - the simmer never reaches more than a rolling boil, and the lack of release offered is a little anticlimactic.

Having said that, I really loved this book. It is smart, deep, layered, wild. It wraps itself around you like the valley around Sarah's cottage, simultaneously protective and menacing. It is a book for whom I made bedtime come early, and there is little praise comes higher than that.

Life on Earth

2010-04-15T15:20:00.000-07:00

Tonight's rather good - unusually - TV fayre included The Museum of Life, about the Natural History Museum (oh, glorious architecture!) and, specifically this evening, its insect collections. Personally, I love beetles, those glorious gladiators of the bug world, whose armour comes in such mind-tingling colours that they inspire the muse in even the most prosaic of us. Crucially though, this programme reminded me of reading David Attenborough's Life on Earth many years ago, and a passage on butterflies that has stayed with me my whole life.

Attenborough talks of their "dazzling wings, iridescent and downy, trailing pennants and variegated with transparent windows, veined, fringed and spotted with the loveliest of colours..." (hints of A E Houseman' s cherry tree there). He explains how the butterfly emerges from its pupal state:

"The actual emergence usually takes place under cover of darkness. A butterfly pupa, hanging from a twig, begins to shake. A head with two huge eyes and antennae pressed over its back pushes through the pupa at one end. Legs come free and begin clawing frantically at the air. Slowly and laboriously, with frequent pauses to gather strength, the insect hauls itself out. The thorax emerges and there on its back are two flat crumpled objects, its wings, wrinkled like the kernel of a walnut. The insect jerks itself free and hangs on the empty pupa case, its body trembling. With convulsive shudders, it begins to pump blood into a network of veins within the baggy wings. Slowly they expand. The blurred patterns on the outside of the wings enlarges and becomes focused. Blotches swell into miraculously detailed eye-spots. Within half an hour, the wings are fully distended so that the two sides of the bag meet flat against one another enclosing the veins between them. The veins themselves are still soft. If the tip of one of them were damaged now, it would drip blood. But gradually the blood is drawn back into the body and the veins harden into rigid struts that will give the wing its strength. All this time, the wings have been held together like the leaves of a book. Now, as they become dry and rigid, the insect slowly moves them apart to show the world for the first time the unblemished perfection of its shimmering colours and awaits the dawn of its first day."

Perfection. The butterfly itself, and Attenborough's writing.

Beautiful For Ever

2010-04-15T09:53:00.000-07:00

Madame Rachel was a - no, the - Victorian "enameller of ladies' faces". Frankly, I needed to know no more to want this book...I also quite fancy being enamelled, but we'll talk about that another day.

Oddly, after my last post, I discovered when I got Beautiful For Ever home that it is published by Long Barn Books, Susan Hill's publishing company, the genesis of which is described in Howard's End is on the Landing.

It's a very satisfying book, in terms of its size and weight, and the cover is truly scrumptious. It's a terribly bookish book; everything about it screams 'book'! So, me and books, kid in sweetshop, in I plunged. Immediately, I was reminded of the superb The Suspicions of Mr Whicher; same era, packed with scandals-amongst-the-upper-echelons, crimes hiding other crimes, early modern legal and forensic application, unsolved riddles and, even now, a slightly gauzy veil hanging over The Truth. Indeed, Mme Rachel spent some time in prison with Constance Kent, a name familiar to fans of the Kate Summerscale tome from the Road Hill House murder case. Beautiful For Ever, then, is a perfect companion work to Whicher, and of particular interest to lovers of Victorian crime. Both books are detailed and readable accounts of true crimes that rocked Dickensian Britain, and give a genuine insight into the inspiration behind classics like Lady Audley's Secret and Wilkie Collins' oeuvre.

There is clearly an impressive amount of research behind this book - records have been unearthed that have remained hidden or buried for decades. The sheer quantity of references at the back of the book pay homage to the work done by Helen Rappaport. It's a real page turner, and I have to say that whilst not quite as engaging as Whicher, I thoroughly enjoyed Beautiful For Ever.

You can sense my 'but', right? Ok, here it is. My 'but'. There is a fantastic amount of spelling errors in here, and bearing in mind this comes hot from the presses of Susan Hill's own company, I find myself very disappointed with the editing. At one point, there is actually a financial figure cited that is clearly lacking a zero. At another, a character is referred to by a name she doesn't adopt until a few years hence, and this new name appearing unexplained and then disappearing again until later in the book is very confusing. (I could rant for some time about the increasing number of spelling and grammatical errors I'm noticing in books, but I'll leave that, like enamelling, and the tattoo I've been promising myself for 15 years, till a more appropriate time). It should be noted here that my 'but' does not reflect in any way on Rappaport herself, for whom I have the utmost admiration as both researcher and writer.

So, 'but' out of the way, I will also say that there is a tantalising end to the story as a character - possibly the one I found most intriguing throughout - who had disappeared some time earlier, re-appears in a shock revelation under a pseudonym, and that not her first. Rappaport's hold-back-and-reveal in this instance really delights and rewards the careful reader.

Beautiful For Ever, for some reason, feels like it wants to be given a mark out of ten, but I'm not in the habit of laying stars on books. If I were... no, I won't. This is a well-investigated, easy-readable, fascinating story about the lengths, and enormous amounts of money (trust me, you'll be astounded!), that women will invest in the beauty industry in the hope of making themselves look better than ...what? They used to. The woman next door. The current star of stage or screen. They did yesterday. We've learned nothing, ladies, as my Bobbi Brown makeup compact testifies.

Resistance (1), with thoughts on landscape

2010-04-13T09:19:00.000-07:00

"Sweet April! Many a thought
Is wedded unto thee, as hearts are wed..."

...claimed Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and I'm inclined to agree. Spring gives rise to thoughts of newness (I may decorate, or at least re-arrange, my bedroom; I want a new job; I'll start drinking Camomile tea; when will my Croquet set arrive?) and of romance (surely this year will come "a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love", as Sylvia Plath once put it, adding plaintively, "Let me have him for this British Spring..."). She meant Ted. She got him.

In the true spirit of Plath, then, this morning, sun blazing, I threw on a flowery shirt dress and converse, slicked on some red lippy and cycled (I love my bike the way littler girls love ponies) into the grounds of the stately home that butts up against my back garden. A mile to the big house, and past it, down winding country lanes to a rocky crater where I would be sheltered from wind and tourist alike. It was close to too much - fat bees buzzed past my head, skylarks darted above, the creak of tree buds popping open was almost audible. It was like standing in a cloud of spring poetry. I spread out my grandparents old tartan travelling rug and settled into mackerel pate and cucumber sandwiches, dates, elderflower juice... I am not exaggerating when I say I took out my ipod (one day soon it will be a gramophone) and fired up some forties dancehall ballads. There was no-one for miles. The decades melted away, and once I had climbed inside my book, for a few hours, I wasn't even me.

At the Cambridge Wordfest this weekend, I had stumbled (figuratively - I'm fairly steady on my feet) on a talk by Owen Sheers about his new novel, White Ravens, which made me want to read his last novel, Resistance; and so this morning, in my private 1940s crater, I did. Happily, and entirely non-coincidentally, Resistance is set in an imagined 1945, where the D-Day landings have failed and German troops are invading British shores. It is also set in the Welsh countryside, which is not entirely dissimilar to that of the Peak District, where I live.

Now, I'm wary of novels written by poets - for one whose craft is paring down, finding the perfect word or expression, the lengthy telling of a story with many characters and plot twists is surely an arduous task, and one that many have not met appropriately. So far though, I'm good with Sheers, though I may be giving him a long leash on account of his passion for landscape poetry, which I share with all my heart. Indeed, the talk on Sunday was lead for some time in that direction, and Sheers made the comment that it is not just that landscape shapes us, but that crucially, it is the landscape that we encounter as children that most influences our adult selves. I was reminded of Wordsworth (Sheers was Poet-in-Residence at Grasmere some years ago), and of the impact that The Prelude had on me as an A-Level student, when this idea of landscape-as-parent was first explicitly laid before me. I was deeply affected by it, by the reflection of my own experiences that I found in the poem. As an English teacher, I now call this, in my professional capacity, 'pathetic fallacy,' but it is so much more than that. Like Sheers, I was brought up amongst hills and peaks, stone farmhouses and weather-beaten woodland, and the power that a cloudy day can have over one's mood, the electric charge in the air the hour before a storm, the heightened sensations that accompany the haze of midsummer, these are not mere literary technique, but all-consuming events. Here, in these moments,landscape teaches, points out, shows us other ways of seeing. It becomes a part of us, of who we are, and of who we will become.

I lived in London for five years, a period which ended because I could not live without my fields and peaks any longer. I was limbless, without this landscape. Unwhole. "It holds us more than we ever reckon, the few square miles of territory where we are born and bred," said another great author of place, Daphne du Maurier. And she knew what she was talking about. Menabilly is the strongest character in every one of her books.

The romance of Spring, placed in a landscape like the one in which I am lucky enough to currently live, is infectious. It takes me on journeys I would never embark on, should I still live in the city. It has taken me on today's journey, along country roads to hidden valleys, to 1945, to an imagined past, to the carefully chosen words of an author I may never have glanced at had my ears not pricked up at that word, "landscape". Perhaps we read only what we already know, even if on a subconscious level. Perhaps we each fit into a specific time or place, even if we are born outside of it - I know I've felt homesick for places I've never been. Perhaps Resistance will be the perfect novel for this final week of the Easter holidays.

Howard's End is on the Landing

2010-04-09T03:47:00.000-07:00

Oh, that I had Susan Hill's discipline! To spend a year reading only books that I already own, and to hold back on buying anything new, would be fantastically rewarding, a kind of satisfying mopping up exercise. I often look uncomfortably at books I have bought and not read; they eye me back with contempt, make me squirm guiltily. "J'accuse," they seem to say; if I had left them in the bookshop, someone would have bought them who would have read them, and their life's purpose would have been granted. But I, selfishly, am leaving them unopened, unenjoyed, pointless, on shelves and in piles, ignored, unloved... Stop! Stop! Enough! I know.

The problem, of course, is that I enjoy purchasing books almost as much as I love reading them. The act of perusing titles, selecting interesting ones and taking them down from the shelf, squeezing what one can from the blurb and brief jacket reviews from the TLS, deciding whether or not this particular novel is for you at this particular time, is exhilarating. The discovery of an unheard-of gem, the re-issue of an old favourite in beautiful binding...these are experiences that equal, sometimes, the devouring of the book itself. Indeed, the number of books on my shelves that I have bought and not yet (I refuse to say never) read, indicates that sometimes, the finding and buying is in fact a greater experience than the reading. It all boils down, I suppose, to the love of the physical book as much as of the story within. Dislike of the e-reader, explained.

Books about books are always interesting to those who love books. I suppose books about golf are interesting to those who, unfathomably, love golf. There is, though, something rather post-modern in reading about reading. Perhaps it is because reading is such a personal and private business that it is pleasant sometimes to throw open one's literary windows and to let in someone else's reading habits, to learn of their preferences and to hear their wisdoms. One may not always agree with these new and strange views on literature, but they are of profound interest nevertheless.

Susan Hill, in Howard's End is on the Landing, pleasantly affirms many of my own views, which is a boon to one's literary confidence. I found myself yesterday sitting on a train, actually nodding at a passage on Jane Austen, about whom I entirely share Ms Hill's opinion:

"Perhaps the nineteenth century, whose style of dress and architecture, design and manners, I find cold and distancing, is to blame for my inability to appreciate Austen, whose cool, ironic style is somehow all of a piece with that formality and porcelain veneer."

With the very lake out of which Colin Firth appeared sodden in the TV series of Pride and Prej just a ten minute bicycle ride out of my back garden, this may seem odd, but is, I am afraid, true.

Howard's End is on the Landing is well-structured, each chapter being short and carefully labelled so that one might find five pages on children's picture books, seven on Hardy, a handful on Bruce Chatwin; digestible chunks that can easily be returned to should one need a wise comment on a specific author or genre. It is funny in places - the chapter entitled "The Dregs" being particularly amusing, as Hill runs through a collection of books, the origin of whose appearance in her house she cannot fathom, with such delectable titles as Red Grouse and Moorland Management and Sue Barton: District Nurse. We all have our equivalents.

Hill has also alerted me to several books about which I either knew nothing, or had passed over. I shall at some point investigate further The Smaller Sky by John Wain and the life and works of Elizabeth Bowen.

There are also shadowy hints at a bleaker side of publishing - the cuts in Arts funding, for example, leads Hill to an interesting discussion of whether or not plays can stand alone as literature or whether they must be performed in order to fulfil their purpose. If the latter, does the lack of repertory theatre these days mean that certain plays, or styles of play, even playwrights' oeuvres, will die out altogether? There is more than one oblique comment about the lack of culture in modern culture - again, hints at a dystopic future for the literatii.

I do not always agree with Hill's summation of books or writers. I cannot bear crime or detective fiction, about which she raves, for example. I have never been able to be fully absorbed in any Virginia Woolf other than Orlando, which is the one Woolf about which Hill is disparaging. This, however, is simply interesting: I am not so self-absorbed that I will only tolerate literary criticism with which I agree!

No. My one criticism of Howard's End is on the Landing would be this: there are far too many - and often, frankly, dull - anecdotes about famous authors Hill has met or known. It becomes tedious. She met Roald Dahl twice, on both occasions in a professional capacity. Neither reveals an interesting enough story for retelling. And yet she does, in a 'my dear friend Roald Dahl' kind of way. It is not an illuminating addition to the book ( surely everyone knows he was a grump?), and I would far rather she simply talked about her daughters' reactions to his books and her own experiences of reading them aloud to said daughters. The same is true of her chapter on Iris Murdoch - tell me about the books, Susan, not an amusing evening you spent with the writer. We weren't there, and it seems from this anecdote that we really needed to be...

This book is at its best when Hill allows her passions full and free rein. Here she is on reading slowly:

"Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings...Not every book is worth that sort of effort...they are ice-cream reading and barely a trace of the flavour remains half an hour after they are finished. Sometimes, only ice-cream will do. But we are not nourished physically, mentally, artistically or spiritually by its literary equivalent."

Luckily for Susan Hill, despite having at least ten books by my bed that I have not yet (the crucial yet) read, I bought this one. And in this case, read it immediately. And I can highly recommend, if a copy sits in a similar pile in your own home, that you slide it out and give it a go too.

The Chalet School in Exile (2)

2010-04-07T05:03:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start with a brain teaser - see if you can work out, from what we are given in Chapter 1, how this happy family are related:

"Dr Jem Russell, head of the Sonnalpe Sanatorium in Tyrol, glanced at his young sister-in-law, Jo Bettany...Jo gave an impish grin, and turned and ran along the wide corridor to the bathroom, where she found her adopted sister, Marya Cecilia Humphries, commonly known as Robin...Robin stuck her fingers in her ears and raced on down the long corridor to the big room where the little Russells, together with their young cousins, the Bettanys, and Dr Russell's younger niece, Primula Mary Venables, were curled up round a big armchair...Robin ruffled the silvery fair curls that covered Peggy's small head...'All right, but not ve babies,' stipulated Rix, Peggy's twin...Jacky [was] the youngest member of the Bettany family present - though in India a little brother and sister known to the Sonnalpe people as 'second twins' were beginning to trot all over now...Sybil and Jacky crawled out of their corner...Sybil sometimes resented the mothering...She had been known to madden Rix by chanting, 'You're only a cousin! David an' me belong!'

Who the heck is David? I re-read the first chapter and drew a family tree, which took me most of the afternoon. This is not a book for those who are easily confused or who find it hard to remember who's who. Having not read any Chalet School books in probably 25 years or more, the names of the girls (oh, Chapter 1 is nothing compared to the lists of names and descriptions that come later - it's like The Iliad!) meant little to me, and I have to admit that after a while I gave up trying to remember who was involved in which adventure or prank and who was the same age as who else and who was best friends with whom, and just got on with reading the story.

I suppose what I most wanted to find out is, is The Chalet School in Exile just another twee early twentieth century girlschool novel, or, considering its subject matter, is it darker; is it, in fact, a War novel? It manages, I think, to span some sort of strange gap between the two. It is notably emotionless, imbued with a crazily stiff upper lip. Deaths, of Jews the girls witness being attacked, and of friends and relations, are covered in such a matter-of-fact way as to be off-hand. They are like newspaper obituaries written by a journalist who never met the deceased. I find this fascinating; today's children's literature treats emotion in almost the opposite way. Consider the works of Jacqueline Wilson, prolific writer of modern girls' books, and as such, a worthy comparison with Elinor M Brent-Dyer. Emotion, the description of it and the dealing with it, is at the core of what Wilson writes. Today's young female reader is shown that she should bare her feelings for all to see, that she should display her grief rather than lock it away. The Chalet School teaches a very different lesson, perhaps one that translated as the 'spirit of the Blitz', that oh-so-English manner of mildly shaking an angry fist at the Luftwaffe as they razed our cities to the ground.

There are little snatches of news thrown into the story that remind us with a shock that this was written in 1940, long before the worst atrocities of the Nazi regime had come to light. Concentration Camps are mentioned as places of torture, no more. A news broadcast from Germany "was vehemently insisting that a U-boat had sunk the Ark Royal", and the girls spend their evenings learning how to treat burns and put on gas masks. The most glaringly ironic aspect of the story comes, though, when the School must de-camp - and they choose to move to Guernsey! At the time of writing, Brent-Dyer had no way of knowing that the Channel Islands would be occupied.

The book is very much divided into two halves. The first is set in Austria and involves much fleeing from gestapo officers. A small group of girls and two male doctors, sent to protect them, (poor weak creatures that the girls, though some are in their twenties, are) escape over the Swiss border in a rather hurried description of a week in disguise as gypsies, tricking Nazis and hiding in barns, eating berries and suffering dreadfully from blisters. The tiny amount of time given to such a vast enterprise is incongruous, and made all the more so by a plan at one point to try to seek refuge in a fictional country, Belsornia, the Belsornian King's daughter being an ex-pupil of the Chalet School. To throw something so ludicrous into a tale of escape from Nazi occupation is on the one hand utterly trivialising, and yet on the other, works, by throwing into greater relief the trueness of what they are running from. It is a technique of which Brecht would have been proud!

Then suddenly, it is a year later, and the new school is about to open on Guernsey. At this point, the book reverts to type, and for a while nothing more interesting happens than that members of the Fourth hide the gardening tools, which go rusty. Things pick up again, however, when a new girl arrives at the school. She is German and haughty - she must be a Nazi! I'll not spoil the reveal.

The Chalet School in Exile is quite unlike anything I have read before, possibly due to the contrast between the usual subject matter of such books, and the individuality of this specific 'adventure'. The language is distancing - did anyone ever really talk like this? There are too many examples for me to isolate one, though the word "quoth" appears at least once, and 'wild' girls are described by one doctor at the San as "stormy petrels", which just seems inappropriate to any place or time as yet recorded! It is terribly elitist - how must the ordinary girls who comprised its main readership have felt at having their state schools described thus: "...the education was good enough of its kind, but the girls of a very different class, with an outlook on life of which her parents disapproved." Poor Guernsey-girl Beth, to have had to suffer such indignity before the Chalet School arrived on her shores!

Whilst not being, obviously, the huge fun that the majority of girlschool books are, this is an intriguing and historically fascinating work, and I am delighted that Girls Gone By have brought it into the public consciousness once more. It is compelling on many levels, and works very well as a companion piece to many of the Persephone titles. As the Headmistress so accurately comments towards the end of the book, "'Oh, drat Hitler and all his works.' With which reprehensible remark the Head picked up her essay books and departed to the study." Quite.

The Driver's Seat

2010-04-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

This is a very hard book to write about, very hard. And if you haven't read it, may also be hard to read about. It is short, a novella, or even a long short story, and it deals essentially with only one day in the life of the protagonist, Lise. We meet Lise as she is shopping for clothes to wear on holiday. Then we travel with her, and spend just one day with her, in an unnamed foreign city. And this sparsity of plot is what makes The Driver's Seat so hard to write about - I could summarise the whole book, every incident, in three lines. I could tell you who she meets and what she does with them, the gist of all her conversations, in two more. But to do so would be to sidestep utterly the point of the book. There is no unexpected ending - we are told early on that her mutilated body will be found by the police the following morning. And Lise, poor, unbalanced, silently screaming Lise, spends the day we spend with her, looking for her murderer. Our only question seems to be: who is he? Which of the several unsavoury male characters that she meets will be the one?

This though, is not, in fact, our only question. Far more pertinent are the questions we have about Lise herself.

I am reminded of Martin Amis' London Fields, although of course, The Driver's Seat came first chronologically, if not in terms of my reading. Amis' murderee "knows the time, she knows the place, she knows the motive, she knows the means. She just doesn't know the man" who will kill her. This too, then, is Lise's predicament. But Spark writes in such a clean, almost jaunty, style that we forget that Lise does not have to go through with it. At any time, she can change her mind and not be murdered. But this does not occur to her, and nor does it occur to us, as we have been told already that her body will be found. It is, therefore, not stoppable.

Lise's movements are reconstructed by the witnesses who see and speak to her. We, as readers, seem to be listening to a series of police interviews. And yet... and yet... that is not what we are hearing, for there is a definite voice narrating this unfortunate tale. Is it Spark's voice? Some other omniscient narrator? And indeed, as omniscience goes, this narrator is seriously lacking, at one point asking us, "Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?"

Why? Why does Lise want to die? Why is suicide not an option, why must she be murdered? Why in this place, on this night, in this way? The more we question her, the further from her, and from knowing the answers to the questions, we seem to get. Is Lise even likable? And does it matter?

It is a story that is read by the head, the intellect, the intelligent part of the reader that wants to know - what does this book tell us about the human condition, about ourselves; what can I learn from it? And yet...and yet... she cries. Lise cries. Quietly and without explanation. And it is this that spoke to my heart. Such tininess, such plain-ness of detail, is what raises Spark's writing above the ordinary. In amongst all the questions this book throws up, the darkness, the coldness, the horror, is just a young woman crying, alone. Not sobbing: that would imply fear. Lise cries tears that simply roll down her cheeks. They are tears of grief.

There is no doubting Muriel Spark's genius as a writer. Jean Brodie has lived with me my whole life, since I first read her story many, many years ago. There too, was a tale edged in darkness. And now Lise will haunt me, forever, I suspect. Spark's women collect in the recesses of my mind, and like shadows in a candlelit house, frequently appear as a flicker in the corner of my mind's eye, so that I am forced to remember them and to consider their various fates. In this way, Spark speaks to my intellect. And yet...and yet...there is the heart, too. Spark always always has heart too.

Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights

2010-04-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

I was sceptical. I was. I was sceptical when she first appeared on the world's radar as a model. I was even more sceptical when she began publishing 'novels'. And when I saw she had a cookery programme on the TV, with accompanying recipe book, I was...well, I was sceptical. But in both the first and last instances, she has won me over - the novels I have yet to be convinced by.

Sophie "grand-daughter of Roald" Dahl is probably as pretty as it's possible to be. Up there with Audrey Hepburn. She's sweet and affable, and as every review has commented, 'her' (it's not, it's rented for the series) kitchen is to die for. So the only thing that could possibly go wrong is the food itself. And I'm going to have to admit it, I'm lovin' the food!

Sophie, or Miss Dahl as I should properly address her, is on my wavelength completely when it comes to eating. She's a fan of mashed potato - I live for the stuff! - and rhubarb and simple soups and scrambling things and grating cheese over things and green stuff and fishy stuff and fruity stuff... I just love her Voluptuous Delights! Despite everything in me telling me this book is just an opportunistic money spinner, I can't help it. I love the food. I like Soph..Miss Dahl.

The book is punctuated with pages of autobiography, which are interesting, funny, heartbreaking in places, and - damn her! - well-written. The accompanying photos are aspirational enough to send me hurtling into charity shops looking for twee bone china cups into which I can slop chocolate mousse. And I've been dreaming of having a gypsy caravan at the bottom of my garden for years anyway, so that's just affirming the validity of a wish already placed.

It's Easter Sunday, yet another day of the year for thinking about nothing but eating well. I'm surrounded by Green & Blacks' eggs and a 'straordinary Black Forest Gateau affair by the Chocolate Alchemist - cherries embedded in white chocolate on a dark chocolate egg - and still my mind is full of the French Onion Soup I've made for tonight's starter. It won't be served in self-consciously mismatching flowery china bowls, but one step at a time, eh? We all need a dream to cling to.

The Great Penguin Bookchase

2010-04-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

This won't take a minute of your time - The Great Penguin Bookchase is like Trivial Pursuit, but is entirely literary. There. If you want a little more, I can tell you it has a big board which you whip round according to dice throws, answering literary questions pertaining to the category you land on, which in turn correspond to the classic Penguin colourings - orange is Classics and Modern, red is Poetry and Plays, yellow is Children's etc. Instead of a pie, your counter is a small garishly coloured plastic bookshelf, and instead of slices of pie, you win...books! Of course! The questions have multiple choice answers, and it's up to the players whether they use them or must answer the question without options.

I've whiled away many hours with family and friends playing this, and it looks impressive sitting in the corner of the dining room, as the box is an enormous Penguin book. Great fun, great gift, Great Penguin Bookchase!

The Enchanted April

2010-04-03T02:41:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Von Arnim is herself an interesting proposition: cousin of Katherine Mansfield, she made few friends with the sometimes callous portrayal of thinly-disguised actual people in her novels. Rebecca West said she had "little heart", an accusation hard to believe when one reads The Enchanted April; for this is a story that is all heart. Perhaps a little too sentimental for some, its fluffiness is spiked with a frustrating mean streak, little droplets of spite that sour the meringue.

Written in 1921, it tells of four women, previously unacquainted, who answer an advert in a newspaper to rent an Italian Villa for a month. Each has her own reason for needing to 'get away' from someone or something; a husband, a lifestyle, herself... Naturally, each eventually sees her own faults, as well as those of the others, and the air, the beauty, the plants and the castle itself all work their magic, so that as May dawns, the four women are changed forever, and entirely for the better. So much for a surprise ending.

It shares something with Nancy Mitford, but is, I think, of more literary merit. There is a beautiful style at work here, redolent of the time of its writing, which harbours a wit and observancy typical perhaps of Wilde: "I hate authors," complains Lady Caroline, "I wouldn't mind them so much if they didn't write books." There is a farcical interlude towards the end, befitting of Noel Coward - people arriving unexpectedly, seeing things they shouldn't, jumping to conclusions, hiding identities...but of course, it all works out in the end, as the utterly lovable Mrs Wilkins predicts.

The story flits cleverly from one of the four heroines to the other, like a camera panning across a landscape and lingering for a short while on individuals it finds, one in the top garden, one on the battlements, one in the hills with her solitary picnic.

It is an enjoyable book, simple, light, and easy on the intellect, but it's unlikely to ever sit in my all time Top Ten. It is described by critics variously as a "confection", an "omelette" - a sweet, at best a light lunch, nothing heavier or more filling. Ideal for whiling away two consecutive hot summer's days in the garden, but to grant it more time would be as frivolous as the life from which Lady Caroline is running.

Girls Gone By Publishers / The Chalet School in Exile (1)

2010-04-02T10:12:00.000-07:00

The chain looks like this: I read an article by A.S. Byatt about children's literature at the turn of the (nineteenth to twentieth) century, she being somewhat of an expert since the research that went into The Children's Book, and felt a compunction to re-read some of those classics she mentioned, books that had had a profound effect on me as a child (though I am not quite Edwardian), such as The Secret Garden and The Phoenix and The Carpet.

Thus, I found myself in the Children's Classics section of Britain's only High Street bookshop.

And there I stumbled upon the beautiful item pictured above. This edition of The Chalet School in Exile, says the blurb on the back, "has been published to commemorate the 70th Anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, and in memory of all those who lost their lives." Now I am a huge fan of the Elinor M Brent-Dyer / Angela Brazil school (excuse the pun) of writing - I spent my childhood summers in my grandparents house in Devon, and the bedroom in which I stayed had a cabinet crammed with such books, most of them with my great-aunt's name scrawled lazily in her own hand on the inside cover. A voracious reader even then, I ploughed merrily through the lot, ankle-socked legs waving in the air as I lay on my stomach in nana's garden, gently turning the kind of nut-brown only children go and that I have never gone since. (It may be worth noting that this was in fact during the 1970s/80s, and not the 1920s, as I like to make it sound. It may also be of interest that my favourite treasure in this cabinet of stylised girlschool literature was the beautifully dated Dimsie Moves Up, whilst my favourite of the cover art was the dust jacket of The New House Mistress).

The Chalet School in Exile has been re-published (it was originally available in 1940) by an outfit I had not heard of until now, Girls Gone By Publishers, whose website I shall be visiting regularly as of today. It's a beautiful paperback edition (£12 at Waterstones), published using the full first edition text and with matching cover art: "This original dustwrapper is extremely rare, and, very unusually, it was changed while the book was still in its first printing. It is thought that Chambers received complaints that the illustration was unsuitable for children..." Indeed, it shows a Nazi commander questioning two girls, pupils at the eponymous Chalet School in Austria, when the country is invaded and the school inhabitants are forced to flee.

This edition, then, includes a relevant WWII timeline, complete with maps, a biography of Elinor M Brent-Dyer, a geekily detailed publishing history of this particular title, and much more. I am delighted to have it, and to have discovered this wonderful publishing venture, which I really hope thrives. A review will follow when I have actually read the book, instead of simply being ridiculously excited about owning it...

Wolf Hall (3)

2010-03-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

I am torn between "meh" and loving this book. "Meh" because I didn't realise it would follow so closely the Katherine-Henry-Anne story yet again - this really has been done to death now, surely? - and loving it because...well, it is just so absorbingly written. And Mantel is right: Cromwell is an intriguing character, and one ripe to hang this story on; and she brings him utterly to life; and perhaps I did learn a lot about the machinations that go on behind the scenes of law-making, but... there's just such a 'but' with this book.

First of all, you have to have time to read Wolf Hall. Big, fat chunks of time. I have been working to the point of exhaustion these last few weeks, and without a solid two hours every day to devote to the book, I just couldn't get into it. Fifteen minutes on a train here, ten minutes before I turn the light out there, just won't cut it with this monster. I found myself bored and frustrated with the book. But - there's that 'but' again - that's not to say that if you do have the time needed to really get into it, it's not brilliant. A rare Saturday morning free to lie around and drink coffee and do nothing else but read this weekend, proved that.

There are some wonderful humorous moments that I wasn't expecting, some great witticisms on the part of both Cromwell and others, which add a very human dimension to this well-worn tale. It undoubtedly forces a new look at Cromwell, an historical figure whose reputation precedes him always, and which perhaps might be reconsidered in the light of Mantel's thorough research. And it is a good novel, and interesting - the title, for example, is very clever. Wolf Hall itself plays no role in the book, yet is the very final sentence. It is as though we and the characters are always pushing forward, toward something, toward this place and the events it holds, as though Wolf Hall itself is a great towering representation of fate, that sits like a predator waiting for us to finally arrive... for it is the family seat of the Seymours, whose youngest daughter Jane will be Anne Boleyn's successor. And it is at Wolf Hall, one presumes, that the story will be taken up in the sequel currently underway. And of course, I shall read the sequel eagerly. Eagerly...but...

Lowry seascapes

2010-03-15T09:27:00.000-07:00

Mills, clogs, whippets... the classic Lowry abounds aplenty at Manchester's Lowry Centre, which has, as one would expect, a definitive and insightful collection of the great man's paintings. It was only this weekend, though, that I was reminded of the spare simplicity and haunting hollowness of his seascapes, which previously rocked my world in Glasgow. There is something utterly absorbing about the white nothingness of the pictures, and I find myself sucked into them far more than I am into his Where's Wally-esque northern working scenes.

Bright Star

2010-03-09T09:36:00.001-08:00

I never got to see it in the cinema, but guess what Auntie Amazon delivered today?

Bright Star is beautiful in its claustrophobia - despite many outdoor scenes, there is still the feeling that the whole story takes place, if not in a single house, then in a snowdome, Hampstead with a glass case over it. It is not the story of Keats - it is the story of his relationship with Fanny Brawne, and they are stiflingly central to the film. All other characters are incidental, although Paul Schneider's Charles Brown is exceptional. As soon as Keats leaves for Italy, even though several months pass before his death, his absence is notable. Fanny is left forlornly under glass in London, and John has gone beyond the dome; we know he will never return to her.

The film seems to have accurately gauged the relationship; I have always had the impression that Fanny was the bolder of the two, the stronger, and this certainly comes across in the film. Indeed sometimes, Ben Whishaw's whispering little Keats seems to all but fade into the background. I wanted to - thought, even, that I would - fall completely in love with this Keats, but I didn't, and I think it is for that reason. He simply isn't enough of a presence.

The script is well done - this description of what it is to read a poem is wonderful:

"A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be IN the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not 'work the lake out'. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes, and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."

There are some beautiful readings of Keats' poetry and letters, and some devastatingly gorgeous set pieces, just as one would expect from Jane Campion. It hasn't touched my heart as much as I anticipated, but nevertheless, I think tonight I shall lie on the rug in front of the fire, and by candlelight read The Eve of St Agnes aloud...

Wolf Hall (2)

2010-03-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

Two days in. Is it - could it be? - living up to the hype? Well, I'll begin by allaying fears that my adoration of The Children's Book may have been shaken; it hasn't, not one bit. AS Byatt was robbed of the Booker, and I stand by that view. That does not, however, mean that Wolf Hall doesn't deserve its many accolades. It is everything you have heard it is - it is unputdownable, the ultimate, "oh, I'll just read the next little bit" book. I'm over my dislike of the present tense; it's so well worked that it feels right, the correct way for this story to be told. But there is another problem, and it's a peculiar one; not one I've ever come across before. It almost feels like an experiment, and I'm not sure that the results are positive. Let me explain: unless he is being addressed by another character, Cromwell's name is never used. The story is told in third person, thereby making use of the omniscient narrator, yet this narrator only ever calls Cromwell "he". The problem arises when another male character is also referred to by the pronoun - you reach a point where you simply can't tell if the "he" you are reading about is Cromwell or the last named male. Here is a short yet simple example:

"That's like Suffolk; to think the letter of the law is some kind of luxury. He whispers to the cardinal again..."

That "He" refers to Cromwell, even though the last named male was Suffolk. I've read whole pages, only to realise that though I thought I was reading about one character, I was actually reading about Cromwell, and I have to re-read it replacing the image in my head with the correct one.

This vexation aside, I am enjoying it. The constant use of the pronoun, combined with the present tense, gives a genuine sensation of being inside Cromwell's head. It is set out almost as a play, with scenes, which is very appropriate, as I think we tend to see the whole Tudor era as some sort of theatrical performance anyway. It reminds me in tone of Christopher Rush's Will, crossed with - I hate to say it, but I can't hide from the truth - The Other Boleyn Girl.

And though it's absolutely no fault of Hilary Mantel's, I find it terribly frustrating that my image of Henry VIII is no longer of a paunchy, fine-calved red-head, but of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. And I didn't even watch The Tudors!

The Diary of Miss Idilia

2010-03-07T10:20:00.000-08:00

True story or literary hoax? It's in the memoir section in Britain's now-only book chain, and nothing on the cover indicates it to be fiction. Yet, flicking through it, I couldn't help but feel it looked far too literary to be the genuine diary of a seventeen year old girl. By which I mean no disrespect toward seventeen year old girls, or, indeed, their diaries. Being the suspicious sort, I did a little research, but am none the wiser - in fact, all I've really learned is that a lot of other people share my doubts. Now call me macabre, but I am only interested in this if it is the bona fide article; anyone have insider information on this puzzle?

Three Great Beginnings

2010-03-07T09:34:00.000-08:00

In writing about Carson McCullers last week, I was reminded how immediately she can draw the reader into her books, and this got me to thinking about other great beginnings. Here, in no particular order, are three I love:

[1] The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you've read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether.

Direct address works so well here, as our un-named guide pulls us through the back alleys of Victorian London. She flits before us, explaining the streets, the houses, the characters, before plonking us headlong in the middle of the story. I could eat this book.

[2] Angel by Elizabeth Taylor
"'into the vast vacuity of the empyrean,'" Miss Dawson read. "And can you tell me what 'empyrean' means?"
"It means," Angel said. Her tongue moistened her lips. She glanced out of the classroom window at the sky beyond the bare trees. "It means 'the highest heavens'."
"Yes, the sky," Miss Dawson said suspiciously. She handed the exercise book to Angel, feeling baffled. The girl had a great reputation as a liar and when this strange essay had been handed in - "A Storm at Sea" - Miss Dawson had gone through it in a state of alarm, fearful lest she had read it before or ought to have read it before. She had spent an agitated evening scanning Pater and Ruskin and others. Though disdaining such ornamental prose, such crescendoes and alliterations, before she would say that the piece was vulgarly over-written, she hoped to find out who had written it.

So begins the tale of one of the most unlikeable heroines in literature. For which very reason, I adore her. She did write the essay, and the teacher's reaction to it is incredibly interesting, even - perhaps especially - today, when there are so many novels being published; how many times have we read something and been unable to decide if we don't like it because it is intellectually over our heads, or if it is, in fact, just overwrought tosh? That the teacher cannot tell if this essay is awful, or Ruskin, says so much...

[3] Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, and auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I've got Tourette's. My mouth won't quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks empty of breath and tone...words rush out of the cornucopia of my brain to course over the surface of the world, tickling reality like fingers on piano keys. Caressing, nudging...Then when it comes, the urge to shout in the church, the nursery, the crowded movie house. It's an itch at first. Inconsequential. But that itch is soon a torrent behind a straining dam. Noah's flood. That itch is my whole life. Here it comes now. Cover your ears. Build an ark.
"Eat me!" I scream.

Lionel, believe it or not, is a private detective. And this is a very clever novel. The beat and pace builds and subsides with Lionel's attacks (tics as much as words) and the descriptions of how Tourette's feels from the inside are extraordinary. Lethem uses words not just as a way of furthering narrative, but also as characters, and even simply as noises. This is an unusual choice for me, but it's one I recommend investing in.

Wolf Hall (1)

2010-03-05T11:16:00.000-08:00

And so it begins...

From Nancy Mitford to Hilary Mantel - is it really so odd? My paperback - and therefore transportable, hence readable - copy arrived yesterday. I am disappointed to find it is written in present tense; I'm really rather averse to novels in the present tense. However, Wolf Hall has had such consistent praise that I am willing to overlook this fact and dive straight in. I cannot believe that I will prefer it to - or even like it as much as - The Children's Book, its Booker counterpart in volume if nothing else, but to enjoy it even half as much I shall consider a triumph. I may be gone some time...

Wigs On The Green

2010-03-05T10:17:00.001-08:00

It is never really necessary to give a long or detailed review of a Nancy Mitford; you know you either like her or you don't. As I have explained previously, I have been particularly interested in this novel because, like the guy you cannot have because he's with your best friend, it has been teasingly unavailable for so long a time.

Was it worth the wait? As I say, you're either on board with Nancy or you're not, and as I've also said, I most certainly am. Wigs on the Green is as barbed as we would expect, although I agree entirely with Nancy's assessment that Eugenia, the character based on Unity, is in no way offensive to her inspiration. Of course Eugenia is ridiculed; she is a Fascist, and as Laura Thompson states in her wonderful biography of Nancy, Life in a Cold Climate, "the point is that the war against Fascism was necessary and Fascism, in Nancy's opinion, was not." Eugenia is a Boadicea figure, an Amazonian Britannia, and impressive indeed as such. And Unity, apparently, was exactly this in real life. The book seems to me to be a fond tribute and a gentle dig rather than a cruel satire, and is entirely befitting the political climate in which it was written. The Mosley figure, however, upon incurring Diana's wrath, Nancy did entirely cut from the book - he is mentioned, but never appears.

Wigs on the Green does not have the pacey wit of The Pursuit of Love, but equally it is not as narratively frantic as Pigeon Pie. It is biting: an artist character introduced as a "surrealiste" suffers a response from the wonderfully named Jasper Aspect "that he had once written a play which took place inside Jean Cocteau's stomach. 'Unfortunately I sold the film rights,' he added, 'otherwise you could have had them. The film was put on in Paris and many people had to leave the Jockey Club and stop being Roman Catholics because of it. I was pleased.'" The re-publication of Wigs on the Green also uncovers one of Nancy's cleverest satires - Peersmont, the asylum for lunatic peers, "built on the exact plans of the House of Lords, so that the boys should feel at home." A visit to this "bin" reveals a Duke who considers that "Socialists put a perfectly exaggerated value on human life...what on earth does it matter if a few people are killed, we're not at war, are we? We don't need 'em for cannon fodder." Nancy can stick the knife into her own kind with a lipstick coated smile. She also has a fair go at the institute of marriage, which she describes as "a great bore - chap's waistcoats lying about in one's bedroom, and so on." In fact, little is left out of the line of Nancy's witty fire.

This is another beautiful period piece, of a time and place, and by a class of person, very much rooted in the 'then'. For me, Nancy displays more brevity than Wodehouse, but does not come close to her great friend Evelyn Waugh, whose Decline and Fall is possibly the funniest satire of the era. And froth it may be, but life is all the sweeter for a bit of meringue.

William - An Englishman

2010-03-01T03:29:00.000-08:00

Although I will offer brief criticism of this short novel, I feel I must make it clear from the outset that this is one of the most powerful fictional stories of war I have read, and is a unique and masterful work. William - An Englishman is both a love letter to the ordinary man, and a gently sarcastic criticism of him. It is also a tirade, a furious, heartbreaking account of the futility, not just of war, but of life itself, and of war when it becomes one's life.

The style of Persephone Book No.1 is a little hard to get into; an omniscient narrator tells us what to think about William Tully rather than letting us form our own opinions by listening to his conversation or assessing his actions. Indeed, there is very little dialogue at all by which we may see a man's mind at work. As a result, the first section of the book - it falls into three distinct parts - is almost Brechtian in its didacticism; it forces one to stand back and observe the foolishness of a certain breed of political activist, a type whom I recognise as still very much in existence today. This 'type' is more concerned with the thrill of rebellion, the joy of swimming against the flow, than they are with reaching the goal toward which they aim. And it is this aspect of William and his new wife Griselda that Cicely Hamilton sends up, as their all-consuming battles for pacifist, socialist and women's rights excludes their awareness of the growing threat of war, to their own fatal cost.

Written in France "in a tent within sound of guns and shells" (The Persephone Catalogue), William - An Englishman is one of the few novels of WWI to have been composed whilst the trenches were still full, active and bloody. It is clear that the author knew well of what she wrote - the detail in her descriptions of mangled bodies and the machinery that ripped them apart is distinctly un-feminine, a comment that would have been, I am sure, taken as the compliment it is meant. Hamilton did indeed work in a Hospital at the Front, and her horror at what she saw, and anger toward the idealistic Edwardian mind that allowed it to happen is evident.

By Chapter 4, one is entirely invested in William and Griselda. We are frustrated at their naivety; honeymooning away from the world in a cottage in the Belgian countryside, they mistake the distant rattle of gunfire for far-off thunder, and our dread begins to mount. With increasing dramatic irony, we urge them to look at the evidence before them and to see it for what it is. When they return from a walk in the hills to find their caretaker and her family fled, leaving only a handwritten note in a language they do not understand and can make nothing of, our own hindsight bids us shake them into awareness. Awareness does finally come, but at enormous cost. Their childish tantrums - a peculiarly English behaviour perhaps referencing the title - in the face of captivity by German troops tears at the reader's heart.

This is not one of Persephone's twee titles, and sits almost uncomfortably next to Misses Pettigrew and Buncle. It sits instead with Testament of Youth, as a tract on life ruined as much through the destruction of ideals and principles as by physical loss. Yet even in Testament of Youth, the men killed are heroes, decorated for bravery; Cicely Hamilton shows us men dying ingloriously, unmedalled, barely mourned, and forgotten.

She must also be one of the few writers of that lost generation with courage enough to address a largely unmentioned casualty of war; the female prisoner. The Edwardian gift for euphemism in fact adds to the horror of women at the mercy of "licentious soldiery"; the term itself, with 'soldier' at its core, almost accepts that rape is a consequence of war.

On one level, Hamilton appears to understand the appeal of active service, and presents many and diverse reasons for it. There are occasional shades of patriotism, even of Rupert Brooke's "corner of a foreign field": upon capture, William has a "vague, unreasoning, natural longing for home...It mattered not that the England he longed for was small, suburban, crowded and noisily pretentious; he craved for it in the face of death...He knew now that it was dreadful to die away from her."

William - An Englishman is far from being a cosy Sunday afternoon read. Instead, and more worthily, it is essential literature of the type that reminds us; it reminds us of what happened, of how it happened, that it should not happen, and that we must never forget those to whom it happened, no matter how insignificant and small their part may seem to have been.

Carson McCullers

2010-02-28T02:40:00.000-08:00

I had always known her name, been aware of titles such as The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. She was associated in my head with some vague idea of cool, that she herself was cool, that people who read her were cool. These were people who read John Steinbeck and probably listened to jazz, were young and revolutionary, but quietly and carefully so. I had no idea then, when for some reason that I cannot now recall, I picked up The Member of the Wedding, that I would be proven both right and wrong in my assumptions, and that I would become a devoted fan.

Sometimes, one talks of a book that one loves. "Oh, that's one of my all time favourites..." we enthuse when it is mentioned in conversation, and feel pride and a certain ownership over said title. At other times, it is the author about whom we express adoration, and talk in terms of an entire oeuvre rather than a single book. Thus, I can talk for Britain on The Magus, though I would never call myself a huge fan of John Fowles, and on The Crow Road, though again not on Iain Banks. It is not, however, enough for me say that I love The Sea The Sea: it is Iris Murdoch whom I love. Muriel Spark, E.M Forster, and, as of last summer, Carson McCullers belong also to this latter category.

Aged just twenty-three when her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, was published, McCullers drew herself from the start in the role of the individualist, and the characters in her books do the same. They are magnificent examples of the downtrodden screaming for recognition; the fight for the right to express themselves is the crux of much of their motivation. This fight for expression may be fuelled by political reasons, as in the case of Blount in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, or social, like Dr Copeland in the same book. It may be teenage desire to find one's calling, seen in all McCullers' young, female leads, who reflect her own androgyny (their very names, Frankie, Mick reflecting hers) and fierce need to find their own space. These characters - and I cannot think of a writer who creates more intriguing protagonists - inhabit the familiar world of Depression-era literature: small towns in the American South; heat and dust; silent night-time streets punctuated by drunks and brawls; drifters; racial segregation... it is easy to draw comparisons between both Mick, and more particularly Frankie, and Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. But to do so would be simplistic. McCullers' novels are messier, dirtier, more layered. Her leads are not as pure as Jem and Scout, as their inquisitiveness takes them into areas Harper Lee never ventured near, such as sexuality.

None of this explains why it is not simply one book about which I rave, but about McCullers' whole body of work. The reason is perhaps that her voice resonates so clearly in all her stories that when I read them, she begins to supercede authorship and becomes an entity within my life; it as though she were sitting by my bed telling me the tale. Her tone belies meaning - she explains herself through stylistic means, and once one is attuned to that style, a new level of understanding is reached. And so I find that in certain moods, I crave McCullers' writing, in the same way that one might be urged to see a particular friend, watch a specific type of film or have a certain food. I need simply to hear that voice again, to immerse myself in her world, and when that desire comes, I know no other writer will fulfil that need. I am the same with Murdoch - in another mood, only she will do, only her particular voice will suffice. I have a friend for whom Hemingway fills that role.

I will end then, with that voice about which I am so passionate. Here is the opening - for me, one of the greatest beginnings in literature, and my very first taste of Carson McCullers - of The Member of the Wedding:

"It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid."

Top Ten Evocative Book Titles (1)

2010-02-27T02:45:00.000-08:00

All of these books I have read, their titles being simply too intriguing for me to leave on the shelf, though those couple that are out-of-print (OP) I have been unable to, as yet, get my grubby paws on. Regardless of their content and literary merit, here then, are ten titles whose names alone conjure magical images in my mind:

[1] The Girl from the Candle-lit Bath ~ Dodie Smith (OP)
[2] My Swordhand is Singing ~ Marcus Sedgwick
[3] The Heart is a Lonely Hunter ~ Carson McCullers
[4] Love of Seven Dolls ~ Paul Gallico (OP)
[5] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ~Robert M Pirsig
[6] A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ~ Dave Eggers
[7] Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight ~ Alexandra Fuller
[8] Far From The Madding Crowd ~ Thomas Hardy
[9] The Wind-up Bird Chronicle ~ Haruki Murakami
[10] Women Who Read Are Dangerous ~ Stefan Bollman

In The Library: The Scent

2010-02-27T02:26:00.000-08:00

Ever wanted to smell like a vintage bookshop? Luckily for you then, CB I Hate Perfume have bottled the scent of "Russian and Moroccan leather bindings, worn cloth and a hint of wood polish." Kitsch rather than genuinely enticing (probably - I don't know anywhere in this country that sells it so that one might try it, though Liberty in London would be my first port of call), I suspect that In The Library is more of an impressive dressing table attribute than a night-out necessity. Of course, it would also make an original gift for the girly bibliophile, or perhaps is simply a useful addition to the toilet of those of us currently cultivating a certain geeky, bookish charm...

What Not To Read: The Kite Runner

2010-02-26T13:15:00.000-08:00

This is another infamous 3 for 2 classic - by which I mean it never leaves the Waterstone's pyramided tables - which one is constantly told, "Oh, you must read it, it's wonderful, you'll cry all the way through..." So, heeding said advice, I read it.

I'm sighing as I write this, as I fear I'll come across as someone who just hates anything populist, but I really didn't enjoy this book. It has no great literary merit that I can fathom; it fulfils all the criteria of a novel - it tells a story, lots happens, it has good characters and bad characters and good characters that do bad things and must atone - but there is nothing in its style or structure that I find interesting, and that a book "will make me cry" is not, alas, my first consideration when selecting a novel. I became vaguely interested at the point the Taliban take over, hoping in vain that I might be given some insight into the Taliban mindset; instead, I was fed a stereotypical Boys-Own-Adventure 'bad guy' - who rapes children, just in case his publicly stoning a man to death hadn't convinced us of his evil - whose two-dimensionality is patronising in the extreme, to both the Afghan people and the reader.

The catalogue of appalling events that befall our hero eventually became so numerous, so commonplace, so frequent that at last the well of my suspension of disbelief ran completely dry; The Kite Runner is, I'm afraid, little more than a fictional misery memoir.

Eloise in Moscow

2010-02-23T07:34:00.000-08:00

If you haven't yet discovered the Eloise books, I urge you to do so. Eloise is the brainchild of Kay Thompson, a little known MGM studio actress of the 1930s and 40s who, in 1955, published Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grownups. The eponymous feisty heroine was brought to life by illustrator Hilary Knight, and was an instant success. I will let the leading lady introduce herself:

"I am Eloise. I am six. I am a city child. I live at the Plaza... My mother knows The Owner... Nanny is my nurse. She wears tissue paper in her dress and you can hear it. She is English and has 8 hairpins made out of bones. She says that's all she needs in this life for Lord's sake... She always says everything 3 times like Eloise you cawn't cawn't cawn't. Sometimes I hit her on the ankle with a tassel. She is my mostly companion... I have a dog that looks like a cat. His name is Weenie. Sometimes I put sunglasses on him... I have a turtle. His name is Skipperdee. He eats raisins and wears sneakers."

- from Eloise -

Several books followed, among them my personal favourite, Eloise in Moscow.

This particular adventure satirizes the Cold War spy thriller: on her way with Nanny to their hotel Eloise observes that "everybody watches everybody...You have to be careful of what you do and say in Moscow otherwise they will swoop down on you and snip-snap at your wrists and send your radio to Copenhagen by rail." Knight's exquisite pictures detail a luxurious hotel decorously adorned with portraits of Stalin and Lenin; his piece de resistance is the central fold-out of the Kremlin, which, like a child, I can stare at for hours at a time. The running commentary by guide Zhenka is wonderful: "In former days is possible to see here market place Red Square immediate neighbourhood of Kremlin scene of momentous events in Russian history and is point of convergence of highways leading through Moscow's ceaseless noisy and brisk commerce." Perfect.

Eloise is described by Marie Brenner as "Holden Caulfield for kindergarten girls", which strikes me as incredibly accurate. She is an "ancient child with the musical vocabulary of a poet"; a cross, in English terms, between Nancy Mitford and Clarice Bean (whom I suspect was directly influenced by Thompson's creation). And yet these are, like so many children's books, largely lost on the very young. Eloise in Moscow, for example, served, at its time of publication, as an antidote to the Cold War propaganda and fear-mongering that gripped America in the 1950s. It is, more than any other of the Eloise books, of great interest as a piece of social history.

I have given Eloise the room to speak for herself here, as I simply cannot do justice to the beauty of these books, in terms of language or images. They are truly wonderful, and I can only hope that you will take the time to become acquainted yourself with this fabulously funny little girl and her gorgeously glamorous life.

Rupert Brooke

2010-02-21T09:59:00.000-08:00

"Lay down your Swinburne and attend!" So Brooke begins a letter to Noel Olivier, youngest daughter of the Fabian reformer Sydney Olivier and cousin of Sir Laurence. It is 1909: Brooke is about to take his Tripos at the end of an academically average undergraduate career, Noel is sixteen and frequently more mature about the nature of her relationship with the dashing poet than he is, despite his being several years older. Theirs will be a tempestuous yet unconsummated relationship, at times ferocious and possessive, at others, barely existent. It is traced through its ups, downs and plateaus in Pippa Harris's Song of Love: The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier (OP), and is a fascinating insight into one of English literature's most charismatic poets.

To look at Brooke with a modern understanding of psychology, then in its infancy, reveals a deeply obsessive character, sexually frustrated and at times almost bi-polar in his mood swings, which ranged from egotistical and manipulative ranting to deep, possibly even suicidal, depression and a crippling lack of confidence. In many ways, he comes across as a young man out of his time, born too early; the personal and literary freedoms he craved are simply not those of Edwardian society. Take, for example, his poem The Voice; this is an accomplished piece of romantic pastoral, which, re-examined in light of the ending, becomes biting satire. The poem very much sums up Brooke's complicated attitude to his art - poetry was, to him, the highest pinnacle, the greatest form of expression, the weight of its history both inspiring and oppressing... and yet at the same time the canon is something to played with, turned on its head, even mocked; see also The Great Lover.

Love, indeed, seems to have presented him with a similar dichotomy; he both yearned for it and despised it. When he wasn't in love, he forced himself to be so, playing the courtly lover much as Romeo does before he meets Juliet. Yet when real love (hetero- or homosexual), or at least its potential, reared its head, he ran a mile!

What his letters show, however, is a complex boy who grows into an even more complex man. He is intellectual, yes, but also surreal, witty, even silly:

"I am writing a Book. There will only be one copy. It will be inscribed in crimson ink on green paper. It will consist of thirteen small poems; each as beautiful, and as meaningless as a rose-petal, or a dew-drop. (These are not yet written, however.) When the book is prepared, I shall read it once a day for seven days. Then I shall burn the book: and die."

Surely, had he ever realised it, a contender for the Turner Prize?

His legendary "dateless" beauty ("he was tall and well built, loosely put together, with a careless animal grace..." "eyes not grey or bluish white, but of living blue, really like the sky..." "the whole effect was almost ludicrously beautiful.") is set off by the intense passion with which he sometimes imbued his letters: "You go burning through every vein and inch of me till I'm all [you]", he wrote to Ka Cox, with whom he lost his heterosexual virginity.

But he was also, as Virginia Woolf was often quick to point out, cruel. He knew how and when to hurt his friends, and did so with calculated precision. His letters demonstrate occasional remorse, but it was often a long time coming. Indeed, due to his early death, in some cases apologies never came.

And then, we can - and better men than I have spent much time doing so - deliberate on what he would have become had he lived longer. He is known in many circles simply as one of the 'war poets', and criticised just as often for the heroic tone those few war sonnets take, but one must remember that in 1915, when Brooke died, even Sassoon's poems were patriotic, and Brooke, though on his way to Gallipolli, never saw frontline action. I have read speculations that he might have made Prime Minister - he moved in the right circles (friends included Churchill and Violet Asquith, the latter, naturally, being in love with him) and was always vaguely interested in politics. But he was a strange mix, as many were at that time, of latent racism and outright sexism (he hated suffragettes), combined with liberal Fabian ideals. (Indeed, he is indirectly responsible for the Arts Council - his friend, the great economist Maynard Keynes, proposed a fund for artists based on an appeal made by Brooke). Brooke was in fact so utterly contrary in virtually every aspect of his life that it is hard to say whether he would have, had he lived into the 1930s, sided with Hitler or Stalin.

But contradiction is perhaps what lies at the heart of our infatuation with so many artists, writers and musicians. After all, isn't complexity the essence of creativity?

(All references from Song of Love by Pippa Harris, Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey by Keith Hale, and Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth by Nigel Jones)

Daphne du Maurier: Top 5

2010-02-19T02:38:00.000-08:00

5. The Kings General
Set during the English Civil War, this is not everyone's cup of tea. I have a friend, a fellow du Maurier obsessive, who hated it. But for me, this is one of those books that can be lived in. Honor is an endearing narrator, with whom I share a particular state of mind: "...the fall of the year was always my bad time. My Autumn melancholy." This early admission sets the tone for the rest of the book - it is melancholic, but this is a mood that du Maurier excels in presenting well. I was reminded of The King's General by last year's wonderful television drama The Devil's Whore - same era, same violent and oppressive atmosphere, and both are stories of bloody battle told from the point of view of a woman, who naturally must stand outside the action, but is in that case perhaps better placed to comment on it.

4. Jamaica Inn
It is a little twee for my usual taste, I'll admit, but I spent my summers as a child and teenager in Devon with my grandparents, and the descriptions of Mary's long walks across Dartmoor in howling gales touches a nerve. This is a Wuthering Heights for the West Country, though less involved.

3. Rebecca
I'm not putting this at the top for two very simple reasons: one is that I found the ending too drawn out; the other is that I came to it with a weight of expectation that, whilst largely being met, means that there are two other du Maurier's that, having come to blind, I found slightly more extraordinary than I did Rebecca. None of this takes away from the fact that it is absolutely right that Rebecca has become regarded as a modern classic. I don't think I will ever get over the simple but oh-so-revealing fact that the narrator is never given a name; her name is referred to twice, and in both instances we learn that it is an unusual name, but otherwise, she remains only the second Mrs de Winter. How clever, again, then, that the title of the book is that of a character already dead when the story begins. Du Maurier's genius shines through in this book, these and other simple literary tricks pulling us every which way as we fall under the spells of the various characters. She is here a mistress of storytelling, Rebecca a masterclass in writing. Who can forget those monstrous blood-red rhododendrons or the chilling Mrs Danvers? Rebecca haunts the reader as Rebecca haunts the second Mrs de Winter.

2. The House on the Strand
Is this an odd one to rate so highly? Possibly, but not to those who have read it. I think The House on the Strand must surely have become by now something of a cult classic. It is the strange tale of a man who takes a new drug invented by a friend, and finds himself transported back in time to fourteenth century Cornwall. A rather basic and unconvincing plot, yes, so why does it work so well? I'll be honest and say that unlike some of du Maurier's other brilliant works, where one can pinpoint the techniques she uses to draw the reader in, it is hard to say exactly what is so appealing about The House on the Strand. It just works. I have yet to meet anyone who is prepared to give it a go who hasn't raved about it afterwards, and although one can see the inevitable tragedy coming from a mile away, one cannot quite see to whom this tragedy will fall, and so it is no less affecting for its obviousness.

1. My Cousin Rachel
The second book of my choices in which du Maurier takes on a male persona with which to tell the story (The House on the Strand being the other). Yet stylistically, My Cousin Rachel owes more to Rebecca, in that we, with the narrator, do not know the truth until the very end (and in the case of Rebecca, possibly not even then...) My Cousin Rachel is for me the very epitome of how-to-tell-a-story. It is technically flawless; du Maurier guides us confidently through twists and turns, distracting us with irrelevances at just the right moments, dropping bombshells when we are least prepared. We are certain, as is Philip, the narrator, of our convictions by the end - and then, in du Maurier's greatest denouement, she shatters all we had come to believe. It is another haunting novel; dark, bleak, candlelit, questing; du Maurier at her absolute finest.

Wigs on the Green: Reprinted

2010-02-18T12:45:00.000-08:00

This Nancy Mitford has not, to my knowledge, been re-printed since WWII, after which jokes about Fascism ceased being funny and it was, probably correctly, deemed inappropriate. Nancy herself was doubtless unconcerned by this censorship, as her sister Unity, on whom the main character in the novel is based, shot herself the day that war broke out, unable to reconcile her love for her mother country with her Nazi obsession. So the question one must ask, I suppose, is this: is Penguin's imminent re-publication of Wigs on the Green an indication that the War is far enough away now that we can laugh at its causes; are we entering an era of growing right-wing sensibilities in which there is a sudden need to poke fun at Fascism; or are the Mitford's and their oeuvre currently so in vogue that previously held views on decency are being sacrificed for financial gain? Whatever the real reasons for the re-issue (and I suspect it is a mixture of several), I for one am delighted.

What I am not so delighted about is the cover design. I am afraid I am an utter snob when it comes to book covers - I could rant for England about my abhorrence of the current vogue for covers of 'women's literature' in the full spectrum of pinks with stylised twenties cartoon images of stick-like women holding any combination of lipstick /powder compact / Pomeranian dog / suitcase / shoes / shopping bags...oh, you know the ones, and I'm wearing myself out just thinking about describing them. Not only modern chicklit falls foul of this creeping horror, however; Molly Keane is these days an embarrassment to be seen with. In answer to this problem, I was given for Christmas a gorgeous dark brown leather book cover, soft as kid gloves and just as sophisticated, that slips easily over any paperback, ostensibly to protect said book, but really, and unashamedly in my case, to hide the cover from neighbouring commuters. Not to hide the title, I must stress, but to disguise the actual cover design, which so often belittles the calibre of content, as well as the woman reader.

Thankfully, I note also that the beautiful Capuchin Classics range is re-issuing Highland Fling in a few weeks, and with one of their wholly appropriate covers. I love their sparse line drawings and simple, neutral colours.

Anyway, jackets aside, it is fabulous to have Nancy back among us so prolifically. Lordy, at this rate, we'll all be having our hair shingled and calling each other 'hon' by the end of the year!

Venezia

2010-02-18T12:05:00.000-08:00

I adore books, and I love food. Inevitably then, I'm a bit of a sucker for a gorgeous cookery book. I have never stopped loving Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess, not only because it is crammed with so many delicious recipes, but also for her writing, and for the overall presentation; it is simply a lovely thing to hold, to read, to flick through and, of course, to use. The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook was my most recent kitchen-based acquisition - so far I've only tried the basic vanilla cupcakes, but my goodness, they were good! American style batter rather than English cake mix, and just too good to be true; three of us ate fourteen of them in one evening.

And now, today, I have purchased Tessa Kiros' Venezia. If you thought Apples for Jam and Falling Cloudberries were glam, you need to take a look at Venezia! It redefines opulence in the kitchen, with its gold trimmed pages and flourishing fonts, black velvet page-marker and reams of full colour and atmospheric black and white photographs of Venice itself. It is an advert for the city rather than for its food, though the sumptuousness of both are exploited to the full by Kiros. Many recipes involve meat - it is Italian, after all - although there are many fish dishes - understandably - and enough vegetarian risottos, antipasti and side dishes to make it a worthwhile buy (or gift) for non-meat eaters. The food itself is presented, as one would expect, beautifully, and one is left wondering if everyone in Venice perhaps really does eat from Baroque dining services! More than anything, though, Venezia makes one want to visit Venice, particularly at Carnevale. This is a genuinely high quality publication; cookbook as coffee-table book.

The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters

2010-02-17T13:25:00.000-08:00

I love an Edwardian evening... Coal fire spitting softly in the grate, snowflakes catching in the light of the streetlamp outside, the whole house quiet and warm and comforting. I curled up on the sofa in an old loose cardigan and read the first 100 pages of The Mitfords.

I love a good letter writer, too. Rupert Brooke is a particular favourite, by turn sweetheart and caustic rat, imbued with exactly my sense of humour. And I am delighted to be able to say that the Mitford girls live up to my high epistolary standards. Deborah and Nancy are far and away my favourites, each snappy and funny with, frequently, hints of surrealism. But it is only in reading her letters, in hearing her own personal voice, that I am for the first time able to get some kind of feeling for Unity, always the hardest sister to generate empathy for. She is a giddy schoolgirl, letter after letter simply babble about how many times she has met Hitler and where and for how long and what he said and what he did when she replied and how many times he touched her on the arm and how many times on the shoulder... it becomes quite wearing, whilst at the same time being a real insight into her extraordinary, and perhaps slightly frightening, psyche. The pre-war correspondence between her and Diana is, of course, of the greatest historical significance of all the letters, but is also the most tedious, and I find myself skipping paragraphs in order to get to the next cheering 5 line missive from Nancy. This in no way belittles the weight of the horror that Unity and Diana both refused to attach to their beloved Fascism, but in fact adds to the complicated strands that made up the Mitford family tapestry.

The Children's Book (2)

2010-02-16T12:55:00.000-08:00

I finished it today. And I find myself in a place I visit from time to time, a place known to all readers, a place that lies at the end of a perfect book; we wander around, picking up a novel or a biography that, when we bought it, we couldn't wait to start, but which now, in comparison with the book just finished, looks dull and two-dimensional. Put simply, no other book will now do. A bar has been raised, and I am frustrated at the lack of challengers to meet the new standard.

The Children's Book shifts, from its early arts-n-crafts idyll, into a darker, lonelier area. The children grow up. Events take hold. 1914 looms with bloody dramatic irony. Byatt gives us whole chapters as political instruction. The feel of the novel becomes altogether more charged, the last fifty pages or so reading almost as a textbook list of the names of those killed in the trenches. Ypres passes by and takes with it certain characters, then comes Passchendaele and the Somme, and more boys are lost; it is to Julian Cain that Byatt gives the voice with which to express this overwhelming pain. The final scene reminds me of Testament of Youth; I am left with the image of a post-war townhouse in which the remains of an extended family gropes its way towards a depleted future.

And yet, already when I think back over my month with this book - as I will do often, for it is that sort of book - I find it is within Olive's stories and the Wellwood gardens that my mind settles, or to Philip's pots and the marshland around Purchase House that my thoughts return. It is to that short Edwardian period in which the seeds of our modern world were sown that I (and I think many others, including Byatt herself) am drawn. It was a unique time amongst the privileged classes, and one which has come to define a certain England, and as I now pass over Anna Karenina and a new biography of Emily Dickinson in search of something in which I can live as I have lived inside The Children's Book, it is to that era that I long to turn again.

What Not To Read: Shadow of the Wind

2010-02-08T10:15:00.000-08:00

I have friends who will swear this is the best book of the last however-many years, and who claim it stayed with them for months after reading, was unputdownable yadda yadda yadda. I hate to be the dissenter, but this is surely a case of the Emporer's New Clothes: Shadow of the Wind is not any of those things, and I fail to see its appeal. It's so plot-driven and frenetic that the characters have no room or time to develop and grow; they remain little more than names on the page, hardly fleshed out at all. The Barcelona of the story comes across much as the village in Milly Molly Mandy, a series of houses and shops that the characters wander between, experiencing a mini-adventure at each new destination; the map at the front does little to disuade me from the MMM comparison. I found the narrative wholly implausible, even within the world of the book, and by halfway through, I was desperate for the whole saga to end and release me. I love Gothic and I enjoy a twisting tale, but this, despite its enigmatic title, is in fact a poor shadow of both.

Bookswap

2010-02-08T09:36:00.000-08:00

What a wonderful idea! I used to live exactly halfway between Wimbledon and Raynes Park stations, and am delighted to see this has taken off. Lets start them all over the country!

Guardian article on Wimbledon Station Bookswap.

What I Saw and How I Lied

2010-02-02T09:08:00.000-08:00

Noir thriller for teenage girls? Are you sure? Well, yes, actually, and boy, does it work! Recommended by a friend who works in children's books, and whose literary opinions I rate very highly, What I Saw and How I Lied had me from the first scene:

"The match snapped, then sizzled, and I woke up fast. I heard my mother inhale as she took a long pull on a cigarette. Her lips stuck on the filter, so I knew she was still wearing lipstick. She'd been up all night."

Judy Blundell captures the darkness and glamour of post-war America as though she lived there; it is a nuanced piece of writing, wreathed in smoke, cinched at the waist and held tightly in place with a gallon of hairspray. The atmosphere slides off the page and envelops.

Our guide through this alien and superficially enchanting world is a girl on the brink of womanhood, and in that sense is nothing new for Young Adult fiction. What sets Evie apart is her wiseness. And it's not an omnipotent wiseness, common in children at the helm of a raft of recent adult fiction (Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for example), but the honest wiseness that follows curiosity, desire and a succession of mistakes; the wiseness of a young woman who watches, who understands certain things but not others, and who, above all else, wants to know. She is a beguiling heroine.

And so, femme fatale aside, what of this noir plot? Well, it reveals some unpleasant truths about post-war society, it ticks all the pulp boxes - murder, deceit, money, sex - and it takes some unexpected twists. Characters are altered by events - we, like Evie, do not know who we can trust, and our mind is changed regularly; no-one is whiter than white, all are sullied in some way, are morally shady. And when, towards the end, Evie herself ceases merely spectating and steps into the limelight, and we learn, finally, not why she lies but how she lies - such a clever title - that morally shady area becomes for a time, the heart of the novel.

Although a teen novel, What I Saw and How I Lied is not noticeably written for the young. It is perhaps a little heavy handed in terms of imagery occasionally, but then, few fourteen year olds these days are familiar with Bette Davis, Joan Crawford or Humphrey Bogart. And for my money, this is an era that can comfortably handle being a little over the top; blood-red lipstick has never been known for its subtlety.

The Children's Book (1)

2010-01-27T08:18:00.001-08:00

I had wanted to read all the 2009 Booker shortlist. Before the winner was announced, I managed only two, The Glass Room and The Little Stranger, both of which I loved. There was a stretch in the middle of the Sarah Waters' where I felt some tighter editing might have moved things along a little more pleasingly, but this minor fault was more than made up for by the novel's chilling last line. She is truly a mistress of storytelling - I still haven't forgiven her for the twist that comes halfway through Fingersmith, a shock so great that when I read it, I had to put the book down and lie silently for an hour before I was able to continue with my life!

The Children's Book was too large, as was Wolf Hall, to carry around, and with some misgiving I determined to leave them both until their paperback counterparts were available. Wolf Hall comes at the beginning of March, but I am delighted to say that I am now happily ensconced in the lightweight version of The Children's Book. And it was worth the wait.

Beginning in 1895, this vast opus, part novel, part social history, bridges for me a fascinating gap. Last summer's guilty pleasure was the watching of Desperate Romantics, and subsequent reading about the pre-Raphaelites and their influence on the Arts and Crafts movement and indeed, the social reform it spawned. In addition to this, I have long held a crush on Rupert Brooke, and find the late Edwardian era and First World War a compellingly interesting time. Class issues and the rights and standing of women were at the forefront of reform, and the budding of the world we now live in began in that bloodied soil. These two eras are joined by The Children's Book; one character is a Rossetti 'Stunner', others are related to major players in Brooke's short and turbulent life. It is immensely satisfying to be able to identify people and places as real, and to know already something of the world immediately preceding that of AS Byatt's creation, and the one that follows.

I would add that this is a book entirely suited to the title of this blog; I find myself curled up and reading by candlelight night after night, frustrated only that I am too exhausted during the week to dedicate more of my time to it. It is an enthralling story, filled with characters with whom I am already, after only 200 pages, very much in love. It is real, and yet part dark fairytale, and ultimately deeply satisfying; true literary porridge.

Saplings

2010-01-27T07:06:00.000-08:00

I am always looking for novels that contain the same spirit as I Capture the Castle. There is something uniquely captivating about that book, as, I suppose, its title suggests. I look frequently for its spiritual successor in the Persephone catalogue, a search which has led me now to Saplings, by Noel Streatfield.

This is one of the few novels Streatfield wrote for adults, and yet still its main voices are those of children. It is for me curiously nostalgic, as I am sure it will be for other devotees of Ballet Shoes et al (my personal favourites were the Gemma books, which I had in a gloriously 60s box set that I am unable to trace); Saplings brims with Streatfield's trademark realism, the acutely drawn observations of human nature, the simple didactic tone that never condescends, and this style, along with certain recognisable characters and situations, takes me straight back to my childhood. And yet this is in no way a book for children. There is sex. There is attempted suicide, caused by haunting loneliness and spiteful relations. There is hopelessness not always assuaged.

And yet there is beauty. The summers are idyllic: green, wild, adventure-filled, dripping with scuffed shoes and muddy ankle socks, grazed knees and torn dresses. Behind it all, of course, lurks the menace of War, the reality of which is brought cruelly home in the form of several tragic deaths. And it is this that forms the backbone of the novel; Streatfield is asking us in Saplings to look carefully at the effect of prolonged tragedy on children, particularly when that same tragedy takes hold of the adults on whom the children rely for security, and who are themselves unable to give what is required. Little worlds collapse, often entirely unnoticed, and the pieces are not put back together. War torn families learn too late that the physical survival of a child is not, within itself, enough.

The story centres simply on a middle class family - mother, father, four children, their nanny and governess - on whom the horror of the Second World War pays several unkind visits. The children are drawn with genuine insight. They are earnest, funny, sweet, heartbreaking...they try hard, but make mistakes, mistakes that in normal circumstances would have been sorted out and forgotten, but which in this abnormal situation are ignored, often with tragic psychological consequences. Laurel in particular, as the eldest daughter, bright but plain, suffers enormously at the hands of throwaway comments made by distracted adults, and our hearts bleed for her.

Streatfield illustrates with precision the decline of the family's happiness and hope. She never overwhelms us, and never preaches, but allows the story simply to unfold through a series of differing perspectives. Her adults are slightly misty, wavering at the edges and never as clear and defined as the child characters; but this in fact is exactly right for a book whose central thread concerns the failing of children by those distant adults.

Little Boy Lost

2010-01-14T08:10:00.000-08:00

In an awful hurry just before Christmas, I bought two books from one of my favourite publishers, Persephone, without really looking at them. This wasn't quite as spontaneous as it may sound, as both were on my Persephone wishlist: Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski, and Saplings by Noel Streatfield. I discovered when I got them home that they share subject matter; both are about the effect of war, specifically WWII, on children.

In Little Boy Lost, a father returns to France just after the war in order to find his young son, whom he met only once when he was a baby. In spare, careful prose, Laski conjures a France brought almost to its knees by the effect of the fighting; Paris and countryside alike are bombed out ruins, the people wary and fragile. Those who collaborated with the Germans are rejected by their villages, left to hold cold, haughty chins high amidst disparaging looks and turned heads.

Like Elizabeth Taylor, Laski creates for us characters that are not wholly likeable, and in that, are wholly human. One wants to beat one's fists against Hilary's chest as the final chapters speed by and one can see the mistake he will make even as he cannot - or perhaps, as he will not, for surely even this broken man understands what he will lose in exchange for fleeting pleasure? And it is here then, that one realises that the lost little boy of the title is not the child who is physically missing, but the man who searches for him; Hilary has lost sight of his own purpose, his own sense of self, and in this respect is perhaps an everyman for a post-war landscape.

The heart of the novel, however, is the child. Jean, who may or may not be Hilary's son, is drawn with pity at his core. He is small and skinny with huge dark eyes; he wants nothing more out of life than to one day go on a train. His reaction to the meagre gift Hilary brings him - the first present he has ever received - is surely one of the most moving scenes in literature. And yet Jean is so much more than just a small boy placed to tug at our heartstrings; he is a lesson in what becomes of displaced and orphaned children during wars. His is not an overly harsh existence, nor even entirely loveless, but it is stripped of nuance, of the care of the individual; in this post-war Europe, children are spare parts, leftovers; they are not the centre of anyone's universe, as all children should be. And when one sees how placing him in the centre changes both his own and Hilary's life, however briefly, one begins to understand quite how much is lacking in lives made hopeless so early.

This is a beautiful book, simple, human, intelligent and crafted with great talent. Laski is overlooked today, but she remains a writer of importance in both subject matter and skill; the very last line of Little Boy Lost is alone proof of this fact.

Women Who Read Are Dangerous

2010-01-12T10:32:00.000-08:00

Is there anything brings greater pleasure to a bibliophile than a longed for Amazon delivery? Arriving home from work this afternoon, I found a box sitting in the porch - I have treated myself to two books I was hoping Father Christmas might bring, but which were clearly too inflammatory for his sleigh: The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (thus rendering my last post, in which I said my next journey Mitfordwards would be an attempt to trace Wigs on the Green, a blatant lie), and the beautiful Women Who Read Are Dangerous. Neither are books I intend to sit and read from cover to cover, but rather will be dipped into. And of course, my first move when I had ripped the box from around them was to dip.

The Mitford epistles cheer me nearly as much as Wodehouse. The style, the humour, the ludicrous abbreviations and nicknames transport me to another world. More on these as I read.

Women Who Read Are Dangerous was brought to my attention by an article in The Guardian shortly before Christmas. I looked for it, unsuccessfully, in Waterstone's, and decided in the end to order it blind online - after all, how wrong could I go with such a title? I am not disappointed. It's a lovely large hardback, chock full of colour plates; simply, paintings and photographs of women reading. The Virgin Mary, in 1333, hides her devotional book from a visiting angel; in 1952, Marilyn Monroe loses herself in Ulysses. The commentary is intelligent, interesting and captures its reader perfectly:

"She is young and in her own bed. Her parents allow a certain amount of bedtime reading, but all too soon her mother or father will come to turn the light out, tell her that it's time to sleep. The door will be left open when the parent leaves to to ensure the light stays off. The girl will wait until she hears her parents' voices in another room, knows they are occupied with other matters. Then she will make a cave under the blankets, open her book inside the cave.
This girl knows the value of a good flashlight; she leaned that from Nancy Drew. She will read until she falls asleep, and neither her parents nor anyone else will ever be any the wiser."

My own childhood could not be better captured by my own hand. And if you gasped at its accuracy with regard to your own, I urge you to order yourself a copy of this delicious publication.

Last book of the year...

2010-01-11T02:18:00.000-08:00

It's not usual that I should be in a position to start a new book on the first of January; however, I finished Hons and Rebels on the thirty first, and opened Marghanita Laski's Little Boy Lost (about which more later) at the dawn (literally) of the new decade. There is something pleasingly tidy about that.

I'm a huge Nancy Mitford fan - there, it's said - and of course am fascinated by the whole Mitford family. Although I have quite a collection of books by and about them, I had not yet read Hons and Rebels, Decca's account of the girls' upbringing, and decided it was high time I did. It was enjoyable - and of course, deeply moving - but by the author's very nature was throughout more serious in tone than other biographies, and for me, is not as delicious as either Mary S Lovell's The Mitford Girls or Laura Thompson's wonderful Life in a Cold Climate. The latter in particular, though ostensibly about Nancy, captures the whole brood vividly, and realises an aristocratic England of the twenties and thirties that is, for better or for worse, long gone. My personal predilection for the glamour of the first half of the twentieth century is constantly fed by the vast number of books about this family, and indeed, by the books Nancy herself wrote. My next journey Mitfordwards will be Wigs on the Green (which I have half-heartedly been trying to track down for some time), Nancy's parody of her sister Unity's fervant (and indeed, fatal) Nazism. I recently came across original penguin paperbacks of The Water Beetle and Noblesse Oblige, two of her works of non-fiction, which now sit proudly on my shelf under a pair of black and gold art deco shoes. And with that thought, I commit the readings of 2009 to the library of the past and reach for the first of this year's offerings.